The next Pokémon TCG set: what is coming, and when it lands
Here is the thing almost nobody tells you when you ask when the next set is coming out: it already exists. Every international expansion is a Japanese set that shipped over there first, and by the time you are wondering what is next, the cards have been on shelves in Tokyo for weeks. So the question stops being "what will be in it" and becomes "how long is the wait" — and that one we can answer, because we measured it on 22 expansions, one pair of dates at a time.
- The wait, measured rather than guessed: 56 days between the Japanese release and ours, about 8 weeks. That is the median across 22 expansions where we know both dates.
- It is not a clock. The fastest was Paradox Rift (PAR) at 7 days, the slowest 151 (MEW) at 98. But 12 of the 22 landed between 50 and 70 days, which is tight enough to plan a birthday around.
- Next up is ME Starter Set ex, out in Japan on 31 July 2026 with 58 cards. Our measurement puts it here somewhere between 19 September 2026 and 9 October 2026.
- 30th Celebration has a real announced date: 16 September 2026, 11 days out. What is inside the packs has not been confirmed, and you will not read it here until it is.
30th Celebration lands on 16 September 2026
30th Celebration has an announced release date: 16 September 2026. That is 11 days away. We picked it up on 21 August 2026, and you can go and check it yourself — the address is at the foot of this page.
The rest of this page hands you arithmetic, because most of the time arithmetic is all anyone has. Here we have better. Once a date is actually announced it goes to the front, and our estimate has no business being in the conversation.
There is another one behind it: Delta Reign, on 6 November 2026.
What is going to be inside the packs is another matter, and we do not know. Not the card count, not what you can hope to pull out of one.
You are going to run into very precise numbers about exactly that between now and release day. A card almost nobody can find, one pack in however many thousand, that sort of thing. Those numbers nearly always come from somebody who says they saw a document at a printing plant, and the publisher has never written them down anywhere. Before you spend money on the strength of a pull rate like that, wait for someone to confirm it.
One last thing about the date itself. An announced date can still move, it has happened before. It moves a lot less than our estimate does, though, so that is the one to keep.
The Japanese set ME has no date here yet
ME Starter Set ex (スターターセットex) went on sale in Japan on 31 July 2026 with 58 cards. Its international release has no date. The publisher has not announced one, and nobody else has it either.
What we can do is put the arithmetic in front of you rather than behind you. Across the 22 expansions where we know both release dates, 56 days went by between the Japanese release and ours. If that held, ME would arrive around 25 September 2026.
If you would rather have a window than a single day: 12 of those 22 releases landed between 50 and 70 days after Japan. Applied to ME, that opens a window from 19 September 2026 to 9 October 2026.
Now the part to keep straight, because it is the sort of sentence that gets remembered wrong. Those three dates come out of our own measurement of past releases. The publisher has said nothing. It has changed its pace before and it will again. Do not book anything on this. The day a real date is announced, it replaces our arithmetic and we will not be sad about it.
The cards themselves are not speculation though. They have been played in Japan since 31 July 2026, and the numbers printed on them — HP, damage, Energy costs — are the numbers that will be printed here. We read them one at a time from the publisher's Japanese database and write up what we find in the Journal.
Why we can see the next set coming, and most sites cannot
Because we are not waiting for an announcement. The set is already printed, already sold and already being played, in Japan. Reading it is a matter of going and looking, which we do every night for the Journal.
The publisher releases in Japan first and internationally afterwards. That is not a leak or a rumour, it is simply how the product works, and it has worked that way for as long as anyone reading this has been playing. So there is a period of about two months where the entire next expansion is a matter of public record on one side of the world and a mystery on the other.
We read the publisher's own Japanese card database, card by card, and publish what we find. The numbers need no translation at all: HP, damage, Energy costs and Retreat costs are printed as digits, and they are identical to the ones that will ship here. Only the sentences have to wait, and where we have translated one ourselves, we say so on the card.
What that gives you is not a spoiler, it is a head start. If you are deciding what to build for the season after this one, knowing that a particular Pokémon is about to arrive with 300 HP and a two-Energy attack is worth considerably more than knowing the box art.
The frieze, release by release
Each row carries one expansion: the day it landed here, the Japanese set its cards came from, and the bar of the gap between the two. The lime rule marks the day you are reading this. 22 expansions are on it, every one with a date on both sides. The most recent to land here is Pitch Black (PBL), on 17 July 2026.
Read the bars down the frieze and you can watch them settle. Over the "Scarlet & Violet" series, the 16 releases we measured spread across 7 to 98 days — nobody could have planned anything on that. Over "Mega Evolution", the 6 releases run 49 to 70 days. The spread has narrowed a great deal, and that is the only reason the arithmetic on this page holds up at all today. It would not have held up three years ago.
Take the extremes seriously rather than as trivia. Paradox Rift came out in Japan on 27 October 2023 and here on 3 November 2023 — 7 days. 151 took 98, from 16 June 2023 to 22 September 2023. That is a three-month spread between the two ends, on the same product line.
The space between two rows is time: the taller it is, the longer the wait was. Rows that touch came out on the same day, which happens — Black Bolt and White Flare did.
30th Celebration
16 September 2026
Where we stand between the last release and the next one
Read on 21 August 2026 Source
2026
Delta Reign
6 November 2026
62 days to go30th Celebration
16 September 2026
11 days to go- Today · 5 September 2026
Pitch BlackPBL
17 July 2026 · 84 cards
Out in Japan on 22 May 2026, as M5
56 days after Japan 
Chaos RisingCRI
22 May 2026 · 86 cards
Out in Japan on 13 March 2026, as M4
70 days after Japan
Perfect OrderPOR
27 March 2026 · 88 cards
Out in Japan on 23 January 2026, as M3
63 days after Japan
Ascended HeroesASC
30 January 2026 · 217 cards
Out in Japan on 28 November 2025, as M2a
63 days after Japan2025
Phantasmal FlamesPFL
14 November 2025 · 94 cards
Out in Japan on 26 September 2025, as M2
49 days after Japan
Mega EvolutionMEG
26 September 2025 · 132 cards
Out in Japan on 1 August 2025, as M1L + M1S
56 days after Japan
Black BoltBLK
17 July 2025 · 86 cards
Out in Japan on 6 June 2025, as SV11B
41 days after Japan
White FlareWHT
17 July 2025 · 86 cards
Out in Japan on 6 June 2025, as SV11W
41 days after Japan
Destined RivalsDRI
30 May 2025 · 182 cards
Out in Japan on 18 April 2025, as SV10
42 days after Japan
Journey TogetherJTG
28 March 2025 · 159 cards
Out in Japan on 24 January 2025, as SV9
63 days after Japan
Prismatic EvolutionsPRE
17 January 2025 · 131 cards
Out in Japan on 6 December 2024, as SV8a
42 days after Japan2024
Surging SparksSSP
8 November 2024 · 191 cards
Out in Japan on 18 October 2024, as SV8
21 days after Japan
Stellar CrownSCR
13 September 2024 · 142 cards
Out in Japan on 19 July 2024, as SV7
56 days after Japan
Shrouded FableSFA
2 August 2024 · 64 cards
Out in Japan on 7 June 2024, as SV6a
56 days after Japan
Twilight MasqueradeTWM
24 May 2024 · 167 cards
Out in Japan on 26 April 2024, as SV6
28 days after JapanTemporal ForcesTEF
22 March 2024 · 162 cards
Out in Japan on 26 January 2024, as SV5K + SV5M
56 days after Japan
Paldean FatesPAF
26 January 2024 · 91 cards
Out in Japan on 1 December 2023, as SV4a
56 days after Japan2023
Paradox RiftPAR
3 November 2023 · 182 cards
Out in Japan on 27 October 2023, as SV4K + SV4M
7 days after Japan
151MEW
22 September 2023 · 165 cards
Out in Japan on 16 June 2023, as SV2a
98 days after Japan
Obsidian FlamesOBF
11 August 2023 · 197 cards
Out in Japan on 28 July 2023, as SV3
14 days after Japan
Paldea EvolvedPAL
9 June 2023 · 193 cards
Out in Japan on 14 April 2023, as SV1a + SV2P + SV2D
56 days after Japan
Scarlet & VioletSVI
31 March 2023 · 198 cards
Out in Japan on 20 January 2023, as SV1S + SV1V
70 days after Japan
What to actually do with a two-month head start
Three things, and none of them is buying anything early. Watch what the format is about to lose, watch what is about to replace it, and hold off on the expensive card until you know which of the two your deck needs.
Start with what leaves. A new set arriving is only half the story — roughly once a year the oldest regulation mark stops being legal, and that takes far more cards out of your deck than any single expansion puts in. Knowing what is coming is worth much less than knowing what is going.
Then look at the Trainer cards in the new set rather than the big Pokémon. That is the advice nobody gives you because it is not exciting. Trainers are cheap, they slot into every deck you will ever build, and a new Supporter that draws an extra card changes more games over a season than a 340 HP attacker does.
And be patient about buying. Prices on a brand new set move a lot in the first few weeks, in both directions, and we have no price data to guide you with — we would rather say that than pretend. What we can tell you is that the card will still be legal for years, and that the rush is entirely manufactured.
This list fills itself in. The moment a set lands in Japan and we manage to read its cards one by one, it shows up here with the number we got through. It's our week's work, put up as it is.
Questions people ask
- When is the next Pokémon TCG set coming out?
- 30th Celebration, on 16 September 2026 — 11 days from now. That date was announced, and we picked it up on 21 August 2026. What will be in the packs has not been confirmed, and the pull rates you see going around between now and then did not come from the publisher.
- How long after the Japanese release does a set come out in English?
- About 56 days, or 8 weeks. That is the median measured on 22 expansions where both dates are known, and the individual gaps run from 7 days to 98. 12 of them fell between 50 and 70 days, so two months is a reasonable working assumption and a bad promise.
- Where do these upcoming set dates come from?
- From arithmetic, and we would rather show it than hide it. We take the Japanese release date, which is public, and add the gap we measured on past expansions. No date on this page comes from the publisher unless the set has already shipped. When an official date is announced, it replaces ours.
- What is the newest Pokémon TCG set right now?
- Pitch Black (PBL), released on 17 July 2026. That is the most recent expansion in our set table, and the table is rebuilt whenever the catalogue is, so this answer moves on its own rather than being retyped.
- Is the Japanese set the same as the international one?
- Not exactly, and it matters if you are trying to work out what is coming. Japanese sets are smaller and ship more often, and an international expansion is often assembled out of two or three of them with the numbering redone from scratch. The cards are the same cards, but the set they arrive in is a different product.
Where all of this comes from
Release dates on both sides come from poko's own set table, built from the public TCGdex API for the international expansions and from the publisher's Japanese database for the Japanese sets. The gap is measured pair by pair on the 22 expansions where both dates are known, and we publish the median rather than the average because two near-simultaneous releases would drag an average down. The gap is measured from the most recent MAIN Japanese set of a pairing: a subset partially reused would have come out much earlier and would stretch the wait artificially. Projected dates are additions we did ourselves, shown as such, and they carry no announcement from anyone. Dates that have already been announced are read every night off each set's own announcement page: https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/30th_Celebration_(TCG) https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Delta_Reign_(TCG). Anything not written there in plain sight stays off this page, and that covers pack contents, rarities and pull rates.
You've just read a page about the game. We can do far more with one match.
Everything above is about the game in general. The thing we're really good at is one single match: yours. When a game ends, Pokémon TCG Live leaves you a log — the written record of everything that happened, turn by turn. Paste it here and we'll replay each of your decisions hundreds of times, then tell you which one actually cost you the game.
It's free and there's no account to make. Your log stays in your browser: your browser is what replays the game.
These pages are about the same corner of the game. If you came away from this one still wondering about something, start with one of them.