Pokemon Produced Over 9 Billion Cards Last Year

thegamer.com:

If you need a single figure to help understand the sheer scale of the current Pokemon TCG craze, let it be this: in the last year, The Pokemon Company has printed over nine billion cards. That is over one fifth of all Pokemon cards ever printed in the game's 25-year history.

In the same period, it has shifted an extra 60 million copies of its games. As these numbers relate to the year from March 2021 to March 2022, it includes the four titles released in that window, Legends: Arceus, Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl, Unite, and New Pokemon Snap, as well as older titles like Sword & Shield, Pokken, and Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon.

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According to The Pokemon Company's Japanese corporate website, and spotted by Serebii in a post on Reset Era, it was confirmed that 43.2 billion cards have been produced and over 440 million copies of the video games have been sold overall. According to Serebii, who compared it with last year's numbers, that works out to 9.1 billion cards produced, and 60 million games sold.

However, it isn't clear what the Pokemon TCG numbers actually represent. Though by now the vast majority of cards produced would have been by the Pokemon Company, it wasn't responsible for the game's first few international expansions. Those were produced by Magic: The Gathering's Wizards of the Coast until EX Ruby & Sapphire in 2003, which means the true number could be higher if WotC's contributions are not being counted.

Regardless, printing one fifth of all cards ever released in the last year is ridiculously impressive. There have been lots of expansions released between March 2021 and 2022, including Chilling Reign, Evolving Skies, Fusion Strike, Brilliant Stars,