Guide · Kayou
Kayou Naruto rarity guide: every code, and where the guides disagree
Twenty-three rarity codes, five box tiers, two rarity systems, and a set of English collector guides that cannot agree on what half the letters stand for. Here is our full chart, with Kayou's own names marked where we could verify them.
Quick answer
A Kayou rarity code only means something inside the set it was printed in. On Kayou's own English product pages, SSR is 'Super Spark Rare' and sits below UR, PTR is 'Platinum Rare', CR is 'Creative Rare' and AR is 'Amber Rare'. All four differ from the expansions most collector guides print. Our archive catalogues 23 codes across five box tiers, and the table below shows which names we can source to Kayou and which are community-compiled.
Kayou Naruto cards carry a two- or three-letter rarity code in the corner, and almost every English page explaining those codes is guessing. The guides do not merely differ in detail: they disagree on what the letters stand for, on how many rarities exist, and on the order they sit in.
This page does not pick a winner. It shows our archive's chart, shows Kayou's own names beside it where we could fetch them from Kayou's product pages, and marks the rest as unverified.
The one rule that makes the rest make sense
A Kayou rarity code is scoped to the set it was printed in. There is no universal Kayou ladder, and every guide that publishes one flat list is wrong by construction.
Two official product pages make this concrete. Kayou's Ninja Age Premium Collector Box page lists 106 card types across ten tiers (◇XR, ◇MR, ◇QR, MR, SSR, QR, UR, PTR, XR and SP), and that box contains no R and no SR at all. The Earth Scroll Series 2 page lists 132 types across eight tiers (CR, AR, MR, ◇UR, UR, SSR, SR, R) with no XR, QR, PTR or SP. The same letter can be the top of one product's ladder and absent from the next.
The second rule follows from the first: SSR sits below UR. Earth Scroll
Series 2 prints 25 SSR types against 15 UR types, lists SSR below UR in its own
legend, and its published pull rate reads 3R+2SR+1SSR+1UR for half of packs.
UR is the slot that upgrades past SSR, not the other way round.
The box system: tiers and waves
Chinese-market Kayou boxes are referred to by a tier and a wave. Our archive uses those codes, and the Kayou hub is organised around them.
| Tier | Waves in our archive | Box shape (community-compiled) | Chase codes our data marks exclusive |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 | W1 to W4 | 36 one-yuan packs | GP (except W1) |
| Tier 2 | W1 to W9 | 30 two-yuan packs, guaranteed SR+ per pack | CR (except W1); ZR in W4 to W5 |
| Tier 2.5 | single box | ~50 packs, the "cloud" box | CP |
| Tier 3 | W1 to W5, plus blisters W1 to W3 | 20 five-yuan packs | TR, TGR, NR |
| Tier 4 | W1 to W8, plus blisters W1 to W3 | 18 ten-yuan packs | HR, BP, SLR, SE |
| EX packs | EX1 to EX5 | premium single packs | SP variants, SLR, SE |
Two honest caveats about that table. First, the pack counts and prices come from
the tiers block in our own kayou-rarities.json, which its _note records as
compiled in July 2026 from the CottierTCG, Eyesight Collectibles, Capsule Corp
Gear and TCGWaifu guides, not from Kayou. Second, those descriptions have
already been outrun by the product: they describe Tier 2 in terms of waves 4 and
5, while our box index now carries Tier 2 out to Wave 9 and Tier 4 out to Wave 8.
Outside the tier ladder our archive also indexes Ninja Age, Youth Scroll, Heaven & Earth, New Year Special, Badge and Figure collections, Live, promos, and the five EX packs. Note a discrepancy there worth knowing about: we catalogue 184 cards under Ninja Age, while Kayou's official Ninja Age Premium Collector Box page states 106 types. Those are probably not the same product boundary, so treat neither number as the other's correction.
Old system versus post-T4W6
Our data splits the codes three ways (old, new, and both) around a
system change our sources place at box T4W6. Everything from T4W6 onward
uses a simplified lineup that added PTR and PU; several older codes (GP, CR, ZR,
NR, TR, TGR, HR, LR, OR, AR, SLR, CP) belong to the pre-change waves only.
This split is community-derived. We have not found a Kayou document that announces it, and we would rather label it than launder it.
The full code table
"Our name" is the expansion in our archive. It was originally compiled from collector guides, and corrected on September 2, 2026 wherever Kayou's own legend gave a different one. "Kayou's own name" is filled in only where we read it directly on a kayouofficial.com product page for this article; where the two columns differ, Kayou's is the one to trust and ours is the one to correct. "Also seen as" lists further expansions we have seen attributed to the code elsewhere, recorded to show the spread rather than to endorse any of them.
| Code | Our name | Kayou's own name | Also seen as | Where it appears | Scarcity note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| R | Rare | Rare ✅ | n/a | Both systems | Multiple per pack |
| SR | Super Rare | Super Rare ✅ | n/a | Both systems | One or more per pack, Tier 2+ |
| SSR | Super Spark Rare | Super Spark Rare ✅ | Super Super Rare (the common misreading) | Both systems | Below UR. Roughly every other pack in Tier 4 |
| UR | Ultra Rare | Ultra Rare ✅ | n/a | Both systems | The community's benchmark "hit" |
| SP | Special | Special ✅ | n/a | Both systems | High-end pull, Tier 3+ |
| MR | Miracle Rare | Miracle Rare ✅ | Millennium Rare, Mega Rare | Both systems | Top-of-tier chase |
| PTR | Platinum Rare | Platinum Rare ✅ | Poster Rare | New system | Insert tier |
| CR | Creative Rare | Creative Rare ✅ | Crystal Rare, Crown Rare | Old system; Tier 2 exclusive | Tier 2 box chase |
| AR | Amber Rare | Amber Rare ✅ | Art Rare, Aurora Rare | Old system | High chase tier |
| GP | Gold Print | not in fetched legends | n/a | Old system; Tier 1 exclusive | Top chase of a Tier 1 box |
| ZR | Z Rare | not in fetched legends | n/a | Old system; Tier 2 W4 to W5 | Limited to two waves |
| NR | Noble Rare | not in fetched legends | n/a | Old system; Tier 3 exclusive | Tier 3 box chase |
| TR | Transparent Rare | not in fetched legends | n/a | Old system; Tier 3 exclusive | See-through chibi stock |
| TGR | Transparent Gold Rare | not in fetched legends | n/a | Old system; Tier 3 | Rarer than TR |
| HR | Holographic Rare | not in fetched legends | n/a | Old system; Tier 4 exclusive | Tier 4 exclusive |
| LR | Legacy Rare | not in fetched legends | n/a | Old system; blisters | Blister-only pull |
| OR | Over Rare | not in fetched legends | n/a | Old system | Above UR |
| SLR | Star Light Rare | not in fetched legends | n/a | Old system; Tier 4 and EX | Gold (+) and silver (−) variants |
| CP | Cloud Print | not in fetched legends | n/a | Old system; Tier 2.5 only | Single-product exclusive |
| BP | Battle Print | not in fetched legends | n/a | Both systems; Tier 4 in old system | Very rare Tier 4 chase |
| PU | Parallel Universe | not in fetched legends | n/a | New system | New-system chase |
| SE | Special Edition | not in fetched legends | n/a | Both systems; Tier 4 and EX | Serial-numbered (see below) |
| ASP | ASP | not in fetched legends | n/a | New system | Serial-numbered |
"Not in fetched legends" is a statement about our evidence, not about the card: we read two Kayou English product pages for this article, and those two products simply do not contain those rarities. A Kayou page for a Tier 4 box or for Chapter Jin would very likely name several of them, and when we can fetch one we will fill the column in.
Three codes appear on Kayou's official English pages but not in our archive at all: XR (Extreme Rare), QR (Cute Rare), and the ◇ prefix. Kayou is not consistent with itself on that last one. Ninja Age glosses ◇XR as "Extreme Rare (Shining)", while Earth Scroll Series 2 glosses ◇UR as "Parallel Ultra Rare". Same diamond, two readings, one publisher.
Serial numbers
Our data's line on SE is "777 or fewer copies per card." We are recording it as our data's figure and nothing more: neither official page we fetched lists SE or any serial run, and the print-run numbers circulating in English differ by region. A figure quoted for the Chinese Tier 4 boxes is not a figure for the North American English product. If someone quotes you a bare "/777" or "/220" for SE without naming the edition, it is at best half right.
Serialisation, not the letter, is what moves a card's price. That is a separate question from rarity, and one for the Kayou card index.
Are Kayou cards official?
What is verifiable: Kayou announced its US market entry on September 17, 2025, in a press release headlined around "Officially Licensed Trading Cards", naming NARUTO Smriti Collectible Cards: Heaven Scroll Edition as one of three launch lines alongside My Little Pony and tokidoki, and listing Amazon, Walmart, Target, GameStop, Barnes & Noble and TikTok Shop as channels. It runs its own US store at shop.kayouofficial.com/us, and its product pages carry model numbers, release dates, card counts and rarity legends.
What that release does not do is name a licensor for Naruto. It states the My Little Pony line is "under license from Hasbro" and gives no equivalent attribution for the Naruto line. So: Kayou is a real manufacturer selling real cards through mainstream US retail, and we are not going to tell you which rights holder licenses Naruto to it, because the document does not say.
That is also the honest answer to "are my cards fake". The overwhelming driver of confusion is regional editions rather than forgery. Chinese domestic, South-East Asian English and US English products use different numbering, different rarity sets and different odds.
What to do with a card in your hand
Read the set first and the letter second: find the product the card came from, then read that product's ladder, because it is the only one that applies. Our rarity pages carry the code-by-code detail and the Kayou hub carries the boxes. If you are not sure which Naruto card line you own at all, start with is there a Naruto card game.
Frequently asked questions
- What does PU mean on a Kayou Naruto card?
- Our archive records PU as Parallel Universe, a parallel-art rarity introduced with the post-2024 lineup and confirmed in the English Jin Chapter Series 2 product. PU does not appear in either of the two official Kayou English rarity legends we were able to fetch (Ninja Age and Earth Scroll Series 2), so we cannot corroborate the expansion against a Kayou primary, only against our own compiled data and the collector guides it came from.
- Is SSR better than UR on a Kayou card?
- No, and this is the single most common mistake. On Kayou's own Earth Scroll Series 2 page the legend runs CR, AR, MR, ◇UR, UR, SSR, SR, R. SSR sits below UR, and the published pull rate makes UR the upgrade slot over SSR. That inverts the ladder Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh collectors expect.
- Are Kayou Naruto cards official?
- Kayou is a real company selling through its own US store and mainstream US retail. Its September 17 2025 US launch release is headlined "Officially Licensed Trading Cards" and names NARUTO Smriti Collectible Cards: Heaven Scroll Edition as a launch line. That release names a licensor only for My Little Pony ("under license from Hasbro") and names no licensor for the Naruto line, so we do not state who Kayou licenses Naruto from.
- Are Kayou pull rates official?
- Some are. Kayou's English series pages publish per-pack odds for some products: the Earth Scroll Series 2 page gives a 50/50 split between two pack contents. The Ninja Age page we fetched publishes none, however, and the Chinese-market tier boxes have no published English odds at all. Any pull rate you read for a T1 through T4 box is community-observed, not official.
Sources
Every factual claim above traces to one of these. Where a detail is not in them, this page says so rather than filling the gap.
- KAYOU official: NARUTO Smriti Collectible Cards, Ninja Age Premium Collector Box (NR-KP-RZSD-LH-001-NA)
- KAYOU official: NARUTO Smriti Collectible Cards, Earth Scroll 002A-NA (NR-KP-DZJ-002A-NA)
- KAYOU official US store
- Kayou press release, September 17 2025: "Kayou Enters the U.S. Market"
- Our Kayou rarity archive
More guides
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