Did Pokémon’s Latest Announcements Let You Down?

This past weekend was the 2025 Pokémon World Championship.

Where the best of the best gathered to compete across the video game, TCG, Pokémon GO, and more, culminating with Championship Sunday and the coolest stage we’ve ever seen from Pokémon.

But, besides the action, the best part of Worlds are the announcements: The Pokémon Company makes sure to take advantage of all the attention to hype up the future of their different games and properties.

And, this year’s annoucements were… more of the same.

You can view the TCG announcements here:

Here’s a quick summary:

1. Mega Pokémon are returning to the TCG (we knew this), including Mega Lucario, Mega Gardevoir, Mega Charizard, and the newest Mega Pokémon: Mega Dragonite.

2. There is a new type of secret rare card being called “Attack Rare”. These cards feature manage-inspired artwork and the name of their main attack written over the artwork in a throwback to the original Mega ex cards.

And… uh… that’s it?

Considering next year is the 30th anniversary of Pokémon, it would be easy to have expected more exciting news coming out of Worlds. Instead, what we got feels like nothing more than just… more of the same.

Is it enough?

We are in a golden age of Pokémon cards. The return of alt art cards in the Sword & Shield era was just beginning, which peaked with the incredible variety of art cards we received through the Trainer Gallery subset and the Crown Zenith set. With the Scarlet & Violet era, the decision to make Illustration Rare and Special Illustration Rare cards a staple of every single set cemented this legacy:

Pokémon cards have never been better.

At a time when we’ve never been more spoiled by the incredible diversity and quality of Pokémon cards, I’m left with no other conclusion:

Yes, more of the same is more than enough. It’s perfect.

It doesn’t matter that I wasn’t blown away by the Worlds announcements. Pokémon revealed some great new cards, including a new, nostalgic rarity type to chase. The release of the first two Mega era sets in Japan, Mega Brave and Mega Symphonia, has already shown us new Illustration Rare and Special Illustration Rare cards, and now we just get more.

All of this is excellent news for the hobby.

At the end of the day, what we want to see is more and more people being able to enjoy collecting Pokémon cards, and nothing delivers on that more than Pokémon continuing to release a large number of beautiful cards to chase in each of their new sets.

And that’s exactly what we’re getting.

I continue to be bullish on the future of Pokémon cards, and hopefully you are too.

As usual,

Thank you so much for reading the TCG Buyers Club newsletter. My name’s Grey, I buy cardboard, and I’m on a mission to make collecting and investing in Pokémon simple.

Cheers 🍻