An Alberta Pokémon Trading Card Game (TCG) player got the surprise of a lifetime at a prerelease event earlier in the month. Amazing Wonders Emporium in Lacombe was hosting a prerelease for the new card set, Mega Evolution - Pitch Black, when something unexpected happened. “When it first happened, I could hear some screaming, so I thought maybe somebody got a good card,” said Todd Bawtinheimer, co-owner of the store. “And then there was a lot more screaming, and more screaming, and a lot of excitement.” One of the young players was lucky enough to get an error God Pack in his prerelease kit. A God Pack is a special booster pack where all the cards in it are above a certain rarity. Odds of this are estimated at somewhere between one in 700 to one in 1,000. This particular pack was exceptionally rare, because it contained 11 copies of the same gold Mega Darkrai Ex card, which is a packaging error. The odds of this happening are about one in 10 million, estimated Bawtinheimer, who has never seen an error pack like this opened before. “That’s probably the only pack that’s going to come out like that for this set,” he said. Gold, or mega hyper rare, cards are currently the rarest pulls in the Pokémon TCG sets, with an estimated pull rate of 0.06 per cent, or 1 in 1,786 packs, according to sample data from the Perfect Order set from TCGplayer. Price estimates for cards vary between sites, more so before sets officially launch. Listings for the gold Mega Darkrai Ex, ungraded, hover around $600 to $800, depending on the site at time of publication. Amazing Wonders Emporium has been fielding calls from people wondering if the photos and videos of this pack that have circulated online were real. “I had no idea it was going to explode quite like this. I didn’t really realize how rare the pack was at that time,” Bawtinheimer. Pokémon Mega Evolution - Pitch Black releases on July 17.
