{"id":826742,"date":"2026-05-28T01:35:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T01:35:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/826742\/"},"modified":"2026-05-28T01:35:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T01:35:10","slug":"10-billion-pokemon-cards-got-printed-and-it-still-wasnt-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/826742\/","title":{"rendered":"10 Billion Pok\u00e9mon Cards Got Printed And It Still Wasn’t Enough"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Pok\u00e9mon Company updated its annual figures and, to nobody\u2019s shock, the franchise continues to dominate the world. It\u2019s now printed over 85 billion Pok\u00e9mon cards since the TCG launched in 1996. Over 10 percent of those were produced in the last year alone. And yet it\u2019s still not enough<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Pok\u00e9mon Company had distributed 75 billion cards as of May 2025, meaning it produced another 10 billion over the last 12 months (thanks Gamesradar<\/a>). These cards came from sets like the incredibly popular Scarlet & Violet\u2013Prismatic Evolutions expansion, divided up across tons of different boxed products. Wizards of the Coast isn\u2019t the only one turning paper into gold<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To put this in perspective, the Pok\u00e9mon Company\u2019s lifetime card production was at just 34.1 billion back in May 2021, roughly a year into the pandemic. That means in the five years since, more than double the total number of cards that had ever existed up to that point were printed. And yet it doesn\u2019t seem to have done anything to slow the ongoing Pok\u00e9mon TCG chaos.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s still basically impossible to just walk into a GameStop or Walmart and buy new booster packs from recent sets like a normal person. Unless you want to pay ridiculous prices or sift through resellers online, your best bet is still to go out and line up outside the store on restock day. Or to go do crimes<\/a>. A shocking number of people are settling for the latter, and often with very unsettling and even violent results<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re aware that some fans are experiencing difficulties purchasing certain Pok\u00e9mon Trading Card Game (TCG) products due to very high demand impacting availability,\u201d the company said in a statement a year ago<\/a>. \u201cWe understand this inconvenience can be disappointing for fans, and we are actively working to print more of the impacted Pok\u00e9mon TCG products as quickly as possible and at maximum capacity to acknowledge this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Will the Pok\u00e9mon Company ever get a handle on growing demand, or will it take a market crash to scare away all the scalpers and restore some sense of calm and kindness<\/a> to the hobby? Will 15 billion cards be enough? 20 billion? Or should we start instituting ID checks for packs of cardboard like they\u2019re thinking about doing in Japan<\/a>?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Pok\u00e9mon Company updated its annual figures and, to nobody\u2019s shock, the franchise continues to dominate the world.…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":826743,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[7],"tags":[48580,339528,85129,158,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-826742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-pokemon-cards","tag-scalpers","tag-tcg","tag-technology","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116649640811525457","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=826742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826742\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/826743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=826742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=826742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=826742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}