To understand why Pokémon's rarest cards aren't actually that rare, start with the print run. The Pokémon Company says it produced roughly 10 billion cards in the fiscal year ending March 2026, pushing its lifetime total past 85 billion. Before 2019, it averaged around 1.5 to 2 billion cards a year. About half of every Pokémon card ever made was printed in just the last four years. That figure covers every language worldwide, and The Pokémon Company doesn't break out English on its own. Bandai has never published comparable card counts for any of its games, so there is no apples-to-apples figure, but nothing in Bandai's numbers or in the secondary market suggests anything close to that scale. Pokémon prints for a global mass market that includes kids at Walmart; Bandai prints for a narrower, hobby-first audience.
The Pull Rates Look Similar. The Outcomes Don't.
On paper, the odds are comparable. Community pack data puts the English Prismatic Evolutions Umbreon ex Special Illustration Rare at roughly 1 in 1,440 packs. English One Piece Manga Rares sit in the same neighborhood or tougher: community estimates range from about one per 288 packs to as rare as one per 1,700 or so, depending on the set, and the new Red Manga treatment introduced in Carrying On His Will (OP-13) is rarer still. Dragon Ball Super's English Masters game made only eight God Rares in its entire history. The difference is what happens after the odds are applied. A 1-in-1,440 card multiplied across billions of packs still produces an enormous supply. A 1-in-1,000 card multiplied across a much smaller print run produces a genuinely small one. Neither company publishes official pull rates, so all of these figures come from estimates by collectors tracking their openings.
What the PSA and BGS Population Reports Say
Grading populations are the closest thing the hobby has to a census, and every figure here is for English cards. Evolving Skies' Umbreon VMAX alt art, the famous Moonbreon, has roughly 29,700 PSA-graded copies, including about 20,800 PSA 10s. Prismatic Evolutions' Umbreon ex SIR has been out for less than two years and already has 21,530 PSA submissions and 6,379 PSA 10s. Compare that to One Piece. The English OP-05 Manga Rare Gear 5 Luffy has only about 1,180 PSA 10s, and the original English OP-01 Manga Rare Shanks sits near 1,520. That means there are roughly 18 PSA 10 Moonbreons for every PSA 10 English Gear 5 Manga Luffy.
Beckett's top grade makes the gap even sharper. A BGS 10 Black Label requires perfect 10 subgrades for centering, corners, edges and surface, and it's the hardest slab in the hobby to earn. Seller listings have put the Moonbreon's English Black Label population at about 103. Now look at the English Red Manga Monkey D. Luffy (OP13-118) from Carrying On His Will, one of the biggest chase cards in the hobby today. It trades around $9,900 raw and about $31,400 in a PSA 10, has only about 262 BGS 9.5s, and seller listings have cited an English Black Label population of just 21. Those Black Labels have sold for roughly $165,000 to $170,000 each, against about $7,600 to $30,000 for a Moonbreon Black Label. Population reports measure what has been graded rather than what was printed, and Pokémon's larger audience grades more, but gaps this wide reflect real differences in supply.
Many Games, Finite Printers
Part of Bandai's restraint is philosophy, and part of it is simple capacity. Bandai Namco's fiscal 2026 results show just how many franchises are competing for the same factories: Gundam brought in about $1.62 billion, One Piece about $887 million and Dragon Ball about $879 million, with trading card games feeding a Toys and Hobby segment worth roughly $4.26 billion. With Union Arena and Digimon in the mix too, there is always a new release competing for attention and production time. The result is a company that moves forward rather than flooding the market with old product. When it does reprint, it does so in a contained, clearly labeled way, like the English One Piece Premium Booster -The Best- (November 2024) and The Best Vol. 2 (October 2025), which reissued fan-favorite cards in a separate product rather than endlessly restocking the original sets. Those reprints have become chases in their own right.
Print Quality You Can Measure
Scarcity only matters if the cards survive the trip from pack to slab, and this is where Bandai quietly embarrasses the competition. English One Piece Manga Rares grade at remarkable rates: the English OP-11 Manga Luffy has about 1,014 PSA 10s out of roughly 1,179 graded, a gem rate near 86%. The English Prismatic Evolutions Umbreon ex SIR, by comparison, gems at just 29.6%, and the full English Prismatic Evolutions set at about 33%. Centering, surface lines and print defects are a constant complaint in modern Pokémon, and they're exactly what keeps Black Labels so scarce for Moonbreon. Bandai's consistent quality means collectors trust what comes out of the pack, and that trust is a big part of why its high-end cards hold their premiums.
Redefining What "Rare" Means
None of this makes Pokémon a bad collectible. Its scale is exactly why its cards are so liquid and why Moonbreon still commands thousands of dollars despite tens of thousands of graded copies. But it does mean collectors should stop treating "hard to pull" as a synonym for "rare." Bandai has shown that a publisher can keep print runs tight, keep its chase tiers genuinely scarce, reprint only in contained ways, and deliver cards that grade cleanly out of the pack. For collectors who care about owning something few other people have, Bandai has raised the bar on what true rarity means. As always, scarcity is only half the equation: demand decides value. Whether you prefer the undeniable liquidity of a global phenomenon or the quiet prestige of genuine scarcity, there is room in the hobby for both. The key is simply knowing which game you are truly playing when you rip open that next pack.
Sources
PokeGuardian: Pokémon card production hits 85 billion and CardsRFun production history
Oricon: Bandai Namco FY2026 results by IP (USD figures) and Bandai Namco statistics (Toys and Hobby segment)
Pokemon Price Tracker: Prismatic Evolutions pull rates and TCGTalk: One Piece box pull rates
TCGplayer: Monkey.D.Luffy (118) (Red Super Alternate Art), English
PriceCharting: English Red Manga Luffy OP13-118 sales (PSA 10 and BGS 10 Black Label) and Card Ladder: English Red Manga Luffy BGS 9.5 population
PriceCharting: Umbreon VMAX 215 population , Umbreon VMAX 215 BGS 10 Black Label sales and Whatnot listing citing English Black Label pop
PokeInvest: Umbreon ex 161 population and Prismatic Evolutions PSA population report
Card Ladder (English, PSA 10): OP-05 Manga Luffy and OP-01 Manga Shanks
eBay listing with PSA data: English OP-11 Manga Luffy PSA 10
PreGrade: Dragon Ball Super PSA 10 guide (God Rare count)
English reprint listings: Premium Booster -The Best- and The Best Vol. 2
All card, price and population figures are for English cards in the U.S. market. Population counts change daily as cards are graded, and Black Label counts come from seller listings.