How Much Would It Cost to Buy Every English Pokémon Card Ever Made?

Imagine buying one copy of every English Pokémon card ever printed: every common, every holo, every reverse holo, every 1st Edition and every promo in our catalog. We added up the real sale prices of all of them. The answer is about half a million US dollars for ungraded copies. The surprising part is where that money goes: more than half of it buys fewer than 8,000 cards printed between 1999 and 2007.

The short answer

Our English catalog lists 38,227 cards once you count every variant separately (a Base Set Charizard in 1st Edition, Shadowless and Unlimited counts as three cards). We found a usable recent price for 33,738 of them. Those cards alone add up to $455,905.

For the remaining 4,489 cards we either had no recent sale, or we did not trust the data (more on that below). We estimated them from similar cards in the same set and rarity. With those estimates included, a complete English master set comes to about $501,000, with a realistic range of $482,000 to $561,000.

For comparison, the same exercise for Japanese cards lands in a similar place. Read how much it would cost to buy every Japanese Pokémon card for that side of the story.

Most of the money buys very few cards

The typical English card is cheap. The median card costs $1.52, and 13,291 cards sell for under a dollar. The average is $13.51 only because a small number of cards are very expensive.

Put simply: the cheapest 16,869 cards cost less than $10,000 together, a little more than one ungraded 1st Edition Base Set Charizard. The hard part of a master set is never the bulk. It is the last few hundred cards.

Cost by era

Here is the bill split by era. “Priced” is how many cards had a usable recent sale. The estimated cost includes our fill-in for the rest.

The four oldest groups (WOTC, e-card, EX and POP) hold 7,583 cards, about 20% of the catalog, but cost about $287,000, or 57% of the whole bill. Every era since 2007 costs less than the EX era alone. If you want to understand why older cards cost so much more, our piece on the rarest Pokémon cards covers the print-run side.

The ranges tell you where our data is thin. Scarlet & Violet is priced almost card by card, so its range is narrow. The e-card era and the decks are the opposite: many cards rarely trade, so their ranges are wide.

The most expensive sets to complete

Skyridge tops the list. It was the last English set Wizards of the Coast printed, so fewer packs exist, and it is full of crystal-type holos such as Charizard and Gengar. Base Set is second, mostly because one card, the 1st Edition Charizard, costs a third of the set on its own. For the full story of that card, see our most valuable Charizard cards guide.

The 10 priciest single cards in the bill

Gold Stars dominate this list. They were very scarce pulls in the EX era, and every one of the top ten English cards is either a Gold Star or a holo from the Wizards of the Coast years. Our most expensive Pokémon cards ever sold list shows what the same cards fetch in top grades.

The most expensive modern English cards are much cheaper than this. The priciest are Umbreon VMAX (Evolving Skies, alternate art) at $1,732, Latias & Latios-GX (Team Up) at $1,631 and Umbreon ex (Prismatic Evolutions) at $1,397.

What about PSA 10 everything?

A full PSA 10 master set does not exist, and we cannot price one honestly. Many cards have never sold in a PSA 10 slab. Some have never been graded at all. What we can do is compare like with like for the cards that do trade in PSA 10.

So just the 3,371 cards with a reliable PSA 10 price would cost about $1.9 million in PSA 10, against about $141,000 raw: more than 13 times as much. The typical card in that group has a PSA 10 price 17 times its raw price. Our guide to PSA 10 versus raw prices explains why that gap exists, and our grading hub shows it card by card.

Cheaper ways to chase completion

A full master set is a project for very few people. Completing a single set is a project for almost anyone. Here are real master-set costs, every card and variant we list, at today’s raw prices.

Popular sets

The cheapest full sets

If you just want the satisfaction of a finished binder, these sets have at least 135 cards, are priced almost entirely from real sales, and cost the least to complete:

• Emerging Powers: 200 cards for about $246.
• Steam Siege: 219 cards for about $445.
• Darkness Ablaze: 363 cards for about $451.
• Pokémon GO: 153 cards for about $457.
• Champion’s Path: 135 cards for about $519.
• Shining Fates: 248 cards for about $538.

Other ways to scale it down

• Skip the variants. Reverse holos and stamped prints inflate the card count. A “one of each card” set is far smaller than a master set.
• Pick one Pokémon. Every card of your favourite Pokémon is a set with a natural end. Our Pokémon pages list them.
• Pick one era. Every Black & White-era card costs about $25,000; all of Scarlet & Violet costs about $32,000.
• Go sealed. Some collectors prefer one sealed product per set instead of the cards. Our sealed product calculator shows what boxes cost and what is inside them.

The time and effort side

Money is not the only cost. A few numbers from the same data:

• Liquidity is the real wall. For 91% of the cards we priced, there were too few sales in the last 90 days to use a shorter window, so their price comes from up to a year of sales. Many cards simply do not come up often.
• Scale. At 100 cards a week, 38,227 cards take more than seven years to buy. In standard 360-card binders, the collection fills over 100 of them.
• Condition hunting. Our prices are medians of real ungraded sales in whatever condition sold. Insisting on near-mint vintage copies will cost more than the totals here. Our condition guide shows what to look for.
• Storage. Half a million dollars of cardboard needs proper protection. See our guide on how to store Pokémon cards.
• Fees and shipping. Tens of thousands of small orders add shipping and marketplace fees we have not included.

How we calculated this

We kept the method simple and conservative, so you can check it:

• Scope. Every English card and variant in the PokéTT catalog (38,245 entries). We removed 3 prism stickers that are not trading cards, and reported 15 trophy and prize-type cards separately.
• Price. Each card’s raw mark: the median of its recent ungraded sales, using the most recent window (7, 30 or 90 days, else 12 months) with enough sales. Where a card has no usable sale, a reference price fills in (187 cards). Graded sales are never mixed in. Read more on our methodology page.
• Data we did not trust. Our own audit found 1,847 priced English entries whose price or population data was copied from a sibling card, for example a German print carrying the English price. We treated them as unpriced. Together with the outliers below, their listed prices add up to about $60,000, so if some of them are right the true total is a little higher.
• Outliers. If a card’s price was more than twice its own 12-month median, we used the 12-month median (10 cards). We dropped 9 one-sale prices that were more than 10 times their set peers, plus one card whose three sales were $675, $2,000 and $9,999 on the same day. We then checked the 30 most expensive cards by hand.
• Estimates. For the 4,489 unpriced cards we used cards of the same set and rarity: the median for the middle estimate and the 25th and 75th percentiles for the range.
• Thin data. 5,933 priced cards, worth $88,530 in total, rest on five or fewer sales in a year. Their prices are real but noisy.

Related reading

• How much would it cost to buy every Japanese Pokémon card?
• Japanese vs English Pokémon cards
• Pokémon card market cap, explained
• The most valuable Charizard cards
• PSA 10 vs raw: what grading does to price

Want to price your own target? The screener filters every card by set, era and price, and each set page shows its cards with live marks.