Elaborating further on what I teased in this post. This is a WIP (work in progress) as I plan to work on it further and refine it hopefully with further community input and more factual sources.
By the end my goal is to come up with an actual estimated number for each set released from base set through Sun and Moon and further show the implications of how many chase cards that may result in for each given set.
I will try to clearly call out all facts as such and all opinions/assumptions as such to keep this as unbiased and scientific as possible. Italicized points I am calling out for your help so feel free to chip in!
Bold and/or underlines are just to call out important info.
Facts:
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Through March 2017 over 23.6 billion cards have been shipped worldwide. Official Pokemon Source
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Through March 2017 we had 72 sets with sun and moon releasing 2-1-17. Bulbapedia Source
(If anyone has other official sources for print runs from Pokemon themselves feel free to share!)
This plot includes some questionable sources taken as true for this exercise
I feel this is a safe assumption given that they jive with the official Pokemon number and I speculate they came from official Pokemon sources at the times they were published.
Here is a plot with various print run estimates I took from several sources I found on the web that had times attributed to them. The red point is the direct from Pokemon data point.
The earliest sources from 1999 I feel were wild ass guesses by the media that well undershot the reality.
Assumptions:
ASSUME we had an even split between English/Non English since the beginning. (anyone have input on this assumption - i.e. which way it would skew in actuality? I assume English would outnumber foreign but am not entirely sure)
We would therefore have 23.6/2 or 11.8 billion English cards printed across 72 sets.
Further ASSUME we had an equal distribution between each and every set. (We all know this isn’t true)
That would equate to 11.8 B / 72 or ~164 million cards for each and every set.
We can essentially take this 164 million card amount as an absolute floor on the more popular sets (later XY and early WOTC) and use it as a absolute ceiling on the least popular sets (ex era, DP era, HGSS). We can ASSUME the very most popular set like base set were likely at least an order of magnitude higher print run wise which leads to 1.6 billion cards and some of the least popular sets likely have print runs half this or less. Let’s be conservative and put a floor of 80 million cards for the lowest print run. This would be on par with “The Dark” set for Magic TCG which had 75 million cards printed for a set released in 1994.
I honestly think the very highest set and the very lowest set could fall outside these bounds and I will work to try and narrow that down if I get more data points from official sources.
For anyone thinking 1.6 B as being too high for a single set, here is a source from worlds 2016 time frame that said 2.1 B cards had been shipped the past year. Also taking the original 23.6 B source as fact that already puts us near 1 B cards per year on average. We know that recent sets like Evolutions and early sets like Base-Jungle-Fossil could have easily achieved these 1B + numbers alone.
Especially given our source that put 2001 print numbers at 12 billion cards.
Note that by the end of 2001 only 10 sets existed all made by WOTC. That essentially means through neo revelation we averaged an astonishing 1B cards per set!
More Facts: For base/jungle/fossil we had 11 cards per pack, holos in 1/3 packs and 36 packs per box. Base and fossil each had 15 holos obtainable by packs and jungle had 16. Recall that Machamp was only in the 2 player starters.
Assuming 1.6 billion cards in base set would lead to 1.6 B * 1/3 * 1/11 * 1/15 so 3.23 million of each base holo. Here is a source from 1999 stating 2 million 2 player starter decks were sold at that point. This does nothing to estimate the split between base 1st/shadowless/unlimited/1999-2000. I would also guess this number is a lowball for base.
I have heard of an intended 10% 1st edition print run for WOTC sets? (Any thoughts/help here?)
I also heard that for base it ended up being less than that as they ultimately made much more unlimited product than they would have originally intended/guessed.
Let’s go ahead with the ASSUMPTION of 10% 1st edition for jungle/fossil.
3.23 million of each holo for fossil = > 323 thousand of each 1st edition holo
3.02 million of each holo for jungle = > 302 thousand of each 1st edition holo.
Put another way this leads to 160 million 1st edition cards or 160 M * 1/11 * 1/36 400,000 + booster boxes of 1st edition product for each set and 4,000,000 booster boxes worth of total product overall (not taking into account blisters, theme decks, promo prints etc.)
For a lower print gold star set like Team Rocket Returns my assumptions would lead to potentially as few as 80 million cards in that set.
We have 3 gold stars in that set and 9 cards per pack. 1 gold star per 2 boxes. So 80 M * 1/9 * 1/36 ~ 247,000 booster boxes.
247k * 1/3 * 1/2 ~ 41,000 of each gold star treeko, mudkip and torchic.
I am working on accumulating good numbers from newer releases on pull rates so I can estimate cards such as hyper rare zard as well as evolutions mega zard.