2026 English edition almanac

• 01-30

  me02.5 Ascended Heroes opens the English year at 295 cards — 217 numbered and 78 secret — and it is the largest English product of the year. 185 of its cards are the English printing of Japan’s November 2025 compilation; the rest are new.

• 03-27

  me03 Perfect Order is the first English set built on a 2026 Japanese pack: 124 cards, 88 numbered plus 36 secret, carrying January’s M3 across with twelve Mega Evolution cards in it.

• 05-22

  me04 Chaos Rising lands on the same day Japan ships M5 — and shares no card with it. 122 cards, 86 numbered plus 36 secret, built from Japan’s March set.

• 07-17

  me05 Pitch Black closes the ordinary run at 120 cards — 84 numbered and 36 secret — carrying Japan’s May set, with 14 Mega Evolution cards. Japan’s July set, which is the one that follows this in Japanese, is not in English 2026 at all.

• 09-16

  30th Celebration arrives at 158 cards — 128 numbered and 30 secret — on the same day as Japan’s M6a. 103 cards are the same card in both languages, which makes this the first shared day in this record. It also runs a rarity table of its own: 30 Pikachu Rare, 2 Futuristic Rare, eighteen Illustration Rare, ten Special Illustration Rare, and no Uncommon at all.

• after 2026

  Japan’s July set is still untranslated when the year closes. 113 cards of M6 Storm Emerald have no English printing inside 2026 — the largest outstanding block in this record, and the reason the two pages of 2026 do not cover the same cards.

What 2026 settles in English is that the calendars have finally met. For three years the two languages ran on parallel tracks with different products; in September they print 103 identical cards on the same day. What still separates them is not scheduling but content: the anniversary set’s thirty era reprints exist in Japanese only, and the English version of that block is thirty full-art redrawings instead.