2011 English edition almanac

All 315 cards of the three English sets are listed. The counts match the card database that holds the English scans: 115 in April, 98 in August and 102 in November. Two of the three counts are one higher than the printed run — 114 and 101 are what the cards themselves print — and the extra card is the secret: Pikachu at 115/114 and Meowth at 102/101. Emerging Powers has no card past its own total. About the holofoil figure in the header: the English database keeps no separate holofoil tier for these three sets, so the only cards that count as holofoil by rarity are the two secret cards — the number is 2, and this page does not claim to know which of the 97 rares were printed on holofoil stock.

The Japanese edition of 2011 is 262 cards in four releases, and this page is not it. Three of those four releases are 2012 sets in English; the fourth is Noble Victories. Call of Legends — English only, 9 February, no Japanese parent set — is not on this page either. It belongs to the HGSS block, its HGSS-era frame is not this frame, and its twelve Lost Link cards are accounted for on the 2010 page. So English 2011 is three sets and 315 cards, and the Japanese year is eighty-one cards larger and one set longer, which is the honest shape of the two editions at this point.

Every card on this page was matched against Japan card by card, and the direction matters here because it runs the other way from 2010. All 262 of Japan's 2011 cards have an English printing, and every one of them matched the same card — no Japanese card of this year was changed on the way across. They are spread across four English sets: 86 in Noble Victories, 91 in Next Destinies, 78 in Dark Explorers and 7 in Emerging Powers. The method is name, HP, number of attacks, each attack's damage reduced to its digits, and at least one attack name that matches after normalising case and punctuation.

The seven cards in Emerging Powers are the ones to look at, because English printed them before Japan did. Five of them — Deerling, Sawsbuck, Tranquill, Unfezant and Ferrothorn — are September cards that shipped in English on 31 August, sixteen days ahead of the Japanese release. The other two, Swoobat and Mandibuzz, are Dark Rush cards that English printed three and a half months before Japan put them in a pack. The card is the same card in both editions; only the date is out of order. None of the 262 is a card English never printed — that is the one respect in which 2011 is simpler than the year before it.

Noble Victories is Red Collection re-sorted, and the seam is visible in the numbering. July's 72 cards occupy the set from 006 onward in their own order; fourteen September cards are spliced in by Pokédex number at 001–003 (Sewaddle, Swadloon, Leavanny), 004–005 (Petilil, Lilligant), 033 (Cryogonal), 050–052 (Solosis line), 062–064 (Timburr line) and 081–082 (Pawniard, Bisharp). The six cards past the printed 101 are Red Collection's own six past 066 — Virizion, Victini, Terrakion, Cobalion, full-art N and shiny Meowth — so the secret cards did not change at all on the way across, only their numbers did.

One card changes its name between the editions, and it is not on this page. Psycho Drive 050 prints 学習装置, the Japanese name of the item English calls the Exp. Share — and the card database lists it under the older English name EXP.ALL. English printed it as Exp. Share, Next Destinies 87/99 in February 2012, so the only card in the year whose English name is not a translation of the Japanese one is also one of the few that missed 2011 entirely. Everything else keeps its name, including the EX suffix, which prints as Mewtwo EX on the English card.

About the scans. All 315 card faces are full-size scans from the database that holds the English prints. The Japanese card images shown alongside are the ones each card was paired with, and where a card has no Japanese counterpart the link is absent rather than approximate — thirty-four cards in Black & White, sixty-three in Emerging Powers and sixteen in Noble Victories.

What is not on this page. The BW Black Star Promos — including the Pokémon-EX cards that are the year's real story — the tins, the theme decks and the League handouts are all real 2011 cards and none of them is listed, because none of them has a per-card release date and distribution condition that could be verified. The three numbered sets are complete — 315 cards, two of them secret — and that is the whole claim this page makes.