Dragon Ball has two rarity systems because it has two games, and the tiers do not match. A card that sits in the middle of one ladder can sit at the very top of the other. The letter is printed on the card; its meaning is not, which is why this page exists.
Masters: the ladder
- C — Common. The bulk of a booster. No foil, printed in the largest quantity.
- UC — Uncommon. A step rarer, and where a lot of the cards a deck actually needs sit.
- R — Rare. The first tier printed with a holographic treatment.
- SR — Super Rare. Foil plus a bigger effect or a splashier illustration. Several appear across a box.
- SPR — Special Rare. An alternate-art, premium-foil version of a card that usually also exists as a plain SR. Same card, different printing, different demand.
- SPR_S — Special Rare, signed. An SPR with a signature on it. Rarer again.
- ST — Starter Rare. A tier that exists only inside starter decks and never in booster packs.
- CR — Concept Rare. A themed frame, introduced in recent Masters sets. The set prints a small fixed number of them, built around that set’s theme.
- SCR — Secret Rare. One of the top tiers, with a very low pull rate and the fullest treatment in the set.
- SLR — Special Leader Rare. An alternate-art or specially finished version of a Leader card, managed as its own tier.
- GDR — God Rare. The highest tier Masters prints, and the one Fusion World does not have at all.
Masters: tiers that exist in one set only
A few rarities are not part of the general ladder at all; they were invented for a single release and have not been used since. If you meet a letter in the wild that is not in the list above, that is usually why.
Fusion World: the ladder
- C, UC, R, SR — the same four base tiers as Masters, with R and above carrying foil.
- SCR — Secret Rare. The top of the Fusion World ladder, at a very low pull rate.
- SCR, alt art — an alternate-art printing of the Secret Rare. Rarer than the Secret Rare itself, and marked distinctly from it. In Fusion World this is the card of the set.
- L — Leader. Not a rarity in the usual sense: Leader cards are their own line, printed in their own slot at the front of every set, and every deck needs exactly one.
- PR — Promo. Not pulled from a pack at all.
How many of each a set holds
Recent Masters sets are built to a consistent structure. Two consecutive sets in the Ultra-Bout series break down as roughly 50 Common, 40 Uncommon, 34 Rare, 18 Super Rare, 6 Concept Rare, 15 Special Rare and 10 Special Leader Rare, then a small number of Secret Rares and God Rares on top — the entire set running to about 178 to 179 card types. Fusion World sets are similar in shape but stop earlier: a recent booster lists five Leaders, a couple of Secret Rares, a dozen or so Super Rares, around thirty Rares and Uncommons each, and forty Commons.
The one that catches people out
UR is not a Dragon Ball rarity. It belongs to a different Dragon Ball card game entirely, and confusing the two is the most common rarity mistake in this hobby. If a listing calls a Masters or Fusion World card UR, the label is wrong.
What a rarity is not
It is not a price. The rarity mark tells you how often a card comes out of a pack; it tells you nothing about which character is on it, and character is at least half of demand. The tiers above the ladder are where the money sits, and that is a separate article.
Frequently asked questions
Which Dragon Ball rarity is the most common?
Common, printed as C in both games. It is the bulk of a booster, carries no foil and is printed in the largest quantity of any tier.
Do the same rarity letters mean the same thing in both games?
No. Masters and Fusion World run separate ladders, so a letter that sits in the middle of one can sit at the very top of the other. Masters alone has a God Rare tier, and the Fusion World ladder stops at Secret Rare.
Which Masters tiers sit above Secret Rare?
God Rare. Secret Rare is the tier directly under it; the tiers beside it are Special Rare, signed Special Rare, Special Leader Rare and Concept Rare.
Why do some rarity letters turn up in only one set?
A few tiers were invented for a single release and have not been used since. If you meet a letter that is not on the general ladder, that is usually why.
Sources
Sources and further reading
- Bandai — Dragon Ball Super Card Game and Dragon Ball Super Card Game Fusion World official product pages and rule manuals.
- PriceCharting — Dragon Ball console and individual card listings. PSA 10 values retrieved 2026-10-04.
- CardSpicy — the Dragon Ball card index, on how the pool and its priced cards are counted.
Prices quoted are secondary-market observations at the date cited and move quickly; nothing here is a valuation or an investment recommendation. Our own asking prices for the cards we hold are on each product page.