{
  "url": "https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/illustrator-spotlight-mitsuhiro-arita",
  "slug": "illustrator-spotlight-mitsuhiro-arita",
  "title": "Illustrator Spotlight: Mitsuhiro Arita, the Man Who Painted the Hobby",
  "summary": "He painted Base Set Charizard, Pikachu, and the first Pokémon card art ever printed, and he's still working thirty years later. Four hundred cards, a $23,000 index, and a market that prices his name in two completely different ways. Our verdict: selectively bullish.",
  "section": "Illustrator Spotlight",
  "published": "2026-07-29",
  "readMinutes": 9,
  "publisher": "moonstone",
  "findings": [
    {
      "value": "$22,952",
      "measures": "Arita index (top 25 cards)",
      "basis": "sum of his 25 dearest raw prices · July 29, 2026"
    },
    {
      "value": "400",
      "measures": "tracked Arita cards",
      "basis": "July 29, 2026 · 877 after the attribution backfill"
    },
    {
      "value": "$17.41",
      "measures": "median Arita card",
      "basis": "July 29, 2026 · $3.06 on his artist page today"
    },
    {
      "value": "$12,863",
      "measures": "his ceiling: Base Zard PSA 10",
      "basis": "unlimited · 15 recent sales"
    }
  ],
  "tables": [
    {
      "title": "The Arita canon, nine of his dearest tracked printings (raw market, July 29, 2026)",
      "columns": [
        "Card",
        "Set",
        "Era",
        "Raw market"
      ],
      "rows": [
        {
          "Card": "Charizard (Shadowless, no catalog page)",
          "Set": "[Base Set](/set/base%20set)",
          "Era": "1999",
          "Raw market": "$10,000 · 1st Ed printing"
        },
        {
          "Card": "[Umbreon H29](/card/ecard2-H29)",
          "Set": "[Aquapolis](/set/aquapolis)",
          "Era": "2003",
          "Raw market": "$1,253"
        },
        {
          "Card": "[Charizard](/card/base1-4)",
          "Set": "Base Set (unlimited)",
          "Era": "1999",
          "Raw market": "$800"
        },
        {
          "Card": "[Charizard](/card/dp7-103)",
          "Set": "[Stormfront](/set/stormfront)",
          "Era": "2008",
          "Raw market": "$669"
        },
        {
          "Card": "Gyarados (Shadowless, no catalog page)",
          "Set": "Base Set",
          "Era": "1999",
          "Raw market": "$600"
        },
        {
          "Card": "[Golem (Crystal)](/card/ecard3-148)",
          "Set": "[Skyridge](/set/skyridge)",
          "Era": "2003",
          "Raw market": "$600"
        },
        {
          "Card": "[Dark Scizor](/card/neo4-9)",
          "Set": "[Neo Destiny](/set/neo%20destiny)",
          "Era": "2002",
          "Raw market": "$595"
        },
        {
          "Card": "[Raikou H26](/card/ecard3-H26)",
          "Set": "Skyridge",
          "Era": "2003",
          "Raw market": "$475"
        },
        {
          "Card": "[Houndoom](/card/neo3-8)",
          "Set": "[Neo Revelation](/set/neo%20revelation)",
          "Era": "2001",
          "Raw market": "$440"
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "charts": [],
  "sections": [
    "What an Arita original is worth when supply is capped",
    "Four hundred cards, median seventeen dollars"
  ],
  "method": [
    "Artist attribution comes from provider metadata verified per card (the 'artist' field on each product), aggregated across 400 tracked Arita printings as of July 29, 2026; the Arita index is the sum of his 25 most valuable cards' raw market prices at that date, momentum is the median 30-day trend of his linked cards with trend coverage. Raw market prices are TCGplayer asks, not sold comps. PSA figures are median recorded eBay sales with stated sample sizes from our graded data. Cross-referenced claims (fair-value screen, negative-EV list, launch-curve decay, print-clock floors) link to the respective moonstone Research studies where their methodologies are stated. NOTES ADDED 2026-09-22 on an independent recompute: the attribution gap flagged below has since closed, and the catalog now credits Arita with 946 rows over 770 distinct products (877 on his artist page), which is third by volume rather than first, and lands his body of work third of 420 credited illustrators by summed value. Each of those 770 products carries its own TCGplayer id, so no card is counted twice and no shared credit is double-attributed. The canon table is nine hand-picked printings rather than a mechanical top nine, and two of its rows (Shadowless Charizard, Shadowless Gyarados) are products with no catalog page and no internal price series, so they carry no link and are not reproducible from our data. Every price in this piece is a July 29, 2026 reading and several have moved materially since. One known attribution gap at the time of writing: provider artist strings were inconsistent for a minority of cards, so 'tracked' undercounted his true catalog. Verdicts are editorial opinion grounded in the cited data; nothing here is financial advice."
  ],
  "terms": "Figures are moonstone's own recorded measurements, dated as published. Quote them with the population stated beside them. The article at `url` is the human form of this file."
}