Wireless devices may use polar codes for encoding transmissions and may support combining transmissions to improve decoding reliability (e.g., by achieving chase combining and incremental redundancy (IR) gains). For example, an encoding device may puncture a set of mother code bits using different puncturing patterns to obtain different redundancy versions for a first transmission and a re-transmission. Each puncturing pattern may correspond to an equivalent decoding performance. In some cases, to obtain equivalent puncture sets, the encoding device may perform punctured index manipulation procedures on an initial puncturing pattern. A punctured index manipulation procedure may involve switching a binary state for a binary bit at a same binary bit index for each puncture index in a puncturing pattern. A device may receive the transmissions generated using the equivalent puncture sets and may combine the information for improved decoding reliability.