Banned Pokémon Cards: Does a Ban Change the Price?

A tournament ban is about as clean a demand shock as a trading card can suffer. The card does not change, the print run does not change, and on an announced date it stops being legal to play. We took the official Play! Pokémon banned card list, **27 cards, every one of them in the Expanded format and none in Standard**, resolved it to 49 distinct marketplace products in our catalog, and priced all 49 on September 23, 2026. The median banned printing asks **$2.29** against $0.89 across the 21,416 priced English products we track, and it sits at the **62.4th percentile of its own set**. A ban does not put a card at the bottom of the box it came out of.

A cross-section cannot see an event, though. Only two of the 27 bans have an effective date inside any price tape we hold, and the second is the informative one. Across the nine weeks spanning the Medicham V ban of April 10, 2026, the cheap playable printing fell 5.56% and the alternate art of the same card rose 12.90%, measured over the identical window against a cohort of 3,151 English products whose median rose 11.00%.

The source is the official list at pokemon.com, fetched on September 23, 2026. It has three sections and no dates on it. Standard reads "No cards are currently banned in the Standard format." Unlimited reads the same. Expanded names 27 cards, and the collector numbers printed beside them add up to 49 separate printings: eleven of the 27 have one printing each, eleven have two, four have three, and Flapple has four. The effective dates below come from the dated Play! Pokémon announcement that imposed each ban, one page per ban.

Three of those set names are not expansions, and the middle column is where our catalog files each printing rather than what the official page prints. Pokemon.com lists the 98a and 98b Delinquents under BREAKpoint, the 75a Hex Maniac under Ancient Origins, the 206a Reset Stamp under Unified Minds and the 77a Shaymin-EX under Roaring Skies, all of them alongside the base printing; our catalog files those four in a promo namespace instead, and that is the difference. Alternate Art Promos is a catalog namespace holding 54 unrelated promo printings; it does have a page on this site, at /set/alternate art promos, but a percentile inside a namespace whose members share nothing except the word promo means nothing, so it is not linked here as though it were a set. The two Black Star Promos series are running promo lines rather than sets, and neither has a page on this site at all. Removing all five rows that live in the Alternate Art Promos namespace changes neither headline: the median ask stays $2.29, the median set percentile stays 62.4 and the median catalog percentile stays 61.8 on the remaining 44.

Every one of the 49 products carries an ask on September 23, 2026. They run from four cents to $271.85. The shape matters more than either end: **30 of the 49 ask more than the median card in their own set**, and 23 of the 49 ask more than the median card of the same rarity in the same set. The middle of the banned population is an above-average card in its box.

The two right-hand columns are separate distributions over the same 49 products, not one card per row. Read down each column on its own: the card sitting at the 10th percentile of ask is Puzzle of Time at 22 cents, which is the 36.6th percentile of BREAKpoint, while 17.9 is the 10th percentile of the set-percentile column and belongs to Oranguru. Only the median row names one card either way, and it is the Medicham V full art at $2.29 and 62.4.

The reason is not subtle once you see the table below. A banned card is usually a card somebody wanted to play, which usually means the set printed a full art and a secret rare of it, and those printings are collectibles first. The fourteen dearest banned printings are seven Ultra Rares, four alternate-art promos, two Secret Rares and one Rare. Not one of them is a Common or an Uncommon.

And the cheap end, which is where the cards people actually sleeved ended up.

**Seven of the 49 carry a recorded PSA 10 sold median and 13 carry a PSA 9.** The rest have no verified graded sale on our tape, which is a statement about how rarely these cards are graded and sold, not a price of zero. The deepest comp pool on the list belongs to Jessie & James, whose Hidden Fates full art has a $176.25 PSA 10 median standing on 561 verified sales. The two largest medians stand on almost nothing: Archeops at $4,348.48 on five verified sales and Hex Maniac at $2,450.50 on three. Neither should be leaned on. The thinnest pools of the seven are three sales apiece, behind that Hex Maniac and the Lysandre's Trump Card Ultra Rare at $787.55.

Eleven distinct effective dates sit behind the 27 cards. Nine of them fall before January 27, 2025, where our weekly per-card tape begins, which means **25 of the 27 cards were banned before we were recording anything** and nothing in this study is a before-and-after for them. Two fall inside: Flapple, announced September 11, 2025 and effective October 10, 2025, and Medicham V, announced March 12, 2026 and effective April 10, 2026.

Both are measured the same way. The window runs from the last weekly reading before the announcement to the reading nine weeks later, a month past the effective date, and every card in the comparison cohort is measured over exactly the same two dates. The cohort is every English marketplace product whose weekly series carries a reading on both ends of that window, which is a selected population and is said so here rather than in the limitations: it is the subset of series that survived a tape rebuild, 2,869 products for the 2025 window and 3,151 for the 2026 one.

Flapple did nothing. The SWSH022 promo, which at $8.41 is the dearest of its four banned printings, is the only one whose weekly series spans the window at all; the Rebel Clash, Shining Fates Shiny Vault and Astral Radiance printings all lost their 2025 history in a tape rebuild and start on August 30, 2026. The one printing we can follow went from $5.52 to $5.66, the 45.5th percentile of 2,869 products. If a ban is supposed to be visible, it was not visible there.

Medicham V is different, and all three of its printings carry the full series. The two cheap ones fell while the market around them rose: the Holo Rare V at percentile 7.5 of 3,151 products and the Medicham V full art at percentile 10.3. The Medicham V alternate art rose 12.90%, which is percentile 54.9 and a shade ahead of the 12.78% median of its own Evolving Skies cohort of 133 products over the same two dates. One card, one ban, one date, and the printing a player would sleeve and the printing a collector would slab went opposite ways.

We are not going to tell you the ban caused that. Nine weeks is nine weeks, three printings are three printings, and the alternate art of a 2021 chase card has its own reasons to move. What the table says is narrower and checkable: over the window containing the ban, the two cheaper printings sat at the 7.5th and 10.3rd percentiles of a 3,151-product cohort, and the printing that is worth owning for the picture tracked its set. That is the same split our earlier study Played in 91% of Decks, Worth 24 Cents measured from the other direction, where playability correlated +0.248 with a card's cheapest printing and +0.011 with its dearest.

Three cards have been banned from Expanded and later unbanned: Shiftry from Next Destinies, unbanned on August 18, 2017 in the same announcement that banned Forest of Giant Plants, and Wally and Lusamine, both unbanned on March 5, 2021 so that the Western list would match Japan's. A fourth, Bellelba & Brycen-Man, was banned in the Standard format on August 28, 2020 and left that list by rotation rather than by being unbanned, which is a different thing: the September 10, 2021 rotation swept the whole Sun & Moon Series out of Standard, and no announcement ever names the card again.

If a ban depressed a price, an unban should lift it, and these four sit in the middle of their sets, which is where most of the banned cards sit too. Shiftry asks $0.71 at percentile 56.3 of Next Destinies, Wally $0.28 at percentile 32.7 of Roaring Skies, Lusamine $0.41 at percentile 54.0 of Crimson Invasion and Bellelba & Brycen-Man $0.40 at percentile 47.2 of Cosmic Eclipse. The same asymmetry shows up here too: the Wally Ultra Rare asks $17.95 at percentile 82.7 with a $552.50 PSA 10 sold median on four sales, and the Lusamine Ultra Rare asks $45.49 at percentile 98.4. Four cards is not a test of anything. It is a sanity check, and it does not contradict the cross-section.

It cannot show that a ban causes anything. Two events is not a sample. The cross-section compares banned cards to unbanned neighbours at one moment, which confounds the ban with every other reason a card is expensive, starting with the fact that a card gets banned for being good and gets printed as a full art for the same reason.

It cannot see 25 of the 27 bans happen. Nine of the eleven effective dates precede January 27, 2025, the first day of our weekly per-card tape, and our daily tape only begins on August 30, 2026. For those cards we can say what they cost now and nothing at all about what the ban did.

The two windows we can measure are measured on a selected population. Only 12 of the 49 banned products carry a weekly series reaching back to January 27, 2025, and the comparison cohorts of 2,869 and 3,151 are the English products whose series survived the same rebuild. Survivors are not a random sample of the market, so the cohort medians of +3.91% and +11.00% are the medians of that panel and not a market return.

Raw prices here are asks, not sales. The graded column is sold medians with the verified sale count beside it, and on 42 of the 49 there is no PSA 10 number to print at all. Our study of how far the two diverge is What a Pokemon Card Asks Against What It Sells For.

And the list is the international one. Japan runs its own Extra Regulation list, usually bans first, and the Western list has repeatedly been changed to match it; nothing here is computed on Japanese products.

Three observations would. A third dated ban landing inside our tape on a card with several printings, where the playable printing and the collector printing move together, would kill the split the Medicham V window shows. A rebuilt weekly tape that restores the 2025 history of the other three Flapple printings, showing them falling across October 2025 while the promo did not, would mean the Flapple null is a coverage artefact rather than a result. And if the median banned printing dropped below the median card of its own set on a later cross-section, the headline reverses: the claim here is that being banned does not push a card below its neighbours, and one day of data is one day of data.

The banned list was transcribed from https://www.pokemon.com/us/play-pokemon/about/pokemon-tcg-banned-card-list on 2026-09-23, and re-transcribed line for line from the Wayback capture of 2026-09-13 because the live page sits behind a bot wall; the two agree exactly. It reads 27 cards in Expanded, none in Standard, none in Unlimited. The 49 printings are the collector numbers that page prints beside the 27 names, summed; no third-party ban list was used for the count. Effective and announcement dates come from the individual Play! Pokémon announcement pages, one page per ban. Pokemon.com serves all of them behind a bot wall today, so every one of the eleven dates was read from a Wayback capture of the announcement that imposed the ban, and each capture prints its own effective date on the page. The two inside our tape are https://www.pokemon.com/us/play-pokemon/about/mega-evolution/mega-evolution-banned-list-and-rule-changes-announcement for Flapple (announced 2025-09-11, effective 2025-10-10) and https://www.pokemon.com/us/play-pokemon/about/mega-evolution/mega-evolution-perfect-order-banned-list-and-rule-changes-announcement for Medicham V (announced 2026-03-12, effective 2026-04-10). None of the eleven is unsourced; what we cannot do is fetch any of them live. Each official entry was resolved to our catalog by folded card name and folded collector number inside the named set, so that an apostrophe or an accent could not drop Lt. Surge's Strategy, Lysandre's Trump Card, Maxie's Hidden Ball Trick or Flabébé, and so that 022 and 22 resolve to one card while 75 and 75a stay two. All 27 lookups resolved. They produce 54 catalog rows, of which four carry no marketplace product id at all (xy9-98a, xy9-98b, xy7-75a, xy6-77a) and are the same physical printings as rows in the Alternate Art Promos namespace that do carry one, and one is a second catalog row for a product already counted (the Astral Radiance Flapple, claimed by both swsh10-TG02 and swsh10.5tg-TG02), leaving 49 distinct marketplace products. Prices are TCGplayer market asks from the daily dump on day 20719, 2026-09-23. That day is used because our daily tape holds 25 days of which nine, 2026-09-08 to 2026-09-17, are partial dumps carrying 35,700 to 50,400 rows against 51,822 to 52,378 on the rest; 20719 is both the latest and the largest at 52,378 rows. The comparison universe is every English row in that dump deduplicated on product id, 21,416 products, because 1,212 product ids are claimed by two catalog rows each. Set percentile is the share of that set's deduplicated priced products asking strictly less than the card. Graded figures are the latest reading per card and grade in graded_snapshots, eBay sold medians with the verified sale count beside them, keyed by both card id and product id; an absent row is reported as not recorded and never as zero. No PSA population absolute is printed anywhere in this study. The one row where a registry figure would have been tempting, the Shaymin-EX alternate-art promo, carries a line recording 2,007 graded copies, zero of them gems and no PSA 9 count at all, against eleven verified PSA 9 sales on our own tape; an absent registry field is not a zero, and a line that cannot account for the sales we can see is not a population for this product. The ban-window change is taken from the weekly per-card series in api_cache under the ppthist: key, from the reading dated 2025-09-08 to the one dated 2025-11-10 for Flapple and from 2026-03-09 to 2026-05-11 for Medicham V, with both dates required to exist in a series before it enters the cohort, so every move in the comparison spans the identical two days. Medians are the upper-middle value on even samples.