George is a writer with a decade in the industry and counting, who specializes in gaming news and features. They ran the gaming section over at The Sun for three years, and has also written articles for GamesRadar+, IGN, GAMINGbible, Siliconera, and VGIM to name a few. When they are not obsessing over their one true love, the PlayStation Vita, you can find them checking out the latest JRPG, visual novel, or unique indie game. With a background in languages, and ten years spent living in Japan, you can also find them diving deep into French, German, and Japanese language games and research.
The Pokemon Company has announced that it has produced 85 billion Pokemon TCG cards as of March 2026. The first sets of the Pokemon TCG were released in Japan in 1996, but saw a huge surge in popularity in October 2024, when a digital mobile version of the game was released in TCG Pocket. The free-to-play smartphone app drew people’s attention to the trading card version of the creature collecting series in a way that led to an explosion in popularity.
Pokemon Surpasses 85 Billion Trading Cards Made
As 2026 is Pokemon‘s 30th anniversary, The Pokemon Company International has released a number of figures about the production and sales of both its video and trading card games. This includes the fact that the company has shipped over 515 million Pokemon video games and produced 85 billion trading cards since the game’s inception. To put this into perspective, Joe Merrick, owner of Serebii, one of the most popular Pokemon wikis, claims that almost 12% of all Pokemon trading cards ever made were printed last financial year. This means that roughly 10 billion cards were made between April 2025 and March 2026.