Print Run Estimations by Set for 2010-2020

Has anyone attempted to analyze this here? If not, I’m going to take a stab at it and share the info once complete.

Its a crapshoot, but the vibes to me say that HGSS saw more printed than DP era. BW saw more printed than HGSS, possibly for every set but idk. Early XY was lower print than late XY. SM overall was higher print but late SM seems lower print by a considerable amount. Swsh was uber printed.

Set by set is harder, but sets like XY base, flashfire, phantom are lower than any of the break sets. Evolutions had an absurd amount printed, as did early sun and moon sets.

HGSS sets feel way more common than anything DPP era. COL feels rarer than anything around that time, but maybe not as rare as the rarest ex-dp sets.

My vibes based approach may be off, but I think its pretty accurate.

Hope that helps

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And for actual numbers, refer to the bottom of this article for something to go off of.

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85 billion?! :scream:

Who’s got that warehouse full of sealed product, and why would anyone continue to think paying secondary market prices is at all worth it.? :unamused_face:

Never collecting modern chase till it crashes at least. I have more fun ways to burn money.

everyone, and its not enough. Nobody does it like pokemon

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People see big numbers are for some reason automatically assume that the chase cards are in the millions each. They aren’t. Most of that number is bulk.

In fact, it’d be nice if they went the JP/Asia pack route. Halve the cards. Not like most of the C/U/R/RR cards aren’t just being thrown away - and let’s not even talk about energy cards/bricks and code cards.

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Thanks for this, those stats about printing since 2022 are somewhat mind boggling!

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I thought the same, but then I saw that over 90k 151 charizards have been graded… they’ll absolutely have to crash. It’s not a rare card.

I was very excited to collect sealed modern but it’s not looking like a good bet right now. Everything crashed after the 25th, maybe it will happen again after 30th and there will be more opportunities to acquire rarer items…

That’s a good point, but if we know the number printed, and we know the number of chase cards per box, and we know the number of chase cards in a set, then we should be able to roughly estimate the number of a given chase card… Again, you have a good point tho. Each chase card is not printed into the multiple 8 figures. But millions? Perhaps.
We can also compare them to vintage: There are far fewer vintage cards printed, and as such, far fewer chase cards printed of vintage… Yet some of these prices are on-par with vintage. The fundamentals just aren’t there, even if millions of chase cards are not printed.

Considering, as @NeubyChu said, the number of graded modern chase is sometimes order of magnitude higher than vintage, we should not expect that other modern chase has a significantly different population. IMO, based on the history of the last 30 years, when the hype runs low, the value does too.

Remember, these were printed to be on shelves, not intended to be hard to get… Enough intended scarcity to be just out of reach but still highly available.

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I’ve gone down the rabbit hole a bit before for SWSH and a bit of SV.

Obviously there are loads of assumptions, and also that these cards are printed in like 9 languages, but if we assumed 1b print run for English sets, the most sought after rarities never exceed 1m English copies per card. Most are actually under 500k and around 200k or less.

And when you rewind to something like SM era, which also has high secret rare cards with nowhere near the same print runs, it gets even less.

Obviously I’m not arguing that 100k isn’t a big number compared to what vintage/mid-era cards have been whittled down to through time, but also that you have to take into account demand.

There are millions of people who collect and sure, not everyone will want every secret rare card, but there needs to be some accessibility too. It is not feasible or strategic to print equivalent amount of secret rares per card in the most popular generation to Gen 4/5 eras.

I’d even go so far as to say that their printed population is not enough, the opposite of what some think - that there are too many of them - and that is why this market cannot cool off and the prices of sealed product continue to rise.

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Thanks. I’ll buy those numbers, but even with them, I disagree with you that the print runs are not enough, and think that there’s plenty of demand. Like we both suggested, we’re making assumptions. I’m considering that many people don’t collect merely english. Maybe I’m wrong tho, but if not, the options pool gets a lot bigger. SM is outside of the era that I’m considering in this however. I’m really just looking at SV to current.