85bn
cards produced since the game began, “or more”, as of March 2026. A lifetime total, worldwide, rounded down. No year, no country, no language.
- 34.1bn the first count of cards produced, March 2021. Before that TPC counted shipments
- 9.0–11.0bn last year’s print, as far as the counter can tell. A band, not a figure
Every headline about how many Pokémon cards were printed last year comes from a single place: a counter on TPC’s “Pokémon in Figures” page. It is a lifetime total, worldwide, updated once a year. TPC does not publish a yearly print, a Japanese print, or a print by language. So every yearly figure you have read is one counter reading minus another. And in the last six years the counter changed twice: first in what it counts, then in how precisely it counts it. The second change came just as the print stopped rising. What follows is what can still be read from it, and what can’t.
One counter, two meanings
Up to March 2020 the page counted cards shipped: 30.4bn. A year later the same line counted cards produced: 34.1bn. The Japanese label changed between captures taken in January and July 2021, and the English page followed at some point no capture pins down. The games counter on the same page did not change. It still counts software shipped.
Shipped and produced are not the same thing. A card can be printed and sit in a warehouse. So the year to March 2021 straddles two definitions. The difference between the two readings is 3.7bn, but that is production minus shipments. All it says is that the year’s production was at most 3.8bn.
One word TPC never uses for cards is “sold”. Across every capture, sale appears only in its count of languages and areas where cards are sold. “Sold” is press wording. One outlet wrote that TPC “sold” 3.1bn cards in the year to March 2020.
One counter, two meanings
TPC’s running total of Pokémon cards, billions, counted each March.
- Counted as cards shipped
- Counted as cards produced
- Estimate
The dashed line counts cards shipped; the solid line, from March 2021, counts cards produced. The year between them straddles both counts.
Built from , and .Show the numbers
| March | Counted as cards shipped, bn cards | Counted as cards produced, bn cards | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | – | ||
| 2016 | no figure | – | |
| 2017 | – | ||
| 2018 | – | ||
| 2019 | – | ||
| 2020 | – | ||
| 2021 | – | ||
| 2022 | – | ||
| 2023 | – | ||
| 2024 | – | ||
| 2025 | – | ||
| 2026 | – |
Counted as cards shipped. TPC’s page counted cards shipped until 2020. Hollow points come from press retrospectives, not TPC’s page.
Counted as cards produced. From March 2021 the same counter counts cards produced. Since 2025 TPC rounds it to a floor, so the last two points are “at least”.
Annual print is subtraction
Take the March readings in turn and subtract. On the production basis the counter read 43.2bn, 52.9bn and 64.8bn in 2022, 2023 and 2024. So the print ran 9.1bn, 9.7bn and then a record 11.9bn. Each reading was rounded down to the tenth of a billion, so each yearly figure is good to about a tenth of a billion either way.
Cards printed each year, billions
Point estimates where the trainer’s notes has a decimal. Later years are floors, so they stay hatched.
The scale of the modern era is the real story. Since March 2021 the print has averaged at least 10.16bn a year. In the five years to March 2020 shipments averaged 1.78bn. The definitions differ, but no gap between shipping and printing explains a jump of that size.
Earlier years are softer. The readings for 2018 and 2019 come from fan-site tables that reproduce TPC’s page, not from a capture of the page itself, and all trace back to one site. And not every press figure agrees with the subtraction. One outlet put the year to March 2022 at 9.2bn against the counter’s 9.1bn. Rounding alone cannot rule either outlier out. They are set aside because each rests on a single page, and the “sold” article gets its next year exactly right by subtraction.
Then the counter went round
In the 2025 update the decimal disappeared. The page now said “75bn or more”, and a year later “85bn or more”. The English page agrees: “Total production over” a whole number of billions.
How round is round? Nobody has said. In the same update TPC rounded its other counters down to the tens: the countries where cards are sold went from 93 to “90 or more”. Reading the card counter the same way, as a floor to the whole billion, is the most natural reading. It is a judgement, graded as an estimate, not something TPC stated.
On that reading, the year to March 2025 printed 10.1–11.2bn, and the year to March 2026 printed 9.0–11.0bn. Only the lower ends are anchored on TPC’s own page. The upper ends depend on the judgement. Together, the two years ran 10–16% a year below the record. Whether the latest year fell or rose against the one before cannot be told: anything from a fall of 19.6% to a rise of 8.9% fits. If the floors were coarser, the bands widen: the year to March 2025 could be anywhere in 10.1–15.2bn, and no decline at all is guaranteed.
The “stated” figure that wasn’t. Press widely reported that TPC printed 10.2bn cards in the year to March 2025. One outlet wrote that “An official report issued by The Pokémon Company” said so. That figure is exactly the new floor minus the last decimal reading, the bottom of the band. No capture of TPC’s pages carries any yearly line. Another fan site printed it beside a cumulative figure that gives a different answer, so it copied the number from somewhere upstream, possibly TPC. Where it started cannot be settled from the record. So it is a press attribution, not a TPC statement. If TPC did state it, the latest year narrows to 9.85–11.0bn.
The dateline problem. Creatures Inc., a sister company in the TPC group, shows the same “or more” figure on its own site, but under a dateline of March 2025. If that date is a stale label, nothing changes. If it is right, the counter already passed the newer floor a year earlier, the floors are much coarser than a billion, and every band above collapses. The March 2026 figure therefore rests on TPC’s live page alone.
No map, and no demand
No geography. In every capture from 2015 to 2026, and in the live page, there is no count of cards for Japan, for any region, or for any language. What the page does count is languages: 11 in 2015, 16 by 2025. The only domestic-to-overseas split TPC ever printed covered the whole franchise’s cumulative market size, not cards: 45:55 in 2015, 35:65 by 2017, then dropped.
So Japan’s share of the print is unobserved. It appears only inside a model that divides an estimate of Japanese card spending by an assumed price per card. That model puts Japan near 33% of the print two years ago and 44–53% last year. That is arithmetic on assumptions, not a count.
Trade data give a rough outer edge for the Asian editions. In 2025 Japan exported about ¥14.6bn of playing cards to Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia, and several times that to China and Hong Kong, where re-exports and other card games blur the picture. Japan’s card exports to those six Asian markets grew sixteenfold since 2019, from about $26 million to $421 million in 2025, most of it to China and Hong Kong. The customs code covers every card game, not just Pokémon, and until this autumn no record named who makes or imports the Asian editions; one retailer says Indonesian packs are printed in Japan. If those editions are printed in Japan and sold from Tokyo, they sit in the parent company’s revenue rather than in its subsidiaries, which is why the question matters for where Pokémon’s profit is booked.
Japan’s card exports to six Asian markets grew sixteenfold since 2019, most of it to China and Hong Kong
Japan’s yearly exports of playing cards, $ million, from UN Comtrade. The customs code covers every card game, not only Pokémon.
China and Hong Kong pull away from 2023. The other four markets grew too, from a much smaller base.
This year the climb showed up in TPC’s own half. From March to August 2026, Japan’s card exports to seven Asian markets ran at 2.3 times last year’s level, from ¥30.1bn to ¥69.6bn: Hong Kong (2.4×) and China (2.2×) about doubled, and Korea and Thailand rose about 5 times. Korea prints its own edition, so its rise is Japanese-language product, or other publishers’ cards, going to resellers; the value of each kilogram shipped there more than quadrupled. The one Traditional Chinese box label read, from a 2021 product, names outside importers, 傑仕登 in Taiwan and MTG Mint Card in Hong Kong, and gives The Pokémon Company in Tokyo as the maker and Japan as the cards’ origin. Who imports the 2026 boxes has not been read, and the customs code still counts every publisher’s cards, so this is the size of the pipe, not Pokémon’s share of it.
Japan’s card exports have run about twice last year’s level since March
Japan’s monthly exports of playing cards to all countries, ¥ billion, 2025 against 2026 to September, from Japanese customs. Export value, not publisher revenue; the code covers every card game, not only Pokémon.
The 2026 line was already higher in January and February, then sits near double the 2025 line from March, the start of TPC’s year. December’s 2025 peak is seasonal.
Built from .No demand either. Production is not sales. A printed card may sit in a distributor’s warehouse, and TPC has said nothing about how much stock is in the channel. The print may also be capped by printing capacity, which is inferred from rationing, not stated. TPCi’s notices that it is printing more “at maximum capacity” do not settle it. They cover the affected products only, and the same wording came before Shining Fates in 2021, so it is a standing restock formula rather than a dated reading of the factory. That makes “the print fell to ten billion” a statement about the factory, not a demand turn. It does constrain one story, though. Western shelf sales rose 1.45–1.87× in 2025 while the world print moved 0.80–1.09×. If the West kept the same share of the print, the value of each Western card had to rise 33–133%, through price, mix and premium products. But one British distributor shipped 45% more units across all its lines. If Pokémon carried that, the West took a bigger slice of the print, and the value story weakens.
Rivals choose differently. Bandai reports ONE PIECE cards as worldwide shipments, passing 1bn about a year after launch. Shipments are closer to what the trade actually bought. TPC’s production floors are not.