30th CELEBRATION Card Sets: Released Oct 16, How to Get One Now

The nine ¥1,200 boxes came out in Japan on Friday, October 16, 2026, and almost nobody got one at a counter by walking in. The 30th CELEBRATION Card Sets are nine separate products, one starter trio each, and in Japan’s Pokémon Centers they were sold on October 16–18 only to LINE lottery winners. As of October 17 the realistic route from abroad is the Japanese resale market, where the first night’s Yahoo! Auctions sales put the Kanto set at a median ¥3,199 and the nine-set lot at ¥19,000. Here is how you can still get one, what each set is selling for, and the one mistake that costs about ¥15,800.

Can you still buy the 30th CELEBRATION card sets after the October 16 release?

Yes, but not at a Pokémon Center shelf. All 17 Japanese stores sold them October 16–18 by advance LINE lottery only, the entry window closed October 12, and their notices say a later general sale is undecided. What remains is resale in Japan, priced well above the ¥1,200 list.

The Pokémon Center side is covered store by store in our Pokémon Center lottery breakdown for these card sets. In short, every notice gave the same reason, crowd control, refused proxy pickup and transfer of a win, and warned that stock was not reserved per slot. The Mega Tokyo notice we re-read on October 17 still carries both lines: no general sale during the lottery period, and future general sale undecided. We checked the news pages of all 17 stores the same day and none had posted anything newer about the card sets.

The resale figures come from the 1,000 most recent closed Yahoo! Auctions listings for 30th CELEBRATION カードセット, which ran from 23:28 on October 16 to 07:32 on October 17, JST. Almost all of them (983 of 1,000) were fixed-price sales. We filtered out promo-only listings (ARのみ), boxes without packs, multi-box lots and other products, then took medians. These are item prices before domestic shipping and proxy fees, and they are first-night numbers. They describe what buyers paid, not where the price is going.

What’s in each set, and what each one sells for now

Each ¥1,200 set contains three holo promo cards of one generation’s starter trio, two 30th CELEBRATION expansion packs, and a paper card stand that holds three cards. The nine share no cards, so you need exactly as many sets as the trios you care about.

The full product name is ポケモンカードゲーム MEGA「30th CELEBRATION カードセット …」 with the three Pokémon names appended, so the suffix column is what tells one box from another. The region names are ours; the official page labels the sets only by Pokémon name, so search and order by the Pokémon names. Kanto is the only set with a deep first-night market. For the five sets marked under 10 sales we are not quoting a median, because a handful of listings, some with unclear contents, is not a price.

The official product page describes these as the Pokémon that were 「冒険の最初のパートナー」, your adventure’s first partner, across nine regions. List price and release date are unchanged on that page as of October 17: ¥1,200 including tax per set, released 2026年10月16日（金）.

The ¥1,200 arithmetic: what you were paying for the promos

Subtract the two packs at their official price and ¥480 is left for three promos and a stand. The 30th CELEBRATION expansion pack has a published suggested retail price of ¥360 including tax, six cards per pack, randomly inserted.

That is what the manufacturer charged at list: under ¥160 a promo, for cards you cannot pull from a pack. At the Kanto median of ¥3,199, the same subtraction leaves about ¥2,479 for the three promos and the stand, which tells you the resale premium sits almost entirely on the promos.

The nine-set lot is the expensive way to get one trio

The headline listing on Yahoo! Auctions is the 9種コンプリート, all nine sets in one lot, and it outsold every single set combined in the first night. At a median ¥19,000, it is nine boxes you mostly did not want.

If you are buying through a proxy, two or three sets from the same seller usually travel together, which matters more than the item price on a ¥2,000 box. Our walkthrough of buying on Mercari and Yahoo! Auctions from abroad covers the proxy step and the fees that stack on top of the medians above.

The promo cards: what the official images show

The product page publishes all 27 promo cards as individual images, and they are full-illustration cards with the region’s scenery behind the Pokémon. The page calls them 「フルイラストのカード」 and lists them as プロモカード（キラ）, holo promos.

Official product image © The Pokémon Company (from the linked official page).

Charmander is numbered 102/M-P with the PROMO marker, an 80 HP Basic Fire Pokémon with a single attack, ひのこ (Ember) for 30 damage, Water weakness ×2 and a retreat cost of two. Illustration credited to Saboteri, with the 30th anniversary Pikachu mark in the corner of every card in the run.

Official product image © The Pokémon Company (from the linked official page).

Sprigatito is 125/M-P, 70 HP, Grass, with このは (Leafage) for 40, and its art is unmistakably Paldea: Koraidon overhead, a sandwich on a plate, the academy roofline. Bulbasaur (101/M-P) sits in front of Pallet Town houses, Turtwig (110/M-P) in front of Jubilife City, Rowlet (119/M-P) over an Alolan waterfront. The five images we checked put the run at 101/M-P through 127/M-P in the order the nine sets are listed.

Where these sit in the 30th CELEBRATION lineup

Four Japanese products carry the 30th CELEBRATION name, and these card sets were the cheapest and the last to release.

The expansion itself launched worldwide on the same day, so the packs inside these boxes are not an access problem; you can buy that product at home. The ¥6,200 Premium Deck Set is the other Japanese-only-as-announced box, with published card lists and no randomness. The whole Japanese schedule is on our release calendar.

One thing about the packs you’ll open: the expansion includes 30 historically significant cards reissued in special formatting, and the official page states those versions cannot be used in the current Standard regulation. Pulling one is a nice moment, not a deck card.

Is there an international version?

No starter-trio card set appears in the announced international lineup. The 30th Celebration product showcase on Pokémon.com runs from September 16 to November 6, 2026 and lists Elite Trainer Boxes, the Poster Collection, Tech Sticker Collection, 2-Pack Blister, Knock Out Collection, the Pokémon ex Box, the Binder Collection, Booster Bundle and Mini Tins, the Espeon ex & Umbreon ex Battle Deck, and the Ditto Premium, Ultra-Premium and Figure Collections. Nothing in it is a nine-way starter promo set.

That is absence from an announced lineup, not an exclusivity statement, and The Pokémon Company could add SKUs later. For now, the Japanese sets are the only version, and the decision is the same one it was in August: work out which starter you actually opened your first game with, buy that one box, and let the other eight go to somebody who started in Alola.