The most valuable card of each Pokémon, Japanese vs English

We only pair two cards when they are the same artwork: the Japanese and English set must share a long run of cards with the same name and illustrator, and the card itself must match one-to-one on both sides. Variants (1st Edition, Shadowless, reverse holos, promos) are never paired, and a pair whose prices sit more than ten times apart is held back, because that is far more often a mismatch or a bad sale than a real market gap.

Every price is the median of real recent sales from eBay, Yahoo! Auctions Japan, Mercari and TCGplayer, converted to US dollars. Ungraded copies and graded slabs are never mixed: the main comparison is ungraded vs ungraded, and the PSA 10 column only appears when both prints have at least five recent PSA 10 sales. A price needs at least three sales and a sale in the last 90 days to be shown here; the rankings ask for five.

Price-guide estimates are never used on these pages. If one side has too few sales, we say so instead of guessing.

Why do Japanese and English prints sell for different prices?

Print runs, pull rates and where collectors live all differ. Japanese sets usually come out months earlier, often with smaller packs and better print quality, while English sets reach a much bigger player base. The gap moves over time — new English releases often start dearer and settle, vintage Japanese cards are often scarcer — which is why we show it from recent sales rather than as a rule of thumb.