When Did Pokémon Cards Come Out? A Collector Timeline

Pokémon cards first came out in Japan on 20 October 1996, when the first expansion pack and the first starter pack of the Pokémon Card Game went on sale.

English cards followed in January 1999, when the Base Set launched in the United States, manufactured and distributed by Wizards of the Coast. UK dates for those first English sets are harder to pin down, and this guide explains why it does not guess at them.

The first releases by country and language

The Pokémon Company's corporate history lists two Japanese launches in 1996. The Game Boy games Pokémon Red and Pokémon Green came out in February, and the trading card game followed in October.

The official Japanese 20th anniversary chronicle on the Pokémon Card Game website gives the exact day, 20 October 1996, for the first expansion pack and the first starter pack.

The same corporate history says the Pokémon Card Game Base Set launched in the United States in January 1999, and the Japanese chronicle marks the same month. So the answer depends on which cards you mean. Japanese cards date from October 1996. English cards date from January 1999, and that date is for the United States.

This timeline covers the physical Pokémon Trading Card Game only. Digital versions are separate products: Pokémon TCG Pocket, for example, appears in the corporate history as released in October 2024, and it produces no physical cards.

Pokémon-branded collectable cards that cannot be played in the TCG are left out too, even when they look similar. Promotional cards are part of the TCG but sit outside the numbered expansions, so they are not in the table either.

The early English expansions

Wizards of the Coast's website, as preserved by the Internet Archive in April 2001, listed its card sets from newest to oldest as Neo Genesis, Gym Challenge, Gym Heroes, Team Rocket, Base Set 2, Fossil, Jungle and Base Set, with Neo Discovery listed as next.

Read from the bottom up, that is the English release order for the first two years. Each set has its own page if you want the cards, starting with our Base Set guide.

Exact days are scarce in primary sources. The clearest is Gym Heroes. Wizards' release event page set in-store preview events for Saturday 5 August 2000 and said the set would go on sale on 14 August. For the other sets, the archive only shows that a set existed by the date a page was captured.

A Wizards page captured in October 1999 said its Duelist magazine was running a Jungle issue, due in shops by the end of July 1999. A Fossil competition page captured in November 1999 described Fossil as the new expansion.

The Base Set 2 product page, captured in April 2000, said the set marked the game's first year and held 130 cards drawn from Base Set and Jungle.

None of this tells you when the same sets reached UK shops. A US date is a US date. The Wizards site listed six languages in 2001: English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French and German. A Wizards FAQ captured in August 2000 said Spanish cards would soon be sold in Europe.

That shows European distribution was under way, but we could not find a dated primary source for each early set's arrival in the UK, so the table gives no UK dates for those years rather than copying the US ones across.

Neo Genesis changed the game itself. Wizards called it a new beginning: 111 cards, including Baby, Darkness and Metal Pokémon, new Energy cards for the two new types, and Pokémon Tools, which are Trainer cards you attach to a Pokémon. In Japan, the chronicle dates the arrival of the Darkness and Metal types to December 1999.

How the main eras are organised

Later Pokémon sets are grouped into series. Several series share a name with the main video games of the time, though Mega Evolution is named after a game mechanic, and Pokémon's own announcement says the Scarlet & Violet set takes its inspiration from Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet.

A series opens with a set carrying the series name, and several more sets follow under it. The table gives the start of each series where we found an official date. It is not a list of every expansion. For that, use Pokémon card sets in order.

Some series are missing from the table on purpose. The e-Card sets closed the Wizards years, the EX sets came before Diamond & Pearl, and Platinum, HeartGold & SoulSilver and Black & White came between Diamond & Pearl and XY.

We could not read a start date for those from an official page today, so we name them here and leave them out of the table.

Why older printings can look different

Cards from the same set can look different because they were printed at different times. In 1999, Wizards' card anatomy page explained the First Edition symbol: a limited quantity of each set was printed with it, marking a first-edition card from that set. Later printings of the same cards do not carry it.

Wizards said in an August 2000 FAQ capture that it was not obliged to release print run figures, and it has not published them. Collectors also separate the early Base Set printings known as shadowless from the later Unlimited ones, and our guides to First Edition cards and shadowless cards cover how to tell them apart.

The same 1999 anatomy page set out the symbols at the bottom of a card. The card number has two parts: the first is the card's number and the second is how many cards are in the set. Next to it, a circle meant common, a diamond uncommon and a star rare.

From Scarlet & Violet, a Pokémon announcement for Asia said the set symbol would be replaced by an expansion code at the bottom left, and the yellow border by the silver border already used in Japan. Our guide to set symbols and numbers shows both systems.

Japanese cards have their own break. The chronicle notes a new card back design in July 2001, so a Japanese card with the older back was printed before then. English and Japanese printings of the same set also differ in other ways, which Japanese vs English Pokémon cards explains.

Packs changed too. Wizards' early booster packs held 11 cards, while a current English pack holds ten, according to the official expansion pages.

In a 1999 counterfeit alert, Wizards warned that fakes were sold in clear bags of 28 cards, which it never sold, and that fake cards used thinner card, let light through, and had blurry or missing legal text along the bottom.

That advice dates from 1999, so read how to spot fake Pokémon cards for current checks rather than relying on the light test alone.

Find a set from your own collection

Start with the bottom of the card. Look for a set symbol or, on Scarlet & Violet era cards and later, an expansion code, then read the card number and the second figure after the slash, which tells you how many cards are in the set.

A Neo Genesis card, for example, is numbered out of 111. Check for a First Edition symbol, and note the language. On a Japanese card, look at the back as well.

With that in hand, match the symbol or code in the set symbol lookup. It tells you which set the card belongs to and whether it is from the older symbol system or the newer expansion codes.

Then find where that set sits in the full chronology of sets. The year the set came out in your card's language is the one that matters, and for the earliest English sets that year is a US date unless a source says otherwise.

Sources, definitions and corrections

Date means the on-sale or launch date the source gives. Where a row says "by", the only evidence is the date an archived page was captured, so the event happened on or before that date.

Country or region is the country the source names, and "worldwide" is used only where the publisher said participating retailers around the world. Language is the language of the cards. Scope separates physical cards from company events and digital products.

The sources are The Pokémon Company's corporate history, the 20th anniversary chronicle on the official Japanese Pokémon Card Game website, Wizards of the Coast's Pokémon website as preserved by the Internet Archive, pokemon.com expansion pages for the US and UK (read through the Internet Archive because the live site would not load for us), and press releases from The Pokémon Company International.

All were checked on 17 October 2026. We did not take dates from fan wikis or shop blogs, even where they give an exact day, because we could not trace those days to a primary source.

If you have a dated primary source that contradicts a row, or fills a gap such as the UK arrival of an early set, please contact us. We will check it and update the row along with the date it was checked.

If you want every expansion rather than the start of each era, the next page to read is Pokémon card sets in order.

Questions collectors ask

When did Pokémon cards come out in Japan?

On 20 October 1996, when the first expansion pack and starter pack of the Pokémon Card Game went on sale.

When did Pokémon cards come out in English?

In January 1999, when Wizards of the Coast launched Base Set in the United States.

What was the first Pokémon card set?

In Japan, the first expansion pack of 1996. In English, Base Set, followed in 1999 by Jungle and Fossil.

Related guides

• Pokémon card sets in order
• First Edition Pokémon cards
• Shadowless Pokémon cards
• How many Pokémon cards are there?