2010 English edition almanac

All 414 cards of the four English sets are listed. The counts match the card database that holds the English scans: 124 in February, 96 in May, 91 in August and 103 in November. Three of the four counts are one higher than the official number — 123, 95, 90 and 102 are the printed runs, and Alph Lithograph ONE, TWO, THREE and FOUR sit past the end of each set. They are shown with the word they print rather than a number, because that is the card.

The Japanese side of 2010 is a different shape, and this page does not force the two to match. Japan printed 314 cards in five releases: 202 across three LEGEND-era sets, plus Black Collection and White Collection on 17 December — 112 cards that open the BW era and belong to a different frame, a different rule set and a different pack size (five cards at 150 yen). Those 112 cards are listed on the Japanese edition of this year, card by card, and none of them is on this page: English Black & White did not land until 25 April 2011, and when it did it was an arrangement, not a translation — seventy-eight of the 112 are the same card, four are a different card of the same species, and thirty wait for Emerging Powers in August 2011. English printed four sets and 414 cards in 2010, most of which are 2009 material: HeartGold SoulSilver is the October 2009 Japanese packs, and only Unleashed, Undaunted and Triumphant carry 2010 Japanese cards.

Every Japanese pairing on this page was made card by card — name first, then an image fingerprint between the two scans, with a hard cutoff so that a weak match is recorded as no match rather than a bad one. The pairing is not one-to-one in either direction, because English reassembled the sets: Japanese February is split across Unleashed and Undaunted, Japanese July across Undaunted and Triumphant, and Japanese April across Unleashed, Triumphant and a 2011 set.

Three English cards have no Japanese counterpart from 2010 at all. Crobat ☆ and Ursaring ☆ in Unleashed are English additions — Ursaring is the Prime-class card the 2009 merge cut, printed a year late. Espeon, Houndoom, Raichu, Scizor, Slowking and Umbreon ☆ in Undaunted come from two Japanese theme decks and four promos, and those decks are not part of the numbered Japanese sets this archive lists. They are shown without a Japanese link rather than with a guessed one.

Alph Lithograph is the year's clearest example of the two editions diverging, and the easiest thing on the page to get wrong. It is one card name printed four times, with four different one-line instructions, and the English names are ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR. Japan printed two of them in 2010 — one in February at 081/080, one in July at 081/080 — and two more in 2009. They are matched by what the card actually says, not by set order: February's Japanese card is return any Stadium card in play to its player's hand, which is Alph Lithograph THREE in Undaunted; July's is look at all of your face-down Prize cards, which is Alph Lithograph FOUR in Triumphant.

Two errors in the Japanese source data are corrected here rather than carried over. Both were caught by cropping the card face. February's two Special Energy cards are catalogued under the same name — 079 is the Special Darkness Energy and 080 the Special Metal Energy, as printed. And July's 025 is catalogued as Venonat when the card is ビリリダマ (Voltorb), Pokédex No.100 on the face. Where the scan and the database disagree, the scan wins.

About the scans. All 414 card faces are full-size scans from the database that holds the English prints. The Japanese preview images on the cards are the ones the same cards were paired with, and where a card has no Japanese counterpart the link is absent rather than approximate.