Pokemon TCG Printed 10 Billion Cards in 2025 as Overwhelming Demand Outpaced Production Capacity
by petewoniowa2020
Pokemon Trading Card Game
Pokemon TCG Printed 10 Billion Cards in 2025 as Overwhelming Demand Outpaced Production Capacity
by petewoniowa2020
33 Comments
My bulk feels this
What are rates atm?
And I still find literally nothing at my targets and Walmarts. Love it.
Half of that is just energy cards
Is it demand for singles and bulk or demand for alt arts, sirs, and illustrations blanketed by gambling and investing?🧐
They wouldn’t have to print so much if 98% of it wasn’t bulk. Increase pull rates and demand issues are immediately solved. But for TPCi the demand isnt the problem so they won’t. They are perfectly fine with how things are.
So then print 20 Billion and then we might see it on shelves for a day or two.
Saw that they printed 43B in the first 25 years. I wonder if someone can figure out how many base set boxes they printed initially so we can finally get a ballpark of how much unlimited cards exist
Double it.
https://imgur.com/a/QNR0qDt
Am I reading this right? They’re printing **16% LESS** than they did in March 2024, prior to the hype cycle?
There’s a prevailing sentiment in the community that TPCi is either failing to address the problem with demand or – as some suggest – they are actively trying to create shortages. The fact remains that I’m not sure there’s much else they can do at this point.
As the article lays out, they are printing at maximum capacity, pushing out as many cards in the last three years as the preceding 25 years combined. They are building a massive print facility to increase capacity. They bought a major distributor to better control the supply chain. And they are printing smaller sets to make printing easier to do at volume.
I say this earnestly – what more can be done?
A lot of suggestions I hear simply don’t align with reality. Scalpers are a problem, but they’re still able to sell their products to end buyers. It’s objective fact that every product that could be sold at any price under market is being sold. Even if there was a magic button TPC could press to make sure every pack was not resold, people would still not be able to buy all of the packs they want; demand for cards is greater than the amount of cards that can currently be printed. The only solution is to print more cards, but it takes time to build out capacity.
Market crash is going to be rough.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills with these numbers. I know dozens of collectors, even a few shop owners. WHERE ARE THESE CARDS GOING? Some of the most hardcore collectors I know haven’t even gotten their hands on more than a hundred packs of Ascended, let alone the actual occasional casual person just grabbing a pack, or small box. 10 billion fucking cards, and still every shelf is always empty. Insane. The Pokemon company really is just out here doing absolutely nothing to combat bots and distribution fuckery lmao.
All for massive chunks of it to just sit unopened in people’s storage
9.5 billion still sealed, .5 billion in circulation.
Just increase pull rates
All that just to reprint Prismatic and Surging Sparks instead of other sets
And i’ve found maybe 5 packs in that time frame
This is such a sham. Just increase the hit rates and demand will adjust. This is corporate greed masked as consumption. No need to print more total cards, just a higher percentage of the ones people actually want.
Wonder if they will ever go to a model like what MTG has – collector boosters with higher hit rates and special prints, with regular boosters being more TCG staples/playable cards. Presuming never because MTG has a bigger card pool, but wonder if they have debated it internally and what the economics look like.
And most of it is sat at scapers houses waiting to be sold on for double the price
Hot take but they need to go back to SV Base hit rate where you were getting 1-2 SIR’s every booster box. That was magical and it helped the market imo because there was a little craze in 2022 that swiftly went away.
Print more hits.
9 billion bulk bs
Just put a guaranteed full art of any rarity in each pack and watch the market implode
The generation before us had lead everywhere, we’ve got microplastics everywhere, the next generation will have Pokémon energy cards everywhere
Pokemon cards; great for the environment!!!!! Grass type would be proud.
Yet in my moderately sized town in the UK I haven’t seen ANY stock in a shop for at least 2 years. In that time all I have managed to snag is 1 Perfect Order ETB & 1 PO Booster Box from the Pokémon Centre.
It’s depressing
It’s insane how much waste is produced to create the gambling ratios for cards people actually want
They need to increase the pull rates of SIRs. 1 in 100 is a joke when it’s this hard to find packs and the market is this euphoric.
Maybe they can fucking increase the hit rates if they’re gonna be printing so much
Is it possible sets from this era become the junk wax of the future?
Code cards + energy cards like 5 Billion.
Sure as hell wouldn’t believe it given the lack of MSRP product.