Vintage Japanese Pokemon Card Prices, Set by Set

Buy one near-mint copy of every card in the Japanese Expansion Pack, the set that became English Base Set, and you would pay **$2,190.76** on 2026-09-23. The English set asks **$2,217.56**. They are within 1.2% of each other. Walk forward four years through the same crosswalk and the two ends of the table are a long way apart: the Japanese originals of Skyridge ask 0.287 of the English set and of Aquapolis 0.311, against 0.988 for Base Set. The column between them is noisy rather than a straight slide, and we print all fourteen pairs rather than the two that make the point. This is the vintage Japanese catalog measured set by set against the English sets it became: 28 Japanese sets, 1,977 products, **$55,800.63**.

Our data holds a release date for 201 sets, and none of them is a Japanese release. Two of the 201 names, Battle Academy and Gym Challenge, are also the name of a Japanese catalog set, but the date recorded against each is the English one. We tested the other direction too, folding the provider's era prefixes and its spelled `and` against the catalog's `&`: not one of the 28 Japanese sets in this study, nor one of the 21 Japanese promo families beside it, matches an entry. Nothing here can be dated from our own records on the Japanese side. Rather than date these sets from memory, we anchored them to the English sets they became, which ARE dated. For every Japanese set name we computed the English set whose checklist it overlaps most, on folded card names, and a Japanese set enters this study when that best match is one of the eighteen English sets released between 1999-01-09 and 2003-05-12, at 60% or more of the Japanese set's own checklist and on at least ten distinct names. That is 27 sets. Nine more, which have no English counterpart at all, were added by hand and are named below as ours.

The crosswalk is worth reading for its own sake, because it corrected two things we would otherwise have got wrong. "Split Earth" and "Mysterious Mountains" map to Skyridge, not to Aquapolis. "Undone Seal" maps to Hidden Legends and "Rulers of the Heavens" to Dragon, both EX-era sets, so neither is in this study at all.

The last column exists because an English set was often assembled from two or three Japanese ones. Aquapolis pools The Town on No Map with Wind from the Sea; Skyridge pools Mysterious Mountains with Split Earth; Expedition Base Set pools Base Expansion Pack with the Pokemon-e Starter Deck. Use the pooled column for those. **Do not use the pooled Base Set row**: its second Japanese set is Expansion Pack (No Rarity), which is the same 59 cards in a first printing rather than 59 more cards, so 1.774 is a printing artifact and 0.988 is the honest same-checklist number.

Read down the one-to-one ratio column and the two highest values, 0.988 and 0.727, are both 1999 pairs, while the two lowest, 0.209 and 0.128, are both 2003 pairs. Between them it is noisy: Jungle reads 0.476 in 1999 and Gym Challenge 0.668 in 2000, so this is a wide gap between the ends rather than a set-by-set slide. On the pooled column the bottom reorders and Neo Destiny at 0.283 is the lowest of the fourteen. The same card, two oceans apart argued from two example cards that vintage converges across the language line; at set level that holds for Base Set and for nothing after 2000.

Twenty-eight sets carry a priced card. The nine added by hand are marked, and they are the reason this study is worth doing at all: they hold $21,620.13 between them, and the largest, Pokemon VS, is more valuable than any set on the mechanical half of the list.

The nine hand-added sets are Pokemon VS, Pokemon Web, the three Vending Machine series, the two Intro Packs and the two Intro Pack Neo decks. We claim no release date for any of them, because we hold none: the era assignment is ours and it is not a recorded field. What IS recorded is that the crosswalk assigns none of them to a Wizards-era English set, and for two different reasons. Pokemon VS and the four Intro Pack decks point at an English set inside the 1999 to 2003 window but below the 60% gate, Pokemon VS at 10.6%, which is what a set of owner-prefixed gym-leader cards looks like when you try to find it in an English checklist. The three Vending Machine series and Pokemon Web overlap hardest with an English set OUTSIDE the eighteen, Genetic Apex, a 286-row set carrying 144 of the 151 original species among its 225 distinct card names, so it shares names with almost anything built from them: 88.9% for both of the first two Vending series. Neither shape is a release date, and we claim none.

Seventeen of these sets appear in our catalog a second time, under their Japanese-language name, as rows from a different provider. The second copy carries **1,462 rows and not one price**, and not one of those rows has ever carried a price on any of the 25 days of the tape. Anyone who sums the Japanese half of the catalog by set name is adding a second, silent copy of seventeen vintage sets to the count of cards without adding a cent of value, which makes the Japanese catalog look both bigger and cheaper than it is.

These seventeen pairs were matched on the release code the catalog id carries, `ja-PMCG1-001` against the marketplace Expansion Pack and so on, not on card names, and the last column is why. The second copy spells almost every card in kana, so a matcher that folds card names finds **nine** of the seventeen and reports 749 rows, 51% of the real total: six of these pairs share no Latin card name at all and Pokemon VS shares nine. That is the residual this kind of count hides. Every one of the 1,462 rows is unpriced, and this study's totals are taken over the marketplace namespace alone. Japanese vs English Pokemon cards documented the two namespaces at catalog level; this is what they do to one era.

**445 of the 1,806 priced cards carry a PSA 10 sold median** on two or more recorded sales and 494 carry a PSA 9 median, which is a far healthier ten-side tape than the English Diamond & Pearl era manages at 71 of its own 1,949. The five highest PSA 10 medians in the study, taken across the whole graded population rather than across the cards that happen to be expensive raw, are Sabrina's Gengar from City Gym Decks at $8,150.00 over 45 sales, Snorlax from Vending Series 1 at $7,500.00 over 10, Sabrina's Gengar from Challenge from the Darkness at $7,316.48 over 26, Ooyama's Pikachu at $7,203.49 over 63, and Umbreon from Crossing the Ruins at $6,550.00 over 29. Two of the five ask under $250 raw, at $160.96 and $245.25.

Eleven cards were removed from the graded population before any graded figure was computed, because they record more than two sales per graded copy or record sales at a grade where the registry line records no copies at all. The bar is a declared one: a slab resells, so recorded sales above recorded copies is expected and only a large ratio points at a graded key pooling two products. The worst is Grimer from Rocket Gang, 25 PSA 10 sales against 3 tens and 54 PSA 9 sales against 4 nines, and Brock from City Gym Decks, 35 PSA 10 sales against a line recording no tens. Sabrina, whose 271 PSA 10 sales against 177 tens we would once have called impossible, STAYS in: 1.53 sales per copy is what a heavily traded slab does. That leaves 1,795 cards in every graded count below, against 1,806 in every ask figure; a stricter bar of 1 would have taken 26.

We hold no release date for any Japanese set, so no Japanese card here is dated. The era is defined by the English sets these checklists became, and nine sets were added by hand with no date claimed at all. Both legs are asks in US dollars on one Western marketplace, so the Japanese leg is an import price rather than what the card costs in Japan, and none of the gap is attributed to freight, scarcity or demand. 171 of the 1,977 marketplace products carry no ask and are excluded from the sums. Nine sets that matched the crosswalk on fewer than ten distinct names were excluded, removing 59 cards and $2,941.55, and they are named in the methodology. The card-name crosswalk matches a Japanese product to an English set by checklist overlap; it tells you which release a set became, not that any individual card is the same print. And a set-level ratio is a sum over the cards we price on each side, so where the two sides hold different numbers of cards, as they do in eleven of the fourteen rows, the ratio mixes price with checklist size.

Rebuild the crosswalk from folded card names on any complete day, take the summed ask on both sides of each pair, and read the ratio. If Base Set against Expansion Pack comes back below 0.8, the parity claim is wrong. If either 2003 pair comes back above 0.6, the claim that the ends are far apart is wrong. And if a reader restricts each pair to the cards that exist on BOTH sides, rather than the full checklists we use, and the ordering of the fourteen ratios changes materially, then our ratio is measuring checklist size more than price and should be replaced.

POPULATION, in two halves, both printed above. MECHANICAL: for every Japanese set name in the catalog we computed the English set whose checklist it overlaps most, on card names folded for case, accents, apostrophes, the gender signs, bracketed suffixes and a trailing product number; a Japanese set enters when that best match is one of the eighteen English sets released 1999-01-09 to 2003-05-12 (Base Set, Jungle, Fossil, Base Set 2, Team Rocket, Gym Heroes, Gym Challenge, Neo Genesis, Neo Discovery, Southern Islands, Neo Revelation, Neo Destiny, Legendary Collection, Expedition Base Set, Aquapolis, Skyridge, Wizards Black Star Promos and Best of game), at 60% or more of the Japanese set's own checklist and on at least ten distinct folded names. 27 sets qualify after wave exclusions. RECONCILIATION: 27 crosswalk sets plus 9 hand-list sets is 36 set names, but 8 of the 27 are Japanese-language duplicate rows of the kind described above, which hold no priced product at all, so the census table carries 28 sets. HAND LIST: nine Japanese sets with no English counterpart were added by hand and are named in the census table. No release date is claimed for them; our data holds none for any Japanese set, and the era assignment is ours rather than a recorded field. EXCLUDED, matched but on fewer than ten names, 9 sets, 59 cards, $2,941.55: How I Became a Pokemon Card, Neo Premium File 1, 2 and 3, Quick Starter Gift Set (Green Deck), World Hobby Fair, Pokemon Card Fan Club, sp2: VMAX Special Set and Champion Road. EXCLUDED BY WAVE BOUNDARY: McDonald's Pokémon-e Minimum Pack, 24 cards and $2,166.42, which belongs to McDonald's Pokemon cards value; P Promotional cards and Japanese CD Promo, 51 cards and $4,458.14, which belong to Japanese promo card prices. Japanese CD Promo also matched on fewer than ten names; it is counted once, under the wave boundary, and is not in the 59 above. The census is taken over the MARKETPLACE namespace, the 1,977 products whose catalog id begins `jat-`. The Japanese-language second copies are reported separately rather than summed: 1,462 rows across seventeen sets, none of which has ever carried a price on any day of the tape. Those seventeen pairs were matched on the release code inside the catalog id (`ja-neo1-001` against the marketplace Gold, Silver, to a New World..., and so on), NOT on card names: a folded-name matcher of the kind used for the crosswalk finds nine of the seventeen, because six pairs share no Latin card name at all. Only 8 of the seventeen enter the crosswalk above, which is why 36 set names reconcile to a 28-row census. EXCLUDED BY THE 60% GATE, and worth naming because they are era-adjacent rather than promo or modern: Theater Limited VS Pack (18 rows, $964.63), Movie Commemoration VS Pack: Sky-Splitting Deoxys (20 rows, $769.82), Master Kit (Side Deck) (10 rows, $315.00) and Melee! Pokemon Scramble (18 rows, $121.28); 66 rows and $2,170.73 in total, none above 40% overlap with its best English match. Prices are asks from the daily card tape `price_history` on epoch day 20719, 2026-09-23, a complete day carrying 52,378 priced products; the partial days 20704 to 20713 are not used. Population is PRODUCTS, not catalog rows: one row per TCGplayer product id where present, else the catalog id, ties broken to the lexicographically smallest catalog id. Graded figures are SOLD medians from `graded_snapshots`, latest day per card and grade, read across both the catalog-id and the product-id keyspaces and taking the fresher row, then dropping any surviving median dated before day 20695, the first day of the current daily graded tape, and quoted only where the sample is 2 or more. PSA figures are REGISTRY LINES from `population_snapshots`, latest day per key; many products share one line, so no per-set sum of them is printed. Medians are upper-middle on even samples. The set-value series `sethist2:` is not used anywhere in this study, so a /set/ page's own "Full Set" figure will not match these sums: that is two instruments, not an error. English release dates come from `api_cache` key `report:spread:setsmeta`, under the provider's own spelling where it differs from the catalog's (Expedition for Expedition Base Set). BOTH LEGS OF THE TWIN TABLE count every catalog row in the set and sum the ask over the rows carrying one on day 20719, so a ratio is a sum of what we price on each side, not of what the set holds. On the English side six rows of the fourteen sets have no ask: base1-8 Machamp, ecard2-H28 Tyranitar, and ecard3-H09, H10, H20 and H30 in Skyridge, so Base Set is summed over 101 rows of 102, Aquapolis over 185 of 186 and Skyridge over 178 of 182. On the Japanese side the gap is far larger and is printed per set in the census table: Mysterious Mountains prices 66 of 91 rows and Pokemon Web 26 of 47. SHARED-KEY TEST: A recorded sold count above the registry's own count at a grade is NOT an impossibility: `graded_snapshots` counts SALES and `population_snapshots` counts graded COPIES, and a slab that resells is counted twice on one side and once on the other. What the ratio measures is recorded sales per graded copy, and only a large ratio is evidence that the graded key is pooling another product onto this card. The bar applied here is a DECLARED one, 2 recorded sales per graded copy, not a physical limit. A card is also dropped when two or more sales are recorded at a grade and the registry line records no copies at that grade, because the denominator is then unusable and our feed does not distinguish an absent grade breakdown from a real zero. WHAT THE TEST COULD BE RUN ON: 622 of the 1,806 priced cards carry a PSA 10 or PSA 9 sold median at the two-sale bar, and 386 of those also carry a registry row, so the test is evaluable on 386 and not evaluable on 236, which hold a sold median and no registry line at all; the 11 removed and the 26 a bar of 1 would remove are both counted out of 386, never out of 622. Eleven cards fail it here and are removed before any graded figure is computed: over the bar, jat-575224 at 11.00 sales per copy, jat-575234 at 2.25, jat-576025 at 5.50, jat-576120 at 2.50, jat-614510 at 5.50, jat-575724 at 8.33, jat-575747 at 2.75 and jat-576235 at 2.25; and with no recorded copies at the graded grade, jat-614743, jat-575609 and jat-575754. That leaves a graded population of 1,795 against 1,806 priced cards. A stricter bar of 1 would have removed 26, and the 15 it would add all sit between 1.14 and 2.00 sales per copy, including jat-614830 Sabrina at 1.53. No Japanese set has a working page on this site, so Japanese set names here are plain prose while their CARDS are linked normally. There is no set-value series for any Japanese set and the set screen's catalog list filters to English, so both surfaces 404. We probed rather than assumed: on 2026-09-23 we fetched /set/ and /research/set-screen/ for SM-P: Sun & Moon Promos, CoroCoro Promotional Cards, SV2a: Pokemon Card 151, Expansion Pack, Pokemon VS, Split Earth and 金、銀、新世界へ..., and read the title back on each; all 404. One spelling is worse than a 404: `/set/ポケモンカード151` and `/research/set-screen/ポケモンカード151` both return 200 and render the ENGLISH 151 set, because the slug normaliser strips non-ASCII characters and leaves the string "151". Neither is linked from this study. The English sets in the twin table all resolve at /set/ except Expedition Base Set, which 404s there and is linked to its set screen; its own study is Expedition Base Set card prices. The English era that follows this window is covered by EX era Pokemon cards value, Unseen Forces card prices and Team Rocket Returns card prices; the four Neo sets in the twin table are ranked against each other in which Neo set holds its value. Related: the same card, two oceans apart, the flatter ladder, the Japanese price flip, Japanese vs English Pokemon cards, Japanese slabs, and the companion studies Japanese promo card prices and Japanese 151 vs English 151.