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Oct 16, 2026·Soleback Team
The three RGB Mew cards sell for 3800 to 5600 euros. The rest of the set gets cheaper every week, while sealed product keeps climbing.
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The most expensive card in Pokémon 30th Celebration is Mew in its RGB version, and it comes in three variants: the red one sells for 5600 euros on Cardmarket, the green one for 4500 euros and the blue one for 3800 euros. Far behind them come Lugia from Aquapolis (180 euros) and the Base Set Charizard reprint (160 euros). All prices in this article come from Cardmarket, cover English cards and were correct on 16 October 2026.
The key point: singles from this set are getting cheaper week by week, while sealed product is getting more expensive. If you are after one specific card, buying the single will almost always cost you less. If you simply want to open packs, this is one of the most enjoyable sets in years, but sealed product now costs noticeably more than it did in September.
Cardmarket is Europe's largest card marketplace and, for many collectors, the benchmark for single-card prices. We quote it in euros because that is the currency its European price guide is built on. If you buy from a UK account, Cardmarket shows you the same listings in pounds at its own conversion rate, so the order of the ranking stays the same.
Cardmarket is not a Soleback partner, so the card links are ordinary links with no cashback.
The anniversary expansion marking 30 years of Pokémon launched worldwide on 16 September 2026. The English set has 199 cards: 128 in the main numbering, 30 Secret Rares (numbers 129 to 158), 30 Classic Collection cards, eight Energy cards and three unnumbered RGB Mew cards.
The packs are different from usual. They hold five cards instead of ten, but every card is foil. On top of that you get a foil Basic Energy, a Pokémon TCG Live code card and a guaranteed Pikachu from a pool of 30 versions. Single packs are not sold on their own: they only come inside products such as blisters, collections, tins and the Elite Trainer Box.
The Classic Collection is 30 reprints of favourite cards from the past 30 years. Each has a Pikachu stamp and a new foil pattern, and in English it keeps the number from its first printing. Hence the codes in the ranking: AQ is Aquapolis, BS is Base Set, PAL is Paldea Evolved. Classic Collection cards are not tournament legal.
Pokémon does not publish official pull rates. Everything we know comes from counting opened packs. The most quoted count covers 4063 English packs, gathered by the community on Discord and published by Wargamer:
Pikachu: in every pack
Double Rare (ex): roughly one pack in four
Illustration Rare: one in five
Classic Collection: one in ten
Special Illustration Rare: roughly one in twenty
Futuristic Rare (Mew ex and Mewtwo ex): roughly one in a hundred
RGB Mew: one copy in 4063 packs
For comparison, Kotaku says that in the sets of the past four years a Special Illustration Rare turned up roughly once every 80 packs. Here it is four times as often. That is why this set is such fun to open: a card worth showing off appears every few packs, not once a box.
The counts differ a little. The @switchstock tracker, across about 6500 packs, had a Futuristic Rare every 117 packs and an RGB Mew every 3200. The rumour of one RGB Mew per 20,000 packs has been doing the rounds since launch, but nobody has confirmed it. One thing is certain: RGB Mew is dozens of times rarer than anything else in the set.
Mew R/RGB (red): 5600 euros
Mew G/RGB (green): 4500 euros
Mew B/RGB (blue): 3800 euros
Three cards illustrated by YOSHIROTTEN, with no number in the set. Each arranges the same three colours differently, and the game text is identical to the regular Mew 065/128. The interesting part is how they surfaced: collectors pulled them from packs a few days before the official launch, and The Pokémon Company did not acknowledge them for the first few weeks. Some fans assumed they were fakes.
The red one is the most expensive, and not only on Cardmarket. On other markets it is also clearly ahead of the green and the blue, which sell for similar amounts. The gap between red and blue is now 1800 euros, almost half the price of the blue card.
Even so, these prices are a fraction of what happened at launch. The first widely reported RGB Mew sale on eBay was roughly five times today's price for the cheapest version. If the 4063-pack count holds, one specific colour turns up about once every 12,000 packs.
Lugia sells for 180 euros. This is the reprint of the Crystal Lugia from Aquapolis, a 2003 expansion, with its original number 149/147. For many collectors it is one of the most beautiful cards of the e-Card era, and the original in good condition is out of reach for most budgets. The reprint is the cheapest way to have this artwork in your binder.
Lugia is the most expensive card in the Classic Collection, ahead even of Charizard. That says a lot about who is buying this set: not just children and players, but adults who remember the cards from 20 years ago.
Charizard sells for 160 euros. It is the holo Charizard from the very first Base Set, number 4, the most famous Pokémon card ever, this time with a Pikachu stamp and new foil.
A specific Classic Collection card turns up about once every 300 packs. Charizard is not guaranteed even in the Ultra-Premium Collection, the only product with a dedicated Classic Collection pack. That pack holds three random cards from the 30, not necessarily Charizard.
Mew ex 152 sells for 79 euros. It is a Special Illustration Rare and, leaving the RGB versions aside, the most expensive ex card in the set. In other sets the Mew name is usually enough to hold a price. Here the competition comes from inside the set: Mew also has a Futuristic Rare (158) and three RGB versions.
Bill's Archive estimates that a specific Special Illustration Rare turns up about once every 200 packs. To have a 50 per cent chance of that one card, you need to open around 138 packs. That is more than 15 Elite Trainer Boxes.
Magikarp sells for 78 euros. It is the reprint of the Illustration Rare from Paldea Evolved, released in 2023, a card that was already one of the best loved artworks of the whole Scarlet and Violet era. The newest card in the Classic Collection costs almost as much as the priciest Mew ex. That is the power of good artwork: Magikarp is not played in any deck, yet it is ahead of Gengar and Pikachu.
Gengar ex 154 sells for 70 euros. The second most expensive Special Illustration Rare in the set. Gengar has been one of the favourite Pokémon among adult collectors for years, and the price shows it. Shortly after launch it was already one of the two most expensive ex cards alongside Mew ex 152, and that order has not changed.
Pikachu ex 150 sells for 62 euros. Pikachu is the face of the set and sits in every pack in one of its 30 versions. Oddly, that does not help it, because every buyer already has several Pikachu cards. The Pikachu ex Special Illustration Rare is also the best example of how quickly prices are falling here. According to Sports Illustrated, one of the Pikachu ex SIR versions has lost around 90 per cent of its value from its highest sale in the first days.
Mewtwo ex 151 sells for 48 euros and rounds off the top eight. Like Mew, Mewtwo has a second rare version in the set, the Futuristic Rare, and that is the card that drew all the attention in the first days. The Mew and Mewtwo Futuristic Rares sold for several times on launch day what they were worth a week later. The Mewtwo Special Illustration Rare is now the cheapest card in this top eight.
This set is falling in value in a predictable way. At launch there were few packs, and the first big hits sold for prices that look absurd today. Insider Gaming worked out that the Mew ex Futuristic Rare lost about half its value in its first week. Sports Illustrated writes that prices for almost every card are falling steadily.
The mechanism is simple. The hit rate is very high, so plenty of mid-ranking cards reach the market. Every week of opening adds more Mew ex, Gengar and Charizard cards. In November new products arrive with even more packs. In our view the singles in this ranking, apart from RGB Mew, will probably get cheaper still.
Sealed product is going the other way. Everyone wants to open it and stock is short. On launch day thousands of UK fans queued overnight, and Nintendo Life reported that demand far outstripped supply, with resellers making it worse. Smyths Toys limited the Elite Trainer Box, Binder Collection, Poster Collection, ex Boxes and ex Tins to one per customer in store.
Pokémon Center UK sold out its first allocation of Elite Trainer Boxes and, according to Dexerto, pushed some orders back to mid or late November, giving affected customers a 10 per cent goodwill code. According to Drawpie, one UK seller listed the Elite Trainer Box at roughly 2.4 times the recommended price.
These are the shops that had the first products, and they are the most likely places for the next ones:
Smyths Toys: Elite Trainer Box and 2-Pack Blister at the recommended price, Click and Collect. In-store limits of one per customer at launch
Pokémon Center UK: its own Elite Trainer Box version with extra packs, limited to two per customer, with delayed shipping
TGC Collectables (the collectables arm of The Game Collection): products sold through raffle-style drops, one of each product per customer, with a minimum account age and spend history. The Greninja ex Tin and the 2-Pack Blister are currently in drops. The 2-Pack is priced about 50 per cent above the recommended price and the Booster Bundle about 20 per cent above it
Specialist game and card shops: first waves sold out quickly
The UK distributor, Asmodee, lists the Elite Trainer Box and the rest of the range at recommended prices. It does not sell direct to the public, but those prices are a good benchmark for spotting markups.
None of the Soleback partners in the UK had 30th Celebration products in stock at the time of writing, so this article has no affiliate links. New Pokémon deals with cashback appear in Soleback promotions, and the Soleback extension tells you when a shop you visit offers cashback.
Battle Decks with Espeon ex and Umbreon ex arrive on 30 October. They are ready-to-play decks, not products to open for hits.
On 6 November 2026 three more products land:
Ultra-Premium Collection, Day and Night: 29 packs, a Classic Collection pack with three cards, a YOSHIROTTEN Pikachu ex promo plus Espeon ex (Day) or Umbreon ex (Night), playmat, sleeves, deck box and coin. It is the only product with guaranteed Classic Collection cards. Asmodee lists the Day version and Smyths has both on its site
Ditto Premium Collection: eight packs, a Ditto promo and an acrylic display
Figure Collection, Mew and Mewtwo: five packs, a Kaiyodo figure and a promo card
This is the most important sum before you buy. Using the estimates from pack counts:
A specific Special Illustration Rare (Mew ex 152, Gengar ex 154): about 1 in 200 packs, a 50 per cent chance after around 138 packs
A specific Classic Collection card (Lugia, Charizard, Magikarp): about 1 in 300 packs, a 50 per cent chance after around 208 packs
A specific RGB Mew colour: about 1 in 12,000 packs, a 50 per cent chance after around 8500 packs
An Elite Trainer Box holds nine packs. For a coin-toss chance at Mew ex 152 you need more than 15 of them. The same Mew ex costs 79 euros as a single. You do not need a calculator for this one.
You want one specific card. Buy the single. Prices fall every week, so if you are not in a hurry, wait for the November products and the next wave of opening. The exception is RGB Mew: supply barely grows and it is hard to say where the price will settle.
You want to open packs for fun. This set rewards it: an ex card in one pack in four, an Illustration Rare in one in five, a Classic Collection reprint in one in ten. A small product like the 2-Pack Blister at the recommended price is the lowest-risk way in. Accept that you are paying for fun, not investing.
You want Classic Collection cards. Wait for the Ultra-Premium Collection on 6 November. It is the only product that guarantees three cards from this pool, although Charizard and Lugia are not guaranteed.
You are buying sealed as a gift or for your collection. Compare offers, because the same product can cost more than twice as much from one seller as from another. A restock at the recommended price at Smyths or Pokémon Center UK is almost always better value than a reseller listing.
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