Why Simplified Chinese Cards Are So Recent

The format is four years old. The exclusive part is much younger

There is a fact about Simplified Chinese Pokémon cards that changes how you read everything else, including every price on this site: the format is new. Not new in the way a 2024 set is new — new in the way that the entire category has a start date you can point at.

Pokémon Trading Card Game launched in Simplified Chinese on 28 October 2022. The first release was not a new set at all. It was roughly 1,000 cards drawn from the existing Sun & Moon era, sold through three booster packs and a starter deck, plus the play accessories that go with them — sleeves, deck boxes, binders. It was a translation and a market entry, not a new design. There were no cards you could only get in Chinese, because there was nothing yet for the Chinese market to be exclusive about.

That is the part worth holding on to. The two things people mean by “Simplified Chinese cards” started at different times, and they are about a year apart:

• The format — Simplified Chinese printing as a thing that exists — started in October 2022.
• The exclusive cards — artwork and treatments commissioned for the Chinese release and printed nowhere else — started in 2023.

So the thing this site actually sells has a history of about three years. That is short enough to describe in a table, which is what the rest of this article does.

Where these 42 cards actually come from

Here is the whole catalogue by the year the cards were released. This is not a sample — it is every Simplified Chinese-exclusive card we currently hold at PSA 10.

Two numbers come out of that table and both are worth sitting with. The first: 36 of the 42 cards are from 2025 or later. The second: 2025 alone produced 26 of them — more than four times the 2023 and 2024 total put together.

There is also a zero in that table, and it is the most telling figure of all. Nothing in 2022. The year the format launched is the one year with no exclusive cards in it at all.

2025 is the year that explains the catalogue

A year that produces four times the output of the two before it is not a gentle trend. Looking at what actually shipped that year, the reason is structural rather than sentimental: 2025 is when the commissioned-art programmes started.

Gem Pack is the largest single source in this catalogue — 19 of the 42 cards — and its first three volumes all landed in 2025. The series is an all-foil mini set built specifically for the mainland China market, with artwork commissioned for the Chinese release and no English or Japanese equivalent. Vol. 2 arrived on 16 May 2025 and Vol. 3 on 26 September 2025, six months apart, each with its own commissioned artwork and its own checklist.

The other half of 2025 was Collect 151, which did something the Japanese and English versions of the same set did not do: it commissioned four Pikachu Art Rares, one per edition, all drawn by the same illustrator. Journey shipped 17 January 2025 — the first of the four. Those four cards are the top of our price ladder today, and all four are from a single year.

Put those two programmes together and 2025 stops looking like a spike. It is the year the Chinese market stopped being a translation and started being a commissioning programme.

The timeline, in order

Dates that matter, with the source for each.

Three and a half years between the launch of the format and the release of the most recent card here. For comparison, the Japanese card game has been running since 1996.

What a three-year-old category means before you buy

This is not an argument that the cards are early or undervalued — we do not make that argument about anything, and the data here does not support one. It is a description of what kind of thing you are looking at, which is more useful when you are choosing.

• There is no long history to read. The oldest exclusive card in this catalogue is from 2023. If you want to know how a card of this type behaves over ten years, nobody can tell you, because no card of this type has existed for ten years.
• The supply of any given artwork is fixed and small. Each volume is a limited print run, and no reprint has been confirmed for any of them. That is not a promise about future availability in either direction — it is simply the current state of the record.
• Almost everything arrives at once. Because output is concentrated in the last two years, the catalogue is dominated by recent releases rather than distributed across decades. Ranking lists behave the same way: the ten most popular cards we track are all from 2024 or later.

The practical version: when you compare two Simplified Chinese cards, you are comparing two things built under the same programme in the same few years, not an old card against a new one. A 2026 card and a 2025 card sit in the same generation — an Applin from Gem Pack Vol. 6 has more in common with a Vol. 3 card than either has with anything from 2022, because in 2022 there was nothing of this kind at all. For a fuller picture of what each of them actually is, the 42-card list sets out every card with its code, set, rarity and illustrator.

Frequently asked questions

When did Simplified Chinese Pokémon cards start?

The Simplified Chinese version of the Pokémon TCG went on sale on 28 October 2022, with around 1,000 cards selected from existing Sun & Moon sets. It was a localisation of an existing card pool, not a new set, and it contained no cards that existed only in Chinese.

When did the first Simplified Chinese-exclusive cards come out?

The first exclusive cards in our catalogue are from 2023, about a year after the format launched. Meaningful output did not begin until 2025, when the commissioned-art programmes started — Gem Pack and Collect 151 together account for most of what exists.

Why are almost all Simplified Chinese-exclusive cards so recent?

Because the format is recent and the exclusive programmes are more recent still. 2025 alone produced 26 of the 42 cards we hold; the year the format launched, 2022, produced none of them.

Is a newer Simplified Chinese card worth less than an older one?

Not in any simple way, and it is worth being careful here. The oldest exclusive card in this catalogue is from 2023, so there is no long price history for anything in the category to be measured against. What drives the differences between cards is which artwork it is and which programme commissioned it, not how many years old it is.

Does every Simplified Chinese release have exclusive cards?

No. Some releases are localisations with nothing unique to them — which is why the catalogue is smaller than the number of sets released. What makes a card interesting to us is the commissioned artwork, and only some releases have it.

Sources