The History of Pokémon Cards in Japan and the West

October 20, 1996. Media Factory releases the first Expansion Pack and Starter Pack in Japan: 102 cards, and on their backs the game's full original name, POCKET MONSTERS CARD GAME, lettered around the Poké Ball. Five days earlier, promotional Pikachu and Jigglypuff cards had been given away peeled from the pages of CoroCoro magazine, so Japanese readers had started collecting before the first pack was sold. Every Japanese set of the first era carries that first back, the Original, Gym and Neo series included.

Japan was not even first by much on paper. Bandai's Pokémon Carddass vending machine cards had reached Japan in September 1996, a month before the card game, and Carddass was never produced outside Japan. The trading card game was the export; the vending cards stayed home. That story has its own page in this shelf.

January 9, 1999. Wizards of the Coast releases Base Set in the United States, the same 102 cards, with a new back of its own: the Pokémon logo twice, the ball turning in a white swirl on blue. That back, not Japan's, became the standard for English and every other language the game appears in, and it has kept the same illustration ever since.

The Western printing also brought a Western idea: the 1st Edition stamp. Wizards marked its first print runs from Base Set onward. Japan, which had been printing the game for over two years by then, had no 1st Edition runs at all. The English Base Set even gained a transitional printing Japan never had, the unstamped early print collectors call Shadowless, which keeps the first printing's layout without the stamp.

July 2001. Japan changes its card back for the only time in the game's history. Pokémon Card VS, released July 19, 2001, is the first expansion printed with the current back: a thick gold border, a rainbow burst, and seven Energy orbs for the seven types the game launched with. The last old back expansion, Darkness, and to Light, had closed the first design's run that April.

The same release begins Japanese 1st Edition marks, which is why no old back card carries one. The timing is the story in miniature: Japan adopted 1st Edition printings in 2001 just as the Western runs were winding down, and after Nintendo took control of the game in the West, English 1st Edition runs were rejected altogether. The two traditions passed each other going opposite directions.

Each side reprints on its own calendar. Pokémon Web reprinted cards from the first four Japanese expansions in October 2001, wearing the new gold back, and the Expansion Pack 20th Anniversary set reprinted the 1996 cards in an updated layout in September 2016. Old artwork on a gold back is a later Japanese printing, never a 1996 one.

The split is written into organized play. Play! Pokémon's tournament handbook states that Japanese cards are considered marked for its purposes, because their backs differ from the backs of all other Pokémon trading cards. Under the print, though, the cards agree: Japanese and international cards are the same 63 by 88 millimetres. The difference between the two traditions is entirely on the surface, and the surface is exactly what a collector reads first.

What no source for this page contains is a publisher's explanation of motive for keeping the backs apart. The documented story is the sequence itself, and this page prints the sequence, not a guess.