30th Celebration Chase Cards: The Top 10, One Week In
The most valuable card in Pokémon's brand new thirtieth anniversary set was first printed in 2003. The second most valuable was first printed in 1999. Happy birthday.
30th Celebration came out on September 16, 2026, the first Pokémon set to launch on the same day everywhere in the world. Nobody was calm about it. Pokémon Center preorders in July meant queues of several hours. Launch week meant people camping outside stores overnight. A week later, Elite Trainer Boxes that retail for $49.99 are still selling for more than three times that.
Singles have gone the other way. The hits come out of these packs far more often than people are used to from a modern set, and the mood a week in has split cleanly: the people opening packs for fun are delighted, and the people who bought in bulk to flip are not. Pikachu Rares that sold for fifty dollars before release go for a few dollars now.
It is also a strange shape for a set. There are 128 cards in the main set, another 30 secret rares numbered past it up to 158/128, a brand new rarity called Futuristic Rare, a large Pikachu anniversary stamp on nearly every card, and a 30 card Classic Collection of reprints that keep their original collector numbers. Those reprints are why an article about a 2026 set has a 4/102 in it, and why four of the ten cards below first appeared somewhere else.
Three cards are missing on purpose. The RGB Mews, numbered R, G and B out of RGB, were kept off the official checklist, turned up in packs anyway, and are the only cards in the set without the anniversary stamp. Our price data does not cover them yet, so they do not get a live price box like the ten below. For the record, sold copies have mostly landed around four thousand dollars each this week, and one blue copy reportedly went for $20,000 two days before release. Which makes the first line of this article a slight lie. Three of them, technically.
A quick note before the countdown. The prices in the boxes below are live and move with the market. Any figure quoted in the writing is accurate as of publication, September 23, 2026. Everything here is raw and near mint unless it says otherwise.
If you want the full picture rather than the top of the pile, the complete 30th Celebration card list has every card in the main set with current values, and the reprints have their own Classic Collection card list.
Here are the 30th Celebration chase cards, counting up to the one that was already a chase card twenty three years ago.
#10 Mewtwo ex 151/128 (Special Illustration Rare)
Illustrated by Yano Keiji
Mewtwo gets two chase cards in this set, and the familiar-looking one is winning.
Yano Keiji built this one like a poster. Mewtwo stands dead centre, arms held out from its sides, with a black halo ringed in fine rays behind its head, and everything around it mirrors left to right: lilac panels fanning out like wings, a spiral on either side of its tail, and a border of pink and violet linework that belongs on the doors of a very old, very expensive theatre. Black background, a scatter of stars, not one warm colour anywhere in the art. It is the calmest thing on this list by a distance.
It has slid from $122 on its first full day of sales to $85, a drop of about 30 percent. The Futuristic Rare Mewtwo ex sits just outside this list at $74.60, so the brand new rarity is losing to the familiar one. Hold that thought, because it happens again at number three.
#9 Pikachu ex 149/128 (Special Illustration Rare)
Illustrated by kantaro
The daytime one.
kantaro drew two Pikachu ex Special Illustration Rares for this set, one in daylight and one at night, and they are built to be read as a pair. This is the day card: a parade under a bright blue sky, streamers and confetti everywhere, and Pikachu sprinting through the middle of it with half the set trying to keep up. Fuecoco is laughing at its shoulder. Meowth is cheering from the right edge. A whole Maushold family is scrambling along the bottom left, a Gimmighoul is lugging its coin through the foreground, and Slowpoke has wandered into the bottom of the frame with its mouth hanging open, which is the most Slowpoke thing it could possibly be doing.
Look up and it keeps going. Moltres and Articuno are overhead, Salamence is doing a lap, and Mew is tucked into the top right corner with a Ditto floating just beneath it. Espeon and Sylveon lead the left flank, and a Volbeat is bobbing along near the top left. Remember those last three.
It is currently about twenty dollars cheaper than its partner. Buyers, it turns out, prefer the late shift.
#8 Gengar 94/102 (Classic Collection)
Illustrated by Takashi Yamaguchi
The first of two Gengars on this list, and the older one by sixteen years.
This is Gengar Prime from Triumphant, a 2010 HeartGold SoulSilver set, reprinted down to the original number and the original Prime frame, with jagged white shards around the art and a lavender text box below. Takashi Yamaguchi's art is a close-up. Gengar fills nearly the whole box, one clawed hand sweeping across the left side, tongue out, red eyes narrowed, grinning like it knows something about your deck that you do not. Behind it, pale lightning crackles through a purple-black void.
Anyone who ignored Gengar five years ago has had a long five years. The original Triumphant Prime was a twenty dollar card in early 2021. It is over five hundred raw now. The reprint, at $96, is not pretending to replace it. It is the version of the card most people can actually hold.
#7 Magikarp 203/193 (Classic Collection)
Illustrated by Shinji Kanda
Magikarp, the most famously useless Pokémon ever made, is worth more than a Gengar. It feels like it should be the other way round, which is the entire point of Magikarp.
This is Shinji Kanda's Magikarp from Paldea Evolved, the youngest card in the Classic Collection. It came out in 2023 as a fifty dollar Illustration Rare and slowly climbed until it was the most valuable single in its set, and it still looks like nothing else in the game. The whole card is drawn in fine scratched lines on black, like a scraperboard etching somebody went over with every coloured pencil they owned. Magikarp is flinging itself up a waterfall, water breaking white around it, while the jungle on either side glitters.
Now look at the top right corner, next to the HP. Up in the dark rocks, beside a pair of lightning bolts, a Gyarados is watching. It is drawn in the same dark linework as everything around it and only its red eyes really give it away, so plenty of people have owned this card without noticing. That is the point of it: the carp at the bottom of the waterfall, and what it becomes at the top.
The original Paldea Evolved printing is around $370 raw. The reprint keeps the number, adds the anniversary stamp and trades the original's silver border for gold, and at $101.58 it is by far the cheapest way into one of the best illustrations of the decade.
#6 Pikachu ex 150/128 (Special Illustration Rare)
Illustrated by kantaro
The night card, and the collectors' pick of the pair by a little over twenty dollars.
Same idea as number nine, after dark. The parade is over and the party has moved somewhere with a dance floor. Fireworks go off across a deep blue sky, gold confetti comes down over a pink and red floor, and Pikachu is mid-cheer in the centre with Eevee right beside it. Gengar grins over Pikachu's shoulder, Hisuian Zorua is front left, Chandelure hangs in the sky like an actual light fitting, and Snorlax is beaming on the right with its eyes shut.
The cast changes with the clock. Espeon and Sylveon had the day shift; Umbreon, obviously, works nights, peering out of the bottom right corner. The Volbeat from the day card has been swapped for an Illumise, and the Mew for a Mewtwo, lounging up among the fireworks next to Jirachi. And my favourite detail on either card: the day card has the original Meowth in it, while the night card has Alolan Meowth and Galarian Meowth instead, crammed together at the left edge. The regional forms, it turns out, are not morning people.
Both Pikachus have come down since launch week, but the night card has held on better, and so far that is the whole story of this pair.
#5 Mew ex 158/128 (Futuristic Rare)
Illustrated by YOSHIROTTEN
The flagship card of a brand new rarity, the one the whole summer was spent arguing about, is fifty one cents ahead of a Pikachu.
The price history in the box above starts at $1,808.25. Ignore that number. It was set by a handful of presale copies before the set was even on shelves, and on launch day, across more than a hundred real sales on TCGplayer, the card averaged about $198. It has been sliding from there to $112.03. The Futuristic Rare Mewtwo made the same trip, from presale prices in the seven hundreds to $74.60.
The art is the most divisive thing in the set. YOSHIROTTEN, a Tokyo graphic artist whose previous clients include Hermès and Nike, was handed an entire rarity to design and ignored nearly every habit Pokémon card art has picked up in thirty years. Mew is rendered as a glossy, iridescent figure in mint, pink and pearl, floating in front of a giant glassy Poké Ball, with polished orbs bobbing around it that each carry an Energy symbol. Even the anniversary stamp is striped blue, green and red.
When the Futuristic Rares were shown in full this summer, the Mewtwo got the compliments and the Mew got told it looked ill. The Mew now sells for about fifty percent more than the Mewtwo. Collectors, as ever, said one thing and bought another.
It also plays. Mew can borrow the attack of anything sitting on your Bench, so it can hit like one of the big Mega Pokémon ex while handing your opponent one fewer Prize card when it goes down. The set becomes tournament legal on September 25, and deck guides built around this card were out within a day of release.
#4 Gengar ex 154/128 (Special Illustration Rare)
Illustrated by CHORISO
The second Gengar, and the reason the first one is only number eight.
CHORISO drew Gengar the way a haunted house looks in a dream you had when you were eight. Gengar tilts in from the left, grinning that enormous white grin, red eyes cutting sideways. The night around it is overloaded on purpose: a hot pink sky, a swirling pale green moon, black trees with twisting branches, lanterns hanging off them with warm yellow light, and in the lower right a crooked mansion with its windows lit. The bottom of the card glows acid green. Nothing in it is a colour an actual night has ever been, and it is wonderful.
Same Pokémon, same set, one drawing from 2010 and one from this year, and the new one costs about thirty dollars more than the Gengar Prime at number eight. Nostalgia is doing plenty of work in 30th Celebration. Not here.
#3 Mew ex 152/128 (Special Illustration Rare)
Illustrated by Kuroimori
Mew is all over this set, and this is the Mew collectors want. At $162.20 it is fifty dollars clear of the Futuristic Rare, the familiar style beating the new rarity for the second time on this list.
Kuroimori painted Mew asleep, or near enough. It is curled up in mid-air, eyes half closed, tail looping lazily up and over, drifting in a shaft of golden light deep in an old forest. Every trunk and branch is warm amber and brown, and every surface is overgrown with vines and tiny white flowers, with pink and purple ones gathering at the bottom. In the nineties, Mew was something a friend's cousin swore they had caught. This card looks like the moment you found out they were telling the truth.
It is the card almost nobody has a bad word for. It peaked two days after release at $230.95 and has come off since, but it is still the most valuable card on this list that is new this year. Japanese collectors, for what it is worth, have gone the other way and put the two Pikachus above it.
#2 Charizard 4/102 (Classic Collection)
Illustrated by Mitsuhiro Arita
You knew.
This is Base Set Charizard, Mitsuhiro Arita's illustration, first printed in English in 1999 and reprinted here with its original number, a gold border and a thirtieth anniversary stamp on the lower right corner of the art. Nearly everything else is the way you remember it: the orange dragon rearing up with its wings spread and its mouth wide open, flames billowing up on the left, the red card face, Fire Spin for 100. Every generation of Pokémon collectors since has had this card explained to them by the one before.
It is also the only card to appear in both anniversary Classic Collections. The 2021 Celebrations set reprinted it for the twenty fifth, so this is the second party hat Charizard has been handed in five years, and the new one already costs more than the old one: the 2021 reprint is about $158, this one is $183.57. It is priced almost entirely on being Charizard, which has been a very safe thing to bet on for twenty seven years.
#1 Lugia 149/147 (Classic Collection)
Illustrated by Naoyo Kimura
The most valuable card on this list comes from Aquapolis.
Lugia 149/147 is a Crystal Pokémon, one of only nine ever printed in English and all of them secret rares, from the tail end of the Wizards of the Coast era. It had never been reprinted until now. This version keeps nearly everything: the old e-Card frame with rows of little dashes running down the side, the Crystal Type Poké-BODY that turns Lugia Fire, Water or Psychic for the turn when you attach that kind of Energy, and Naoyo Kimura's art of Lugia skimming a storm-dark sea with lightning splitting the clouds behind it. The original sells for well over a thousand dollars raw, and PSA 10 copies have gone for around eighty thousand.
A twenty three year old card sitting on top of a 2026 set tells you something about who is buying 30th Celebration. They were twelve when Aquapolis came out, and now they have jobs.
Lugia started its first full day near $264, dipped to about $230 over the weekend and has climbed about halfway back since. It is the only card in this top ten worth more today than it was on Sunday.
The rest of the set
Everything else we track is cheaper, but not all of it is cheap. The Futuristic Rare Mewtwo ex, Sylveon ex and AKIRA EGAWA's Jirachi ex are bunched just below this list in the seventies. A few Classic Collection cards are heading up rather than down: Pikachu & Zekrom-GX has gone from about thirty dollars to fifty since Friday, which puts it level with the 2019 original. The reprint of Erika's Jigglypuff, meanwhile, is worth more than five times an ordinary copy of the 2000 original, which is the sort of thing that only happens in an anniversary year.
The thirty Pikachu Rares top out around six dollars each, which is good news if you are trying to collect all thirty.
If you are building the set rather than hunting singles, the useful view is the whole thing at once: what you have, what is missing, and what the missing pieces cost. That is the 30th Celebration card list, with the reprints on the Classic Collection card list.
Anyway. The glass Mew people were rude about in June costs nearly forty dollars more than the Mewtwo they liked. I have stopped trying to predict this hobby.