Pokemon 30th Celebration Is Out Today: The Top 10 Pulls, Launch-Day Prices, and What We Would Actually Chase

Pokemon TCG: 30th Celebration hit shelves this morning, September 16, 2026, in every region at the same time. That has never happened before. Every set since Base has reached Japan months before the English print, and the Japanese singles market has quietly told us what the English chase cards would be worth before a single American pack got opened. This time there is no import signal. The launch-day market is the first real price data anyone has, and it is moving by the hour.

So we froze it. Everything below is the TCGplayer market price as of the morning of September 16, pulled from the set trackers that mirror TCGplayer’s numbers, and we will refresh this post as the first week of pulls washes through. Treat every figure as a starting line, not a verdict. If you want the full Q4 context, our Q4 2026 outlook covers the calendar, the product waves, and why this set is taking the whole fall window.

What Is Actually in the Set

The base checklist runs 128 cards and the printed list runs to 158. Cards 129 through 146 are 18 Illustration Rares, 147 through 156 are 10 Special Illustration Rares, and 157 and 158 are the two Futuristic Rares, a new rarity tier that is exclusive to this set as far as anyone knows. Every card in every pack is foil, including the basic Energy, which comes in eight special anniversary foils. Then there is the Classic Collection: 30 reprints of cards from the game’s history with an anniversary stamp, numbered to their original sets, headlined by the Base Set Charizard and the Aquapolis Crystal Lugia.

The gimmick everyone will remember is the Pikachu slot. Cards 023 through 052 are thirty different Pikachu, each by a different illustrator, from Ken Sugimori on 01/30 to Kazuki Minami on 30/30, and one of them is in every booster. The claimed retail pull rates, which we are repeating with a warning because nobody has opened enough product to verify them, are roughly one standard ex per four packs, one Illustration Rare per six, one Classic Collection card per ten, one Special Illustration Rare per nineteen, and one Futuristic Rare per hundred. If those hold, a $49.99 Elite Trainer Box with nine packs gives you a coin flip at an SIR and about a one-in-eleven shot at a Futuristic Rare.

The Top 10 Pulls by Launch-Day Market Price

Ranked by TCGplayer market on the morning of September 16. Hover or tap the card on our homepage for the price modal; here we give you the number and our read on where it goes.

1. Mew ex, Futuristic Rare, 158/128: $1,808. The most expensive launch-day card of any set in the Scarlet and Violet or Mega Evolution eras, and it is not close. YOSHIROTTEN’s two Futuristic Rares are printed on a finish nobody has seen before, and Mew is the anniversary mascot in all but name. Pre-release listings touched $2,000 and above; the market settled toward $1,800 this morning as the first real copies hit. At a claimed 1-in-100 pack rate this is rarer than a Mega Hyper Rare, and the print run being enormous does not change the ratio. We expect it to slide, as every launch chase does, but the floor here is higher than anything from Pitch Black or Chaos Rising.

2. Pikachu ex (Night), Special Illustration Rare, 150/128: $886. The two Pikachu ex SIRs are the same card at two times of day, with cameos from the rest of the set’s Pokemon scattered through the art. Night is winning the early market by a wide margin, and we think that is the Umbreon effect: the Night version pairs with Umbreon ex in the Ultra-Premium Collection due October 30, and the hobby has never once picked the daytime Eeveelution.

3. Sylveon ex, Special Illustration Rare, 153/128: $861. This is the card the reviewers fell in love with in previews, and the market agrees. It is the best Sylveon art ever printed, it has the Eeveelution premium that has carried Prismatic Evolutions singles for eighteen months, and there is a Sylveon ex box in wave one that will pull retail attention toward it. We would not be shocked if it passes the Night Pikachu by the weekend.

4. Mewtwo ex, Futuristic Rare, 157/128: $830. Same finish, same illustrator, same 1-in-100 slot as the Mew, at less than half the price. That gap is the most interesting number on this list. Either Mew is overpriced on anniversary sentiment or Mewtwo is the value pick among the two hardest pulls in the set. Our read is a bit of both, and if we were buying one Futuristic Rare to hold, it would be this one.

5. Greninja ex, Special Illustration Rare, 148/128: $343. The first non-mascot SIR on the list and the card most likely to be pulled by the player crowd, since Greninja ex is a real deck card and gets its own wave-one box. Competitive relevance puts a floor under launch prices that pure collector cards do not have.

6. Jirachi ex, Special Illustration Rare, 155/128: $250. The sleeper of the preview season. Jirachi has no box, no deck, and no anniversary tie-in, and it still opened at $250 on art alone. That is the kind of card that holds better than the mascots once the launch premium fades, because the people buying it are buying the painting.

7. Galarian Meowth, Illustration Rare, 141/128: $145. The first of three Meowth-family Illustration Rares in the set (the regular Meowth at 144 opened at $75 and Alolan Meowth at 139 just missed this list at $99). Three Meowths in one secret-rare slate is a deliberate anniversary joke, and collectors are already chasing the trio.

8. Maushold, Illustration Rare, 146/128: $142. An Illustration Rare of a Paldean family Pokemon outpricing eight of the ten SIRs on launch day tells you everything about how art-driven this set is. This is the highest-numbered IR in the set and the one most reviewers singled out.

9. Hisuian Zorua, Illustration Rare, 145/128: $137. The other IR that broke $130 on launch morning. Hisuian Zorua has a small but reliable cult following, and this art leans into it.

10. Pikachu ex (Day), Special Illustration Rare, 149/128: $114. Same card as number two, daytime version, at one eighth the price. We have never seen a wider Day-to-Night gap on a paired card. If you believe the two should converge even slightly, the Day version is the cheapest way into a 30th Celebration SIR with mascot art, and the Espeon-paired Ultra-Premium box in October will put a spotlight back on it.

The Three Cards That Are Not Priced Yet

The Special Illustration Rare versions of Mew ex (152/128), Mewtwo ex (151/128), and Gengar ex (154/128) were only revealed on September 15, and as of this morning none of them has enough TCGplayer sales to post a market price. They are not on our list because there is no number to rank, not because they do not belong. Our expectation is that all three land inside the top 10 by the weekend, and that the Gengar ex SIR, with its Halloween palette arriving six weeks before Halloween, is the one most likely to push Jirachi and the Illustration Rares down a slot.

There is also the RGB Mew. Collectors opening early product reported three unlisted Mew cards, a red, a green, and a blue, all by YOSHIROTTEN, that appear on no official checklist. A $20,000 sale has been rumored and not verified. We are not putting a rumor on a ranked list. If a real sale surfaces with a real buyer, we will write it up on its own.

The 30 Pikachu, Priced Before Anyone Knows the Ratios

The Pikachu Rares at 023 through 052 opened between $44 and $73, with 040 leading at $73, 027 at $62, 025 at $49.50, and the Ken Sugimori 023 at $43.72. Those are launch-morning listings for a card that is in every single pack, so the only thing holding them up is that nobody has pulled thirty of them yet. Once the ETB restocks land in October, we expect most of the thirty to settle in the $10 to $25 range with three or four illustrator favorites holding a premium. We said in the Q4 outlook that we would not touch the Pikachu until pull data existed, and nothing this morning changed that. The ranking of all thirty comes as soon as we have real ratios.

Sealed, and the Part Nobody Wants to Hear

The Elite Trainer Box carries a $49.99 MSRP and was trading between $157 and $191 on the secondary market before release, per the numbers we logged in August. Booster Bundles do not exist until wave two on October 2, and the Ultra-Premium Collections with the Pikachu ex Day and Night pairings do not exist until October 30. If you are paying triple MSRP for a wave-one ETB today, you are paying for the privilege of opening it before the print run catches up. Pokemon has framed this as a celebration product with a massive run planned, and every Mega Evolution launch this year followed the same curve: launch-week spike, then a 30 to 50 percent slide over the next two months as restocks fed singles into the market. We tracked that pattern set by set in our pull-rate and expected-value breakdown, and there is no reason a bigger print run would break it.

Our calls, as of launch morning: buy sealed only at MSRP and only if you can walk into a store and pick it up. Hold anything you pull from the top four for at least a month before deciding, because launch-day prices on the two Futuristic Rares are set by a few hundred transactions and will not look like this in November. If you are buying singles, the Mewtwo ex Futuristic Rare at less than half the Mew and the Day Pikachu ex at one eighth of the Night are the two mispricings we would act on. And if you want the best sealed value in the hobby right now, it is still not this set; our fall sets guide has the three sets that are actually near MSRP.

We will update this ranking as the first week of pulls comes in, add the three SIRs the moment they post a market price, and publish the full thirty-Pikachu ranking when the ratios are real. The 30th anniversary was always going to be the loudest week of the year for this hobby. The interesting prices are the ones a month from now, and we will be here for those too.