Pokémon cards by rarity: what each symbol means

The short answer: the rarity is the small mark next to the card number. A circle is common, a diamond is uncommon and a star is rare. Anything past a single black star (two stars, gold stars, outlined stars) is one of the rarer pulls, and on cards from the last few years the colour and number of the stars tell you exactly which one.

Below are all 17 marks printed on current English cards. Each one is cropped from one of our own card images and was checked by eye against the card it came from, and each comes with a count of how many different cards carry it in our catalogue.

Where to find the rarity symbol

From Sun & Moon (2017) onwards, the rarity mark sits bottom-left, straight after the card number. On older cards it sits bottom-right, again after the number. Either way, find the number and look just to its right.

The 17 rarity symbols, and how many cards carry each

Here are current English Pokémon cards by rarity: the marks used across the 23 main sets of the Scarlet & Violet and Mega Evolution series, from Scarlet & Violet (March 2023) to 30th Celebration (September 2026). The counts are how many different cards have that rarity in our catalogue on 29 September 2026. They count designs, not copies: a count says how many cards share a rarity, not how often you will pull one.

Main-set rarities: numbered up to the set total

Symbol	Rarity	Cards	Sets
	Common The most common cards in a pack	1,473	23
	Uncommon A step up from common	995	22
	Rare The lowest of the star rarities	366	23
	Double Rare Regular ex cards	329	23
	ACE SPEC Rare A deck may hold only one ACE SPEC card	33	6
	Pikachu Rare 30th Celebration’s Pikachu, each with its own count out of 30	30	1

Secret rarities: numbered above the set total

Symbol	Rarity	Cards	Sets
	Ultra Rare Full-art ex and Supporters	356	22
	Illustration Rare Full-art Pokémon (not ex)	510	22
	Special Illustration Rare Special-art ex and Supporters	232	23
	Hyper Rare Gold ex, Trainers and Energy	74	14
	Shiny Rare Shiny Pokémon, all in Paldean Fates	120	1
	Shiny Ultra Rare Shiny ex, full art, all in Paldean Fates	12	1
	Black White Rare Only in Black Bolt and White Flare	4	2
	Mega Hyper Rare Gold Mega ex, in Mega Evolution sets	8	6
	Mega Attack Rare Mega ex in Ascended Heroes	7	1
	Futuristic Rare Mewtwo ex and Mew ex in 30th Celebration; the star takes the card’s accent colour	2	1

Promos

A black star with PROMO across it marks a Black Star Promo: cards from boxes, bundles and events. Our catalogue holds 337 of them across the two current promo sets, SVP (Scarlet & Violet) and MEP (Mega Evolution).

Two notes on the counts. Three 30th Celebration cards, the Mew cards numbered B, G and R, have no rarity in our catalogue and are not counted. One White Flare card, #131 Archen, is numbered above the set’s total but labelled Uncommon in our catalogue; it is counted as Uncommon here, and may be mislabelled.

Secret rares: a number bigger than the set total

The number after the slash is the set’s printed total. A card numbered above it, like 161/131, sits beyond the main set. That is a secret rare.

In the 23 sets above, the split is exact. All 1,325 cards at Ultra Rare and higher are numbered above their set’s total. The main-set rarities, Common to Double Rare plus ACE SPEC and Pikachu Rare, are numbered within it, apart from the one White Flare card noted above. So on a current card the number alone tells you whether you have pulled one of the special rarities, before you even read the stars.

Older cards: the number matters more than the star

Before Scarlet & Violet, one star covered every rare. We checked this on our own images of Evolving Skies’ secret rares: the Umbreon VMAX alt art (215/203, the card collectors call Moonbreon), the rainbow Leafeon VMAX (205/203) and the gold Froslass (226/203) each carry a single star. Two Sun & Moon secret rares from Cosmic Eclipse (240/236 and 260/236) do the same.

On cards from those years, the star does not tell you what you have. The finish (full art, rainbow or gold) and a number above the set total do.

That is also why the counts above stop at 2023. Our catalogue’s rarity labels for older sets do not line up one-to-one with the names printed on the cards, so we have kept the numbers to the Scarlet & Violet and Mega Evolution sets, where every rarity in the catalogue matches one of the symbols above.

Which rarity is the rarest?

There is no official answer. The Pokémon Company does not publish pull rates for English packs, so any odds you see quoted are estimates from people opening boxes and counting.

What our catalogue can show is how thin each tier is:

• Futuristic Rare is the smallest tier: two cards, Mewtwo ex and Mew ex, both in 30th Celebration.
• Black White Rare has four cards, two each in Black Bolt and White Flare.
• Mega Hyper Rare, the gold Mega ex cards, has one or two per set: 8 cards across 6 Mega Evolution sets.
• Hyper Rare carries three gold stars, the most stars on any Scarlet & Violet rarity. The 14 sets that have them hold between 3 and 9 each, 74 in all.
• Special Illustration Rare runs from 5 per set (Shrouded Fable, Phantasmal Flames) to 32 in Prismatic Evolutions.

Fewer different cards does not by itself mean worse odds. The odds depend on how often each rarity turns up in a pack, and that is the part nobody publishes.

How to tell if your card is rare

1. Find the card number. Bottom-left on cards from 2017 on, bottom-right on older ones.
2. Read the mark just after it and match it against the tables above.
3. Compare the number with the total after the slash. If the number is bigger, the card is a secret rare, whatever its mark.
4. On cards from before 2023, look at the finish too. A full-art, rainbow or gold card numbered above the set total is a secret rare even though it shows a single star.

A shiny finish on its own is not a rarity. A reverse holo is a finish that commons and uncommons get too; we covered how to tell a reverse holo from a holo separately.

The other small mark near the number is the set symbol, which tells you which set the card is from. Our gallery of English set symbols has them in release order.

Current Japanese cards print letter codes instead of these symbols, so this guide covers English cards only.

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