PTCGL credit farming – Dusting Scorer v2

I developed my own Pokemon TCG Live dusting simulator/scorer @ dust.4tcg.live because:

  1. I wanted to understand the topic, to give good recommendations on which PTCGL codes to buy.
  2. TrustYourPilot’s TCG Live economy videos are genius, but people reported different numbers in comments (OBF being 41k-43k).
  3. Pokedata simulator seems great but stopped with „Temporal Forces“.

I called it a Dusting „Scorer“, because it picks up the idea of TrustYourPilot’s video, to factor in code prices.

Bug on Pokedata

I was a bit shocked when I found out that some of the numbers we all looked at, were really skewed.
Looking at pull tables on pokedata, I realized that upgrade slots hit high rarities far too often. Those are typically slots 1-3 that have a very low chance to hit a high rarity card.

This error has higher impact on sets where those „Upgrade Cards“ have a low count, creating an unrealistic amount of dust. Thus sets like e.g Celebrations and DetectivePikachu are not impacted.
I had a brief chat about the suspicion on Bluesky and the author confirmed that this is „probably a bug“.

SETUpgrade CardsPokedataDust4TCGDifference
TEF565047– 6%
OBF335743– 25%
PGO308965– 27%
SHF277155– 23%

Experiment with SHF

I chose shining fates because I have plenty of codes from this set, not much redeemed (13 cards for expanded) and the numbers are not overlapping.

Only 1% of my dustings runs could barely reach the minimum I got on pokedata.

Shining Fates is especially interesting because it only has 1 RainbowRare card (Alcremie VMax), hitting a ridiculous amount of 7-32 times in my testing runs on pokedata.
Statistically you should expect to hit 6.4 of this card.

PokedataDust4TCG
Min6099047105
Max8364566650
Avg7100055000
99% below60625

My Result

Credits: 52590
Rainbow Rare Pulls: 6

I know, it is just 1 sample of a 400 pack opening.
But given all the evidence, I think my numbers seem more reasonable.
Let me know if you have feedback. I have plans for its future, but for now I think it serves good already.