Why 'I pulled 3 chases in 5 packs' means nothing
Taken literally, a post like this is a sample size of five. If a chase card's true rate is somewhere around 1 in 100 packs, pulling three in five packs is either an almost impossibly lucky outlier, a different definition of 'chase' than you assumed, or simply not an honest account of what happened. All three explanations are more likely than the pull rate secretly being 60 percent, because pull rates that high would make the card worthless within a week and every publisher on earth would notice.
This is survivorship bias doing its favorite trick. Millions of packs get opened every week, so someone, somewhere, is always having an absurdly lucky day, and that person is the one who posts. The other several hundred people who opened five packs and got nothing do not make content out of it, so the feed you scroll only shows you the winners. You are not seeing a representative sample, you are seeing the tail end of one.
Cherry-picked videos and the editing room floor
Pack-opening video is entertainment, and entertainment gets edited toward the exciting parts. A ten-minute highlight reel of 'insane pulls' may be cut from many hours of box breaks, with the boring commons and the outright misses trimmed out, or spliced together from several sessions the creator never claims are one box. None of this requires anyone to lie. It just requires nobody to show you the whole picture, which is a much easier bar to clear.
A useful habit is to look for the full, unedited tally rather than the highlight. Creators and community projects who publish every pack opened, in order, misses included, with a running count, are showing you something closer to real data. A thumbnail promising the best pull of the year is showing you the single best moment out of an unstated, much larger pool of openings.
Why a seller's 'these are loaded packs' claim is nonsense
Pack contents are fixed at the factory during printing and collation, weeks or months before any pack reaches a seller's shelf. A retailer or reseller has no legitimate channel to selectively insert hits into a shrink-wrapped pack after the fact without visibly tampering with it, which is fraud, not a service, and would show in the packaging. There is no honest version of 'these specific packs have better odds' available to a seller once the product left the factory sealed.
The economics also do not hold up. If a seller genuinely could identify which sealed packs contained the best cards, by weight, light, or any other method, the rational move would be to keep those packs and sell you the rest, not sell you the good ones at a markup out of generosity. Any claim of 'loaded' or 'hot' packs for sale should be read as a marketing hook at best and a warning sign at worst, never as a real edge.
What a believable pull-rate claim actually looks like
A claim worth trusting states how many packs it is based on, where those packs came from, and whether misses were counted as carefully as hits. It also acknowledges uncertainty instead of presenting a single decimal as gospel. A tally of a few thousand packs with a described method is worth far more than a screenshot of one very good box, no matter how confidently either one is presented.
Small personal samples are not useless, they are just weak evidence. One box is consistent with a wide range of possible true rates, high and low, so treat any rate estimated from a handful of packs as a rough sketch, not a fact, and weight larger, better-documented samples much more heavily when they disagree.
How TCG Prayer labels its own data
Every rate and EV figure on this site ships with its source, its sample size, and a confidence label, and any placeholder or fixture number is marked with a visible DEMO banner so it is never mistaken for a real estimate. This is the same standard we are asking you to apply to everyone else's claims, applied to ourselves first, because a parody church that fudges its own numbers has no business grading anyone else's.
So the short version, restated. Trust sourced samples, not anecdotes. A viral clip, a seller's pitch, or a number with no stated sample size is not evidence, it is a vibe with decimals, and vibes have never once affected a pull rate, not even ours.