The Rotom Dex - my journey to collect every Rotom

Fellas! I am a simple man from Australia with a major project to share - I’m collecting every Rotom I can get my hands on. Plushes, pins, sleeves, but most importantly I’m on the hunt for every printing of Rotom in every language.

As we prepare to open the dusty doors to the Old Chateau, let me tell you a bit about why I have decided to begin a long adventure like this in the world of Pokemon!

I have loved Pokemon since I was young, about 6 or 7 years old. I started with Pokemon Platinum and SoulSilver and have many memories playing those games as a kid, from my first encounter with Giratina to finally managing to beat Cynthia and Red after losing multiple times and even all the times I got caught playing my DS all night (That damn Mario DS always ratted me out, I bet Nintendo made it talk just to get me in trouble), but the best one was finding and learning about a special Pokemon my dad caught for me.

My father worked a lot when I was young and would always leave really early in the mornings but my family always went to take him to work together, I can still remember the 3am drives with my parents listening to David Bowie and Electric Light Orchestra while half asleep in the back seat of the car. Looking back I appreciate that he was always able to say goodbye before he went off to work and I drifted back to sleep.

There was one day where my father borrowed my DS for the day and when he came back he showed me Rotom. I had never seen it or heard about it until then and I loved it from the start, making its way into my team (until Cynthia, I had another line-up for the Elite 4/Champion battles from what I remember).

I replayed Platinum recently on an emulator and the whole Chateau is such a cool area, with the spirits around and the ominous painting that’s always staring, leading up to the Rotom in the TV. I was one of those people who thought Rotom was legendary because of this encounter back in the day and can understand why that was a somewhat common thing. The legendary theme playing through the battle, the rarity of Rotom in the Pokemon universe (at the time) and the requirement of an event item to find the other forms all add to this.

But with all that said behold! The start of my collection!

It may not be much right now but it will grow and I’m making this topic to show how it grows over time, both for my satisfaction and the enjoyment of the other Rotom fans out there! I have made an imgur gallery of the binder that you can see here but I’ll also showcase some of the highlights from February to April now:


This is just a great piece of art, I love that you can find the appliances all around ready to be possessed. I still need to find it in English, fingers crossed I see one at my next card show!

Rising Rivals was the first set to feature the different forms, I’m looking forward to having them all in the binder! They’re also the first and only cards for each form that have the electric type in the TCG, it’s nice having them at the start of each section before it switches up.

This is the Staff stamped promo from Ultra Prism’s prerelease, a card I picked up before I decided to start working on the full Rotom collection, getting these in other languages will be difficult for sure

This is my serialised Eif Origins rotom, number 1/58. These were made for a Hatsune Miku crossover with Pokemon, I don’t particularly care about Hatsune Miku but it’s a cool piece of the collection for sure!

This was a gift from a vendor I met at my first card show! He’s a great guy, I put in an order with his store after the show and got this as a really nice bonus. I always appreciate hand made and unique stuff, it’ll always have a place in the binder.

This is a shirt I got from Star Salts! My unofficial card show uniform now, the way all the Rotoms are taking over various Windows 95 apps is just really cool and creative!

Adding new things to this collection feels great, I’ll be doing monthly updates! Should hopefully have some cool stuff coming in for May that I’m excited to show off. Thanks!

LINKS TO UPDATES
[May 2026 update]

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hey i collect rotom too !! ive loved the little bugger since i played SM as a grub. i wish you luck with your collection !

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Thanks! I saw your bug collection as well, having your own custom cards to add to it is really cool! Your Grubbin makes me wish I had the talent to do them too haha

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thank you !! I’ve been drawing Pokemon my entire life, so its less god given talent and more the continous effort of a bug obsessed autistic kid haha.

one of my favorite things about Pokemon cards is how varied the art can be - 3D models, pencil illustrations, digital pop art, clay, crochet, or even a little kid coloring in a Pichu. I feel that, even if you feel you aren’t a good artist, anything that you make will fit in because there is no “standard” for Pokémon cards. what you might view as “amateurish” or “scribbly” can be unique or nostalgic to someone. perhaps that “lack of talent” can become the style? it makes me think of primitivism, a style of art that tomokazu komiya practices, where the goal is to be messy and imperfect - you lose the details but keep the important emotions. I find his art very peaceful.

regardless of my weird rambling, anyone can be an artist as long as they have the drive to create art. in a world where art and artists are being slowly overshadowed, if you want to create then you just have to begin. I hope I make a little bit of sense lol. :bug:

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Rotom is one of my wifes favorite mon, and I do think hes pretty adorable as well. Do keep posting so we can stay up to date with the collection! Are you also collecting every cameo for rotom?

Edit: Looked at the binder after, and answered my questions. I like what you did with the monochrome ones youre missing! Adds a bit of excitement to replacement for cards you get!

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Inspiring words! Maybe I’ll dig up my old drawing pad and work on something, I tend to dislike the art I work on but maybe I just need to look at it through a different lens and make it my own. Thanks for the motivation, I’ll have to see what I can come up with when I have the time :slight_smile:

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I’m happy that I could inspire you !!! There was a lot of times in my life where I wanted to give up on art, but remembering that I make my art for myself and because it brings me joy always helps me get back up.

I wish you luck !!!

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I will for sure, a lot of the cooler stuff I find has to be shipped in from overseas but it’ll all be seen eventually. I’m only doing 1 card for each cameo, mainly because of the Champions Festival event top cards but also because Rotom isn’t the focus on them.

The black and white placeholders are great, I also have the placeholders in black sleeves and anything I get in coloured ones. Seeing the pages slowly fill up with colour will be rewarding for sure, it already is and I’ve only recently started!

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MAY UPDATE

Welcome back! We’re now at the end of May (my b’day!) and I have made another chunk of progress and picked up some other random stuff that I’m quite happy with. Let’s start with updates to the binder itself:

I have decided that, at least while I’m missing so many cards, the binder will be organized by language. This will make it a lot easier for me to track my progress in each individual language and will make it easier for me to differentiate Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American when buying online. I prefer how it was organized before for display but it makes things a little harder so I may look at changing it back when I have more Rotoms filled in.


I have also made a page just for different sleeve designs that show any form of Rotom on them. The red sleeves are placeholders for others that I have seen and ordered in, there’s only 1 I haven’t been able to find a single sleeve of so this should be mostly filled in soon!

And now for the new cards:

Some of the highlights here are:

  • My first German cards
  • BOTH Russian Rotoms (my first 100% complete language!)
  • Masterball Fan Rotoms in English, Japanese and Spanish
  • My first Spanish cards added to the binder
  • Premier Ball League Fan Rotom (fairly rare card to find)
  • My first Thai cards, with a lot more coming
  • Rotom V Alt Art in Korean and English

56 new cards have found their places in the pages and filling slots feels great but that’s not all I’ve received this month. Here are some of the other cards that have found a home in my collection:


Another Hatsune Miku x Pokemon card. Not as cool as having a serialized one but the texture on it and card quality overall is nice!


Handmade by EquizEmporium on Etsy, I’m a sucker for anything custom made by people and this shadowbox card is no exception! Plus it came with a nice little drawing on cardboard that I trimmed down to put in the binder.

Here is a hand painted full art card alter by MaliRoi on Etsy, as well as a bunch of the sleeves I added to the back of the binder. I love the shiny paint and it just looks great, plus the seller was very helpful as we worked out international shipping on it.

I have also now cracked my first slab, it was a scary thing to do but I got it with no damage to the card thankfully. This is also my first error card of the binder, it has the cosmos holo pattern bleeding through the text box (the photo doesn’t show it too well but it’s definitely noticeable in person). As a bonus there’s a swirl around the lightning bolts that looks quite nice, very happy to have picked this one up.

This one came in today, I’m not sure exactly what it is but it has Rotom on it and that’s my only criteria for the collection. I am easily pleased.

Thank you all for tuning in to this month’s update, and thank you for taking a look at the start of my journey last month! I’m surprised by how excited I get to deliver these updates but it’s fun for me to catalog everything that changes as I move forward.
I’m looking at adding some other cool info to these in future, maybe completion percentages for each language and stuff. In the meantime here is the link to the full binder, see you next month!

MINI UPDATE
I decided that completion percentages would be easy to do so I’ve just made up a table. Here it is!

Language Number Owned Percentage
English 98/106 92.45%
Japanese 31/103 30.09%
German 2/104 1.92%
Italian 0/104 0.0%
French 0/102 0.0%
Spanish 2/90 2.22%
Portuguese 2/86 2.32%
Latin American 0/19 0.0%
Russian 2/2 100%
Korean 16/69 23.18%
Simplified Chinese 0/66 0.0%
Traditional Chinese 2/50 4.0%
Thai 2/60 3.33%
Indonesian 0/56 0.0%
Cameos 15/30 50.0%
Total 172/1047 16.42%
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