Reading Scarlet & Violet rarity codes at a glance

If you've opened a Scarlet & Violet booster in the last two years, you've held a card you couldn't immediately classify. The symbol system changed when the era launched and the old shorthand from Sword & Shield doesn't fully apply. Three silver stars means something different than four silver stars, and both are worth real money.

This is the visual reference: every rarity code that ships in a current-era SV pack, what it looks like at the bottom-right of the card, and which ones are worth pulling out of bulk.

The full SV rarity table#

Twelve codes cover almost every card you'll touch in a 2023-2026 booster. Memorise the top half and you can read the rest at a glance.

The codes that matter most for binder collectors are IR, SIR, UR, and HR. Those four are what people mean when they say "I pulled a chase card." Everything below RR is bulk in volume terms; everything above HR is a misprint or a foreign printing you weren't expecting.

If you're new and want the longer-form intro, the full-art Pokémon cards guide covers the lineage from FA → IR/SIR. This post is the narrower SV-specific companion — same vocabulary, fewer paragraphs of history.

IR and SIR side by side#

The two codes that dominate modern collecting are IR and SIR. They look similar at a glance and price wildly differently.

Illustration Rare (IR) is the art-first layout. The Pokémon is shown in a painted scene — landscape, weather, a trainer in frame, sometimes a moment from the games — and the attack box is pushed to the bottom of the card so the artwork breathes. No rainbow foil. The card numbering runs past the printed total of the set: a 165-card set will have IR cards numbered 166 through about 180. Pull rate is roughly 1 per 10 booster packs in modern SV product, depending on the set.

Special Illustration Rare (SIR) is the same art-first concept applied to an ex card. The illustration is a different artwork than the IR (it's not a foil version of the same painting), the holofoil is heavier and more textured, and the card is significantly scarcer — closer to 1 per 18-20 packs in most SV booster boxes. SIRs of Charizard, Pikachu, and Mewtwo are the cards driving secondary-market headlines for the era.

Both codes were rare-named "alt art" in casual English before the official SV branding caught up. If you read a 2023 forum post calling something an "alt art Charizard ex," they meant the SIR.

The visual tell, if you have a card in hand: an IR has one gold star at the bottom right and a thinner foil pattern that catches light evenly across the painting. An SIR has two gold stars and a foil pattern that shifts in colour as you tilt the card. The card numbering also helps — SIRs almost always sit higher in the secret-rare run than IRs of the same set.

The ex card tier#

SV brought back the lowercase-ex format last seen in the Ruby & Sapphire era of the early 2000s. Functionally these replaced V, VMAX, and VSTAR cards from the SWSH era. Visually they're a sticker-clean version of "fancy basic Pokémon." Every ex card is automatically a Double Rare (RR) at minimum.

ex cards have three printing tiers in any given set:

1. Standard ex (RR): two black stars, foil layout, attack box visible. The cheapest version of any ex Pokémon. The Sandile ex in Twilight Masquerade is a fine example — useful in the slot, doesn't carry a premium.
2. Full Art ex (UR): three silver stars, the entire card is the artwork, attack text overlaid on a holofoil scene. These are the "Ultra Rare" tier in colloquial use.
3. SIR variant (SIR): the alt-art version of the same ex card, completely different artwork, two gold stars, scarcer print run. This is the chase card slot.

A single ex Pokémon can therefore exist three times in the same set — the regular RR, the UR full art, and the SIR alt art. Master-set collectors need all three. One-per-dex collectors only need one of them filling the slot, and which one they pick is a face-card decision the binder is built around.

The traps that still trip people up#

Three things confuse newer SV-era collectors more than the codes themselves.

Reverse holos are not a separate rarity#

A reverse holo is a treatment applied to commons, uncommons, and standard rares — same card, foil pattern on the card body instead of the artwork window. The rarity code on a reverse holo Bidoof is still C, even though the card looks shinier than a base print. Reverse holos don't appear on full-art cards because there's nothing for the foil to reverse onto. Don't pay full-art prices for a fancy common.

Promo cards use a separate numbering system#

Black-star promos (the SVP series in SV) ship outside the main set numbering. A black-star promo Pikachu is numbered something like 045/SVP rather than 045/198. Promos can be IR-style, holo, or non-holo, and the rarity code on the back doesn't always match what you'd expect from a numbered set card. Treat them as their own track. The Surging Sparks era introduced new promo runs that look almost identical to the main set IRs, which is exactly the kind of card a returning collector misidentifies.

Japanese rarity codes are different and the equivalence isn't 1:1#

Japanese SV-era boosters use AR (Art Rare) and SAR (Special Art Rare) where English uses IR and SIR. The artworks are not always identical — some Japanese SAR cards never make it to English at all, and English SIRs sometimes use a Japanese AR illustration upgraded to SIR-tier foil. The codes are loosely equivalent for buying decisions, exactly equivalent for slot purposes (a JP AR fills the same slot as an EN IR in a bilingual binder). The Japanese vs English binder post goes deeper on the structural differences.

The other Japanese code worth knowing is CHR (Character Rare), which doesn't exist in English at all. CHR cards are a Japanese-only Trainer treatment that sometimes carry the silver-star count of an SR but at lower scarcity. The Japanese Eevee CHR cards from the pre-SV era still get traded as collector pieces.

What to pull out of bulk#

The quick triage when you crack a fresh booster box:

• Every IR and above — sleeve immediately, log to the binder, never let them sit in the dump pile
• Every Hyper Rare — gold cards always pay back the sleeve
• ex cards regardless of tier — even RR-only ex cards hold $3-8 secondary, worth tagging
• Reverse holos of commons — bulk unless you're chasing a specific master set
• Standard rares (single black star) — bulk for non-Pokémon Trainers, slot-fillers for Pokémon you don't yet have

A Scarlet & Violet master set hasn't existed without all three ex tiers since 2023. If you're chasing one, the regular RR is the cheapest way to fill your "ex card from this set" requirement on master-set checklists, and the SIR is the slot you'll spend 60% of the budget on.

Linking codes to the binder#

Every Pokémon page on DexBindr tags cards by rarity using the codes above — IR, SIR, AR, SAR, UR, HR — pulled directly from the printed card data rather than guessed from artwork. If you sort a Pokémon's gallery by rarity, the IRs and SIRs surface at the top automatically, which is the fastest visual learning loop for the codes: see one, swap it into your slot, watch the binder face change.

For a complete list of what each rarity looks like in your hand without flipping back to this post, the full-art guide has the longer references. For the master-set angle on Scarlet & Violet specifically, the one-per-dex vs master set comparison walks through how RR/UR/SIR variants stack into a master-set count.

The shortest version of this whole post: in SV, gold star count tells you almost everything. One gold star = IR, two gold stars = SIR, three silver stars = UR, gold body = HR. Memorise that and you can read a card from across a card-shop table.