Wait, How Is This Card Numbered 222 of 191?

So here is one I would have walked right past if my son had not pointed it out.

He pulled this beautiful rainbow Flygon ex card and showed it to me. We were looking it up on this very site and I noticed something that completely threw me. Down in the bottom right, in tiny print, the card number reads:

222/191.

Two hundred twenty-two out of one hundred ninety-one.

Hold on. The first number is bigger than the second. That cannot be right. Card three of five makes sense. Card 191 of 222 makes sense. But card 222 of a set that only has 191 cards? How is that possible?

I had to look it up. Here is what I found.

Welcome to “secret rares”

The Pokemon TCG has had this tradition for years. Each set has an “official” total of cards (in this case, 191). And then it has an unofficial set on top of that. Bonus cards. The rarest, most premium cards. These are called secret rares.

Secret rares are deliberately numbered ABOVE the printed total. So in a 191-card set, the secret rares get numbers 192, 193, 194, all the way up to whatever the highest one is. In this Surging Sparks set, the secret rares run from 192 to 222. That is 31 bonus cards on top of the 191 “official” ones.

So 222/191 is not a typo. It is the system telling you, “this card is number 222 in this set, and the printed total is only 191, so this one lives above the line.”

What kind of card gets a secret-rare number?

A few categories typically:

• Special Illustration Rares. Full-art cards with a detailed background scene. The Pokemon basically takes over the card. This Flygon ex is a Special Illustration Rare.
• Hyper Rares. Rainbow or gold textured cards with shimmery finishes. Almost always among the priciest cards in any given set.
• Other ultra-rare prints. Promo-tied alternate arts, signature cards from particular illustrators, that kind of thing.

If the card is gorgeous and feels really special when you hold it, there is a good chance it is sitting in the “above the total” range.

So when the ratio looks wrong, lean in

Right? This was one of those moments where the system seemed broken, and the apparent break turned out to be the most interesting thing about it. The numbers above 191 are the bonus pulls. The chase cards. The ones collectors actually hunt for. Once you know that, you start scanning the bottom right of every card for the ratio.

If the first number is bigger than the second, you know you are holding something the set considered worth special-casing.

I am not a Pokemon expert. My son knows more than I do at this point. But this is the kind of thing you can pick up from one card on a Saturday morning, and now every other card in the binder feels a little richer because you know what the numbers are telling you.

One thread, pulled. Onto the next one.