Versione italiana: leggila qui.
30th Celebration launches on Wednesday 16 September 2026, and it does something the Pokémon Trading Card Game has never done in thirty years: the same release day worldwide, Japan included. No Japanese edition three months ahead, no window where prices form somewhere else before reaching the rest of us.
The consequence is that today, 21 August, 30th Celebration cards have no price. Not a low one: none at all. The set exists as a page on CardTrader, but there are zero listings, and anyone publishing a value ranking right now is making it up. There is, however, one true thing to say, and it is not an opinion: the 25th anniversary set came out five years ago, it is called Celebrations, and it is built exactly like this one. We took its prices as they stand today, card by card, and a strikingly clear rule comes out of them.
In short. 30th Celebration launches on 16 September 2026, simultaneously worldwide. 128 numbered cards plus secrets, every one of them holographic, one guaranteed Pikachu per pack drawn from 30 different illustrations, and a brand new rarity, the Futuristic Rare, debuting on Mewtwo ex and Mew ex. No prices exist yet. In the 25th anniversary set, five years on, 89% of the value sits in the Classic Collection reprints and not in the new cards: 14 of the 15 most expensive cards are reprints. CardTrader data, lowest Near Mint listings, collected on 21 August 2026.
When 30th Celebration comes out and what is inside
Wednesday 16 September 2026, in English, Italian and Japanese on the same day. The set code is 30C.
The base set holds 128 numbered cards, plus the secrets beyond 128 that push the total past 160. Three things make it different from a normal expansion:
- Every card is holographic, basic energies included. There is no matte common.
- A guaranteed Pikachu in every pack, drawn from 30 different illustrations, each by a different artist. They occupy numbers 023/128 through 052/128 and carry a second numbering from 01/30 to 30/30.
- A new rarity debuts, the Futuristic Rare, with lit-up artwork and three-dimensional elements inside the illustration. The first two cards to carry it are Mewtwo ex and Mew ex.
Then there is a Classic Collection of 30 reprints spanning the whole history of the game, from Base Set onwards. Keep that line in mind, because it decides everything else in this article.
What are 30th Celebration cards worth today
Zero, literally: there is not a single listing. That is the side effect of a simultaneous worldwide release. Normally a set lands in Japan first, the Japanese market settles within two weeks and western prices get estimated from there. That shortcut does not exist here, for anyone.
So the only question that can be answered with real numbers is not "what is it worth", but "how does an anniversary set behave". And to answer that you need a real anniversary set with enough years behind it.
The 25th anniversary set, five years on
Celebrations came out in October 2021 with exactly the same architecture: 25 new cards plus a Classic Collection of 25 reprints, all holographic, enormous print run. These are today's prices, lowest Near Mint listing on CardTrader (Italian-language copies):
Charizard€295.64
Umbreon Star€183.60
Mew€80.53
M Rayquaza ex€79.64
Shining Magikarp€71.15
_____'s Pikachu€40.52
Venusaur€25.29
Mewtwo ex€21.90
Zekrom€21.40
Mew ex€21.33
Reshiram€19.84
Blastoise€19.46
Gardevoir ex δ Delta Species€17.10
Tapu Lele GX€8.99![Garchomp [C] Lv.X](/blog/gran-festa/thumbs/garchomp-c-lv-x-145-147.webp)
Garchomp [C] Lv.X€7.91Above 17 euros there are only thirteen cards in the entire set. The fourteenth drops to 8.99 € and the fifteenth to 7.91 €: below that the ranking stops answering the question, so that is where we stop.
Create a free DarkDex account and add 30th Celebration to your collection from release day: the value updates itself, card by card, without you chasing it.
The rule: value sits in the reprints, not in the new cards
Look at the rarity column. Fourteen of the first fifteen cards are Classic Collection reprints. The only new card that makes the ranking is Mew #025, and it lands third.
The aggregate numbers are harsher still. The 25th anniversary set has 50 singles, twenty-five new and twenty-five reprints, and every one of them has a listing. Together they are worth 979.73 €. Of that:
- 869.73 € sits in the 25 Classic Collection cards, which is 89% of the set's value
- 110.00 € sits in the 25 new cards, and of those 110 euros 80.53 € is Mew #025 alone: one card is worth 73% of the entire base set
- the median reprint is 8.99 €, the median new card is 0.17 €. Fifty-three times the difference
- nine new cards sit at exactly 0.11 €, which is the floor of the market: Reshiram, Palkia, Xerneas, Cosmog, Cosmoem, Yveltal, Dialga, Lugia and one of the two Professor's Research
Put bluntly: five years on, cards drawn specifically for the 25th anniversary are worth eleven cents, and reprints of old cards are worth hundreds of euros. That is not an accident, it is the structure of the product. You buy an anniversary set for the reprints, and a reprint inherits the price of the original instead of creating one of its own.
Applied to 30th Celebration: the 30-card Classic Collection is where to look, and which cards end up in it matters enormously. Only a few are confirmed so far, among them a holographic Charizard and a Pikachu & Zekrom GX. If the list reaches back into the Wizards era again, we are looking at the same dynamic as the Base Set Charizard that today sits at 295.64 €.
The 30 Pikachu: why almost all of them will be worth a few euros
A guaranteed Pikachu in every pack means that, by construction, the 30 Pikachu are the least rare cards in the set: one comes out per pack, so there are as many of them as there are packs printed for a worldwide anniversary.
The precedent confirms it without wiggle room. In the 25th anniversary set every special Pikachu sits under six euros today: Flying Pikachu VMAX 5.93 €, Pikachu 4.59 €, Surfing Pikachu V 4.10 €, Surfing Pikachu VMAX 3.52 €, Flying Pikachu V 2.10 €. The only Pikachu in that set that is genuinely worth something is _____'s Pikachu (WP24) at 40.52 €, and it is the exception that proves the rule: it is not a new Pikachu, it is the reprint of a twenty-year-old Wizards promo, and it is worth seven to nineteen times the others precisely because you could not pull it from a pack.
So the reasonable forecast for 30th Celebration is that the 30 Pikachu settle at a few euros each, with two possible exceptions: illustrations signed by a name collectors chase regardless of rarity, starting with the 01/30 Pikachu drawn by Ken Sugimori, the original Pokémon designer, and the ex versions. Who all thirty are, with numbers and illustrators, is in the dedicated article on the 30 Pikachu of 30th Celebration.
The chase cards of 30th Celebration
There are three real groups of candidates.
The two Futuristic Rares, Mewtwo ex and Mew ex. They are the first cards ever to carry a new rarity, and they sit beyond number 128. In the 25th anniversary set the one new card that held its value was exactly the base set secret, Mew #025, which today is worth sixteen times the other Mew in the same set, #011 at 5.09 €. Same creature, same set, wildly different prices: what makes the price is not the Pokémon, it is the position in the numbering.
The two Pikachu ex, day version and night version. They sit in the base set at numbers 053/128 and 054/128 and return as secrets at 149 and 150.
The secrets beyond 128, where so far we have seen Lapras (#131), Drifloon (#136), Lycanroc (#138), Alolan Meowth (#139), Meowth (#144) and Hisuian Zorua (#145), plus the Eeveelution ex cards that collectors always chase: Espeon ex, Umbreon ex, Sylveon ex and Greninja ex. They are all laid out, with images, in the article on the chase cards of 30th Celebration.
The 30th Celebration cards to watch
An operational summary, drawn from the numbers above and not from gut feeling:
- The Classic Collection reprints, especially those of cards that already cost a lot outside the set. That is 89% of the value in the precedent.
- The two Futuristic Rares, because a debuting rarity has no price history to hold it down.
- The secret versions of cards already in the base set, meaning the numbers beyond 128. In the 25th anniversary set that gap is worth sixteen times.
- To ignore: the guaranteed Pikachu, the holographic energies and the 27 starter Pokémon from 101 to 127. Those are the cards everyone will have, and in the 25th anniversary set their equivalent sits at eleven cents.
Is it worth buying 30th Celebration packs
The arithmetic of the 25th anniversary set is honest and worth stating: all 50 singles together add up to 979.73 €, but 22 of the 50 sit below one euro and the median for the whole set is 3.65 €. The value is not distributed, it is concentrated: the first card alone is nearly a third of the total.
Translated: from an anniversary set you almost always walk away with beautiful cards worth very little, and occasionally with one card worth as much as everything else. Which is exactly why it pays to know which three or four cards matter before you open, rather than finding out afterwards.
Heads up. Every price on this page belongs to the 25th anniversary set, collected on 21 August 2026 on CardTrader, lowest Near Mint listing, ungraded. They are a benchmark, not a guaranteed forecast: 30th Celebration launches with its own print run and its own market. On 16 September we rewrite this page with real 30th Celebration prices, as soon as the first listings exist.
How to track 30th Celebration prices
The fast way is not to do it by hand. On DarkDex you add cards to your collection and the value updates itself with market prices, card by card, in the right language and condition: when the first listings appear on 16 September, you will see them without searching for anything.
In the meantime, if you want to see how a freshly released set moves, the most useful case is Pitch Black: we tracked it from release day and a month later, out of ten cards, exactly one had gone up.
Create your free DarkDex account and be ready on 16 September.