Pokémon Pitch Black fan pulls world’s first ever gold god pack

When a local card shop in Alberta, Canada shared a photo of a smiling young boy holding up 10 golden Pokémon cards, fans didn’t want to believe it. Surely, many opined, it was an AI-generated image — or a Photoshopped one.

Pulling a Pokémon god pack, as fans call it, is unlikely for anyone to get, but not impossible. Annoyingly, there’s footage of people opening an entire stack of full-art Pokémon cards in a single pack nearly every week. These videos of fans winning the Pokémon lottery typically don’t include any golden cards, however. Classified as Mega Hyper Rare cards, these cards are notoriously difficult to find. In the recent Perfect Order set, for example, the pull rate for one of these cards was estimated to be 1 in 1786 packs, or 0.06%. A fraction of a percent.

What are the odds, then, that anyone could ever pull a Pokémon pack composed solely of golden cards? And the odds that someone would pull such a pack before the set goes on sale?

In anticipation of the July 17 release date for Pitch Black, many card shops have started hosting Pokémon pre-release events for the set. In these, fans are given one ready-to-play competitive deck as well as a few loose Pokémon packs. Attendees who stay through the event and play matches get a few more packs at the end.

A photo of an incredibly rare pull is easy to discredit, but a few hours after the initial card shop post went viral, footage of a kid surrounded by open packs emerged. In his hands were 10 individual Mega Darkrai Ex cards, each one valued at around $750 ungraded as of this writing. The video shows the Pokémon fan carefully lining up the cards one by one. If PSA determines the cards are in good condition, they can be worth up to $3,465 each.

“Is that a new kind of god pack?” one Facebook commenter wrote on the original photo. “Or is this an error pack?”

“That is insaaaaaane,” one Redditor wrote in the video comments.

To be sure, there are still people arguing about the legitimacy of the pull. Some insist that the particulars of this case make it believable. One would need to open an incredible number of packs to obtain that many golden cards. That’s hard to pull off when a card set isn’t technically widely available yet. Alternatively, one would need to spend a lot of money on resellers to get that many Mega Darkrai cards; right now, there are only 21 listings total on Price Charting.

The card shop did not respond to a request for comment.

As onlookers cheer and sneer, the kid’s family remains ecstatic. Jordi Stewart, who appears to be related to the youth, said on Facebook that the pull was accompanied by much screaming, by adults and kids alike.

“This little man went to the Pokémon pre-release today and got 2nd place in his age group out of 8 which meant he got another pack and what was in that pack was beyond what anyone expected,” Stewart wrote. “His Birthday week is starting off on the right foot that’s for sure.”

Many Pokémon fans are justifiably jealous of this once-in-a-lifetime pull. But if anyone is going to enjoy such fortunes, at least it’s not a Pokémon scalper.