By Mack, founder of Enthusiast Avenue. Last updated August 31, 2026.
Walk into any Canadian big box store on a Tuesday morning and the Pokemon peg is empty. The obvious explanation is that not enough cards are being made. That explanation is wrong, and it is wrong by a wider margin than almost anyone realises.
More English Pokemon cards were printed in the last twelve months than in any year in the game's history. The shelves are still empty. Understanding why those two facts sit together tells you more about what to buy, and what not to buy, than any restock alert will.
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. I want to be careful here, because "max capacity" is a company statement rather than an audited figure, and no one outside the supply chain can verify it. What can be verified is the direction and the size of the numbers, and both say the same thing. This is not an underprinting story.
What actually broke
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 effectively on contact.
Printing capacity does not respond on that timescale. A new press is a multi-year capital project. A demand spike is a weekend. Everything since early 2025 has been a supply chain running flat out against a curve that moved before it could.
This is the part that gets skipped when people describe the shortage as artificial. Manufactured scarcity would look like flat or falling production alongside rising prices. What the numbers actually show is production climbing hard, year after year, and still landing short.
The part nobody expects: the sets are getting smaller
Here is the genuinely counterintuitive piece. 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.
The plausible reading, and I will flag it as a reading rather than a confirmed strategy, is that fewer distinct cards per set means more copies of each card off the same presses. Fewer designs, deeper runs. It is a rational response to a capacity ceiling, and it has a real consequence for 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 real, and they are not the whole answer
"It is all scalpers" is the most repeated explanation in every comment section, and it is half right in a way that matters.
The behaviour is documented and it is not subtle. 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 treating resellers as the root cause gets the direction of causation backwards. Scalping is profitable because supply is short. It amplifies and accelerates a shortage that record production already failed to close. Remove every reseller tomorrow and the peg still empties, just more slowly and to people who wanted the cards.
It is also worth noticing who else is doing it. 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, "blame the scalpers" stops being a complete account. Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa has acknowledged the high-priced reselling publicly and said measures would follow.
What is actually being done, and when it lands
Two structural moves matter more than any restock policy, and both are slower than the 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.
Read the dates on the first one again. The printing relief that headlines describe as coming is not a 2026 event, and it is not really a 2027 event either. Full-scale operation in late 2028 means anyone buying today is buying inside the shortage, not at the end of it.
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 is aimed at a shop in Montreal or a peg in Moncton. I am reading the consequences rather than quoting them, so treat that as my inference, but I do not think tighter US allocation control makes Canadian supply arrive sooner.
The lived version shows up in Canadian coverage. 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. That is what a genuine shortage looks like at street level, and it is not a pricing narrative invented by shops.
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 deserves the authenticity checks in the verification guide before your card details go anywhere.
What this means if you are buying
Three things follow from the numbers, and one of them is bad for me.
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. I sell sealed boxes and I would still rather you knew that before you bought one as an asset.
"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 it is the single easiest thing for a listing to imply.
Waiting is a real option. Nothing in the current picture suggests modern English product gets meaningfully scarcer from here. If a specific box is priced at a level that annoys you, that is useful information. The one case where waiting genuinely costs you is a limited anniversary product, which is a different kind of scarcity from ordinary allocation.
What to watch this month
The 30th Celebration set releases on September 16, 2026, and it is the first simultaneous global release in the game's history. That is a deliberate anti-scalping design: no import window, no region arbitrage, everyone at once.
It is also the product most likely to test everything above. A global simultaneous launch removes the reseller's usual head start, while a genuinely limited anniversary run is exactly the case where waiting does not help. If you want it, treat that release differently from an ordinary set.
Everything we have on the shelf is in stock and ships from Montreal 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
- August 31, 2026: First published.