By Mack, founder of Enthusiast Avenue. Last updated October 1, 2026.
Pokemon pegs at Canadian big box stores are often empty. The common explanation is that not enough cards are being made, but the production figures say otherwise.
More Pokemon cards were printed in the last twelve months than in any previous year, and shelves are still empty. This guide explains why, and what that means for what to buy.
The shortage is not a printing problem
The Pokemon Company's own production figures, reported in May 2026, put roughly 10 billion cards printed worldwide between March 2025 and March 2026. That took the cumulative total past 85 billion cards, up from about 75 billion a year earlier. It was the third consecutive year of roughly 10 billion added annually.
For scale, the cumulative total sat near 34 billion in 2021. The game has printed more cards in the last five years than in its first twenty-five combined.
The company has also said since early 2025 that it is printing at maximum capacity. "Max capacity" is a company statement rather than an audited figure. What can be verified is the direction and size of the numbers, and neither points to underprinting.
What caused the shortage
Demand moved faster than any factory can. Pokemon TCG Pocket launched in October 2024 and pulled an enormous new audience toward physical cards within months. Surging Sparks arrived that November and Prismatic Evolutions in January 2025, and both sold out almost immediately.
Printing capacity cannot respond that quickly. A new press is a multi-year capital project, while demand jumped within months. Since early 2025, the supply chain has been running at full output and still falling short.
This matters when people describe the shortage as artificial. Manufactured scarcity would look like flat or falling production alongside rising prices. The numbers show production climbing hard, year after year, and still not meeting demand.
The sets are getting smaller
While print volume hit records, English sets have been shrinking in card count. Recent reporting puts the English game at its smallest set sizes in about a decade, and traces the cause upstream to Japan, which stopped releasing the subsets that English sets were built by combining.
One likely explanation, though not a confirmed strategy, is that fewer distinct cards per set means more copies of each card off the same presses. That would make sense given the capacity limit, and it also affects buyers. Within a given set your odds of hitting a specific chase card are shaped as much by how few cards share the slot as by how many boxes were made.
Scalpers are part of the story
Scalpers are the most common explanation online, and they are only part of it.
The behaviour is well documented. Retailers including Target, Walmart and GameStop have run per-customer purchase limits specifically to make bulk buying inefficient, alongside bot mitigation and, in places, ID checks. In Japan, The Pokemon Company went considerably further for the 30th Anniversary Celebration products, gating online purchases and lottery entries behind the My Number Card, which effectively restricts them to Japanese residents and shuts out overseas resellers.
But resellers are a symptom more than the cause. Scalping is profitable because supply is short. It amplifies and accelerates a shortage that record production already failed to close. Without resellers, shelves would still empty, just more slowly and to people who want the cards.
Retailers have done it too. GameStop drew heavy criticism this year for listing 30th Celebration product far above suggested retail, including an Ultra Premium Collection at around 600 US dollars against a 180 US dollar MSRP. When a national retailer prices like the secondary market, scalpers alone don't explain the prices. Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa has acknowledged the high-priced reselling publicly and said measures would follow.
What is being done, and when it takes effect
Two structural changes matter more than any restock policy, and both will take longer than coverage suggests.
- Printing capacity. Millennium Print Group, the largest Pokemon card printer in the United States, confirmed a new 866,000 square foot manufacturing facility in Morrisville, North Carolina, part of a campus of roughly 1.27 million square feet. Construction completes in 2027. Full-scale operations are expected in late 2028.
- Distribution. In February 2026 The Pokemon Company International announced an agreement to acquire Excell Brands, its largest United States distribution partner, which serves Target, Walmart, Meijer, Barnes and Noble and Amazon. The stated effect is more direct control over product allocation and retail pricing.
The new printing capacity will not be at full scale until late 2028, so the shortage is likely to continue well beyond 2026.
Why Canada gets it later
Canadian buyers sit downstream of all of this, and the distribution half in particular is a United States story. Excell is a US distributor serving US retail accounts. Canada runs on its own distribution, with smaller allocations, and nothing in that acquisition targets Canadian retail. This is my inference rather than a reported fact, but tighter US allocation control is unlikely to make Canadian supply arrive sooner.
Canadian coverage reflects this. CBC quoted a Toronto collector this year saying "I blinked and product is impossible to find", and separately covered Canadian card shops dealing with targeted thefts as box values climbed into the several hundred dollar range. Both point to a real shortage.
The practical Canadian consequences are consistent: later restocks than US retail, thinner allocations per store, and a wider spread between suggested retail and what product actually clears at. Anything advertised well under the going Canadian rate during a shortage is worth checking against the verification guide before you pay.
What this means if you are buying
Three things follow from the numbers.
Buy sealed English product to open it, not to hold it. The investment case for modern sealed English boxes rests on an assumption of scarcity. The production figures argue directly against that assumption. Record volumes, record cumulative supply, more capacity confirmed for 2028 and reprinting explicitly used as a supply measure. A set that is hard to buy today is not the same thing as a set that will be rare in five years.
"Out of print" is a much narrower claim than it sounds. For most modern English sets, hard to find means allocation, not extinction. Genuine out of print status is a judgement call about a set that has actually stopped being made, and it is worth confirming rather than assuming, because listings often imply it.
Waiting is a real option. Nothing in the current picture suggests modern English product gets meaningfully scarcer from here. If a box is priced higher than you want to pay, waiting is reasonable. The exception is limited anniversary product, which is a different kind of scarcity from ordinary allocation.
The 30th Celebration launch
The 30th Celebration set released on September 16, 2026, the first simultaneous global release in the game's history. A simultaneous launch removes the import window and regional price gaps that resellers usually exploit.
It is also a limited anniversary run, which is the case where waiting does not help. Launch stock still sold out quickly; the 2026 set calendar covers availability and resale prices since release.
Everything in stock here ships from Montreal, priced in Canadian dollars, across the English Pokemon range including Pitch Black and Chaos Rising. If you are weighing English against the other market, the format differences are covered in the Japanese vs English comparison.
Update history
- October 1, 2026: Updated the 30th Celebration section now that the set has released, with a link to launch availability in the 2026 set calendar.
- August 31, 2026: First published.