Comparison
What can you actually pull?
If you are hunting a 1st Edition, a serial-numbered parallel or an on-card autograph, the first question is not the odds — it is whether the app will tell you the card is in there at all. On that question the 5 apps we track are not close, and the ranking is close to the opposite of their prices.
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1
Fanatics Collect
Names cards, prices them, and publishes its own expected value
The only app that closes the loop. Each tier carries a published hit rate and a list of real cards with estimated values, and the buy screen prints a dollar expected value above it — a claim we can check against the odds table, and one that held on every pack we captured.
16 packs captured 11 naming any card 11 with priced cards no list claimed complete
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2
Arena Club
Names every card, with a probability against each
The finest-grained card disclosure anyone offers: you can look up a specific card and read its own chance before you spend. It costs one thing — no values appear anywhere, so the odds cannot be turned into money.
30 packs captured 28 naming any card 13 with per-card odds no list claimed complete
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3
Triumph
Names a sample of cards, with no per-card odds
You see which cards are in the shop window, and value bands for the pack — but not the chance of any one card, and the list is explicitly not the full contents.
24 packs captured 24 naming any card 0 with per-card odds no list claimed complete
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4
Courtyard
Names no cards at all
Publishes value bands, and a gallery of top items that is not the pack’s contents, but never a list of what a given pack can actually contain. You know the odds of a price range and nothing about which cards sit in it.
31 packs captured 0 naming any card 0 with per-card odds no list claimed complete
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5
CrownCards
Names no cards at all
Publishes value bands, and a gallery of top items that is not the pack’s contents, but never a list of what a given pack can actually contain. You know the odds of a price range and nothing about which cards sit in it.
30 packs captured 0 naming any card 0 with per-card odds no list claimed complete
This ranking used to end on a neat, gloomy point: the apps that told you most about the odds of a price range told you least about the cards, and none did both. That is no longer true. Fanatics Collect publishes value bands, a list of named cards, a price against each one, and its own expected value — on the same screen. The gap the rest of the category leaves open is a choice, not a constraint.
“Names no cards” is not the same as “discloses nothing”
This page ranks one thing: whether an app tells you which cards a pack can contain. On that question CrownCards is in the bottom tier, and it is also the app that publishes the most complete odds table in the category — six named value bands per pack, each with a dollar range and a probability, on all 30 packs. It is the only app whose break-even chance can be read straight off its own screen rather than computed: 50% on the default setting, by design. Two apps can both “name no cards” and be nothing alike, so read this ranking as narrow rather than damning.
The scarcity vocabulary, and who has it
We have catalogued 2,289 card identities. Below is how they break down by the thing that actually makes a card scarce — parallel, print run, signature, era. Each card is counted once, under its scarcest marker.
These columns are not comparable to each other
They are drawn from different populations, so a bigger number does not mean better access. Arena Club's 1,228 come from its published pack checklists — the cards a pack can actually contain, read as one unsplit label string off each slab. Courtyard's 579 come from its vault-wide showcase — the most valuable slabs in that sport, not any pack. Triumph's 482 come from its featured pack lists. Read each column down, against itself. A fair cross-app comparison needs pack-level contents from all three, and two of the three do not publish them.
Swipe the table
| Scarcity marker | Arena Club checklists · n=1228 | Courtyard showcase · n=579 | Triumph pack lists · n=482 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Superfractor 1/1 One copy exists. The scarcest thing in modern cards. | — | 10.2% | — |
| True 1/1 A single-copy parallel or printing plate. | — | 61.0% | 10.2% |
| Serial-numbered Numbered out of a stated print run. | — | 193.3% | 10.2% |
| Shadowless The brief early print of Pokémon Base Set. | — | 40.7% | — |
| 1st Edition The first print run, stamped. | 413.3% | 437.4% | 326.6% |
| Gold Star A short-printed Pokémon subset from the EX era. | 100.8% | 71.2% | 122.5% |
| Autograph Signed, usually on-card or on a sticker. | 746.0% | 8815.2% | 398.1% |
| Patch / relic Carries a piece of worn or event-used kit. | 50.4% | 10.2% | — |
| Special Illustration Rare The modern Pokémon chase treatment. | 302.4% | 61.0% | 71.5% |
| Kaboom! / Downtown Panini case-hit inserts that trade far above base. | 655.3% | 193.3% | 204.1% |
| Superfractor-family refractor Chromium parallels, coloured by scarcity. | 433.5% | 183.1% | 183.7% |
| Prizm parallel Panini Prizm colour parallels. | 16613.5% | 549.3% | 306.2% |
| Holo The baseline foil treatment. | 1028.3% | 488.3% | 6212.9% |
| Reverse foil Foil on the card body rather than the art. | 191.5% | 71.2% | 71.5% |
| No scarcity marker Base cards, or a slab whose label we could not read a variant from. | 67354.8% | 25844.6% | 25352.5% |
If you are chasing something specific
A named card
Only Arena Club makes this answerable. Its checklist puts a rate against each card and the rates partition the pull. The catch is that it publishes no card values, so you can price the chance but not the prize.
A price range
Courtyard and Triumph both publish value bands, so this is computable — see same price, different app for the tier-by-tier numbers.
Something you can actually sell
Scarcity is worthless without an exit. Triumph is the only app whose buy-back we have measured against real sold comps, at about 102% of market — see the Triumph review. A ranking of who pays closest needs a second app measured, and does not exist yet.
How the scarcity buckets are assigned
Each card is matched against an ordered list of markers read from its own slab label — set, card number, variant text — and lands in the first one it matches, so a Superfractor is not also counted as a plain refractor. The order encodes a scarcity judgement of ours and is the one editorial choice on this page; everything else is a count. Cards with no readable marker are reported rather than dropped.