Price Trends: Pokémon Cards Climbing in Price - 05/20/2025
By Peter Day •
We want you to have the best information available when you price cards on the TCGplayer Marketplace. So to help you get the most from your inventory, we’ve put together a downloadable CSV report of Pokémon cards that have dramatically increased in Market Price in the past 30 days.
(Note: This report only considers Near Mint copies of cards with at least five sales between April 19 and May 18, 2025.)
Here are ten highlights from that report. First, we have the five cards that gained the most value in the past 30 days after starting with a Market Price of $30 or less.
Top 5 Price Increases—PKMN Cards $30 or Less
#5 Moltres & Zapdos & Articuno GX (Full Art)
- Set: Hidden Fates
- Increase: +$13.46
- Current Market Price: $36.37
This one’s a simple buyout. On May 10, one buyer bought 40 copies of this Ultra Rare, the second-most valuable card in Hidden Fates (the main set, not the Shiny Vault subset). At time of writing there are no Near Mint copies available for less than $30, so the buyout was successful, at least for now.
- Set: Sword & Shield Base Set
- Increase: +$14.20
- Current Market Price: $17.75
Air Balloon inflated in price on May 4 when The Pokémon Company revealed that Air Balloon would be reprinted in the Japanese set Black Bolt. The reprint means this gold Secret Rare version will likely be legal in Standard in the near future, so speculators are grabbing up copies on the assumption that players will want them to bling out their decks.
- Set: Unified Minds
- Increase: +$14.73
- Current Market Price: $32.94
Back-to-back buyouts on May 13 and 14 pushed this card, the base version of Raichu & Alolan Raichu-GX, over $30 for the first time. Even after the spike, this is far from the most valuable card in Unified Minds. It’s not even the most valuable version of Raichu & Alolan Raichu-GX—both the Rainbow Rare and Alternate-Art versions outclass it. But at this point, so many cards in the set have exploded in price that speculators have to scroll way down to find anything that still has room to grow.
- Set: Prize Pack Series Cards
- Increase: +$20.15
- Current Market Price: $21.92
In retrospect, the Prize Pack Series version of Neutralization Zone may have been underpriced when it first appeared on the Marketplace. Only a little more than a dozen copies have sold since February, but the card is so scarce that those few sales were enough to push its Market Price from $2 to over $20. It helps that players don’t have any better options to beautify their decks—if they’re running Neutralization Zone as their ACE SPEC, they can either go with this version or the original printing from Shrouded Fable.
- Set: Cosmic Eclipse
- Increase: +$23.24
- Current Market Price: $39.51
Much like Raichu & Alolan Raichu-GX, this base-rarity TAG TEAM card got targeted for a massive buyout on May 10 which pushed its Market Price to a new all-time high. Cosmic Eclipse is hardly an underrated set—it boasts ten cards with triple-digit price tags—so speculators who want to find “hidden gems” they can drive up in price are having to look farther afield.
Next, these are the five cards that gained the most value in the past 30 days after starting with a Market Price over $30.
Top 5 Price Increases—PKMN Cards Over $30
- Set: XY Promos
- Increase: +$47.20
- Current Market Price: $149.84
“Alternate-art” and “valuable” are more or less synonyms when it comes to Pokémon cards these days, but The Pokémon Company didn’t start inviting artists to do full-card original illustrations in their personal styles every set until fairly recently. Before the last year of the Sun & Moon Series, these kinds of cards were much less common. So early examples of what today would be Illustration Rares or Special Illustration Rares have become much more expensive as collectors reevaluate these older cards according to modern tastes.
Four such examples are the promo cards from the four Blue & Red Collections that released with Generations in 2016 to celebrate 20 years of the Pokémon franchise. This Venusaur-EX, along with Charizard-EX, Blastoise-EX, and Pikachu-EX, have all grown organically in the last month as the affordable copies have all been snatched up and no new copies have replaced them.
#4 M Gengar EX (121 Secret Rare)
- Set: Phantom Forces
- Increase: +$47.43
- Current Market Price: $181.89
Many “M” Pokémon cards have spiked in the past few months as players gear up for the return of Mega Evolution, both in the video games in Pokémon Legends: Z-A, and in the TCG in the Mega Evolution Series. M Gengar-EX 121 is the latest example of that trend. Its Market Price started creeping up in March after the Pokémon Day announcement that Mega Evolution Pokémon ex were coming later this year, and spiked on hard on April 29 when a buyout pushed the average number of copies per buyer to 4.0.
- Set: Team Rocket
- Increase: +$54.01
- Current Market Price: $265.63
If one card deserved to spike after The Glory of Team Rocket brought Rocket-themed Pokémon cards back to prominence, it was Rocket’s Mewtwo. But if two cards deserved to spike, the second one would be Dark Charizard. This Holo Rare version of Dark Charizard racked up three sales during TCGplayer’s “Mayhem” promotion on May 16th, and given its age and scarcity (25 years old, extremely rare), those few sales were enough to bump up its Market Price another 20%.
#2 Reshiram & Charizard GX - SM201
- Set: SM Promos
- Increase: +$60.76
- Current Market Price: $149.96
Reshiram and Zekrom are having a small renaissance with collectors thanks to the imminent release of Black Bolt and White Flare in both Japan and North America. All together, these two sets will feature the entire Unova Pokédex, with all 156 Pokémon getting an Illustration Rare or Special Illustration Rare version.
As the mascots of Gen V and the namesakes of these two sets, Reshiram and Zekrom are back in the spotlight, and many cards featuring them have moved up in the past month. This promo card is one of them. Available in the Reshiram & Charizard-GX Figure Collection, this card has flown under the radar for most of its life the way most guaranteed promo cards do. But the recent Pokémon card boom together with the general growth in the Pokémon card collector scene over the past six years have made this promo roughly 6 times more valuable today than the entire box it came in was in 2019.
- Set: Black and White
- Increase: +$78.43
- Current Market Price: $133.49
No Reshiram card has grown more this year than this guy, one of the first Reshiram cards ever printed. Reshiram 113 began 2025 at a little under $35. Now its Market Price has blown past the $100 mark, but at time of writing you won’t find a Near Mint copy on TCGplayer for less than $240. Most of that growth looks organic, too—there just aren’t many copies that have survived the years since 2011 in Near Mint condition.
By selling these cards online, you can reach a broad audience of customers who are willing to pay what these cards are truly worth. Download the May 2025 Price Trends Report to review every Pokémon card that went up in value this month. Then list those cards on TCGplayer so your inventory can do more for your business.
Download the Pokémon Price Trends Report
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