Probability of Drawing Zeraora in your First Turn

TLDR: You have around ~77% probability of triggering at least 1 Zeraora in a standard 2 Pokéball + 2 Professors Research deck, even with 8 basics in it. The probability of finding both on your first turn drops significantly as you add basic pokemon (22.8% if you have 8 basics).

Introduction

Zeraora is still seeing gameplay as Miraidon ex, Terapagos ex, and Manectric ex decks rise to the top. For example, here's the current meta build of Mega Manectric ex (54.3% win rate, 1.9% meta share):

Mega Manectric ex / Zeraora

Open in Optimizer20 cards

The problem is you have to pull it in your first turn, otherwise it becomes a bit of deadweight. The more basic pokemon you have, the less likely you are to enjoy its ability.

So, the natural question is: how much does adding basic pokemon to your deck hurt your chances? We ran thousands of simulations using the deckgym-core open-source Pokemon TCG Pocket simulator to find out.

Experiment

We simulated 100,000 games with various Zeraora deck configurations, they all shared the same structure:

2 Zeraora
2 Poké Ball
2 Professor's Research
Varying number of Lightning basics (Electrike, Oricorio, Tapu Koko ex)
Filler trainer cards

Then we used a bot that plays its first turn to maximize the probability of getting Zeraora in play. Here is the code:

fn decision_fn(&mut self, rng: &mut StdRng, state: &State, actions: &[Action]) -> Action {
    if state.turn_count <= 2 {
        actions.iter()
            .find(|a| matches!(&a.action, SimpleAction::Place(c, _) if c.get_name() == "Zeraora"))
            .or_else(|| actions.iter().find(|a| matches!(&a.action, SimpleAction::Play { trainer_card } if trainer_card.name.contains("Poké Ball"))))
            .or_else(|| actions.iter().find(|a| matches!(&a.action, SimpleAction::Play { trainer_card } if trainer_card.name.contains("Professor's Research"))))
            .cloned()
            .unwrap_or_else(|| actions.choose(rng).unwrap().clone())
    } else {
        actions.choose(rng).unwrap().clone()
    }
}

Results

After 4 minutes and 34 seconds, these where the results:

Takeaways

You trigger at least one Zeraora in over 3 out of 4 games, even at 8 basics.
Its the second Zeraora the one that gets affected as you increase the basic pokemon count.
These results are without additional draw engines like Copycat, Hiking Trail, etc... Those cards will only increase these probabilities!
The Mega Manectric build (4 basics) seems strong; it has more ~90% probability of seeing one Zeraora, and ~40% of triggering both! Adding one Oricorio doesn't seem to affect these probabilities much, but adding 2 Oricorios takes away 10% in Zeraora consistency.
7-8 basics as seen in some Terapagos Ex decks sees ~78-80% for one and ~23-26% for both.

If you have questions, feedback, or ideas for what to simulate next, be sure to join our discord.

Happy deck building!

Appendix:

The full code for these results is here: https://github.com/bcollazo/deckgym-core/compare/main...zeraora-triggering-probability