The Pokémon Company updated its annual figures and, to nobody’s shock, the franchise continues to dominate the world. It’s now printed over 85 billion Pokémon cards since the TCG launched in 1996. Over 10 percent of those were produced in the last year alone. And yet it’s still not enough.
The Pokémon Company had distributed 75 billion cards as of May 2025, meaning it produced another 10 billion over the last 12 months (thanks Gamesradar). These cards came from sets like the incredibly popular Scarlet & Violet–Prismatic Evolutions expansion, divided up across tons of different boxed products. Wizards of the Coast isn’t the only one turning paper into gold.
To put this in perspective, the Pokémon Company’s 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’t seem to have done anything to slow the ongoing Pokémon TCG chaos.
It’s 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 shocking number of people are settling for the latter, and often with very unsettling and even violent results.
“We’re aware that some fans are experiencing difficulties purchasing certain Pokémon Trading Card Game (TCG) products due to very high demand impacting availability,” the company said in a statement a year ago. “We understand this inconvenience can be disappointing for fans, and we are actively working to print more of the impacted Pokémon TCG products as quickly as possible and at maximum capacity to acknowledge this.”
Will the Pokémon 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 to the hobby? Will 15 billion cards be enough? 20 billion? Or should we start instituting ID checks for packs of cardboard like they’re thinking about doing in Japan?
