The Pokémon World Championships run from 28 to 30 August 2026 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, with Championship Sunday moving to the Chase Center. Four promo cards come out of the event. For most collectors, though, the date that matters is 21 August, a week earlier, when local stores start handing out the one card you can still get without a plane ticket.
Here is what exists, how each card is obtained, and what the previous years suggest they will be worth.
The four cards
The whole slate was revealed at the closing ceremony of the North America International Championships on 14 June. Note the prefix change: promos have moved from SVP to MEP, for Mega Evolution Promos.
| Card | Number | How you get it |
|---|---|---|
| Pikachu | MEP 093 | Play in a Worlds Celebration store tournament, 21 to 30 August |
| Pikachu, WINNER stamp | MEP 093 variant | Win your age division at one of those store tournaments |
| Rayquaza, PXP stamp | Ascended Heroes 153/217 | Attend Worlds or PokémonXP with a badge |
| Paradise Resort | MEP 092 | Competitor welcome kit only |
Two details are worth knowing before you go hunting. The Pikachu does not carry an applied stamp at all: the 2026 World Championships logo is printed into the artwork at bottom right. And the artwork itself features Gardevoir, a nod to Riley McKay's winning deck from 2025. That is a small tradition, each year's Pikachu references the previous year's champion deck.
The Rayquaza is not a Black Star Promo either. It is a stamped reprint of a card from Ascended Heroes, the 295-card set that landed on 30 January. The underlying card is common and cheap. The stamp is the entire story.
The one date most people get wrong
The Worlds Celebration store tournaments run 21 to 30 August, not 24 to 30. PokeBeach published the later date on the day of the reveal and has never corrected it, and it has been copied widely since. The official Pokémon article says 21 August, the UK version says the same, and the Play! Pokémon event locator already lists sanctioned events on 22 and 23 August, which could not exist if the window opened on the 24th.
Anyone who plays gets the Pikachu while supplies last. Winners of each age division get the stamped version, which means three per store event at most, one each for Junior, Senior and Masters. New this year, TCG winners also receive a Worlds Celebration deck box and sleeves.
That three-per-store figure is worth sitting with, because it is not quite what it sounds like. One player last year reported being the only entrant in the Senior division at their store and receiving the WINNER card without playing a single match. The stamp rewards showing up in a thin division at least as often as it rewards winning.
What a stamp is worth: 14 times the card
This is the number to keep in mind, and it comes from last year's version of the exact same card.
The 2025 Worlds Celebration Pikachu, same artwork, same print, trades at $8.59 in its plain participation form. The WINNER-stamped copy trades at $120.45. That is a 14x spread created by nothing but a stamp, on cards that came out of the same events on the same weekends.
How that gap has moved is the more useful part. Both cards have fallen since June. The stamped one is down about 4%, the plain one down about 14%, so the multiple grew because the cheap card sagged rather than because the stamp gained ground. Read over three months, the stamped card is up 4% and the plain one down 5%.
One caveat on how firm that $120 really is. PriceCharting rates the stamped card at roughly one sale a week, and every recorded sale since May 7 happened on a single marketplace, so the tight $114 to $122 band rests on one venue.
So if you are going to a store tournament, the participation card is a nice souvenir worth a few dollars. The one to actually chase is the division win.
Why the Rayquaza is probably not a $300 card
Competitor promos hold real value. Recent Paradise Resort and Champions Festival prints sit between roughly $116 and $413 ungraded depending on the year, with staff versions running higher and top-cut and Champion versions running into the thousands.
It would be easy to assume the PXP Rayquaza slots into that tier. It should not, and the reason is simple. What supports those prices is the invite list: a competitor promo is scarce because only about 3,000 people qualify. The Rayquaza goes to every badged attendee, competitors and spectators alike, across a three-day convention. It will be the highest-print Worlds promo ever made.
Model it as a roughly ten-dollar card with a stamp premium, not as a competitor promo. Collector sentiment on the forums is bullish, which given the print maths is a reason for caution rather than confidence.
We will know soon enough. As of today there are no listings at all for the PXP Rayquaza or for either English MEP card, on TCGplayer, PriceCharting or Cardmarket. None of the three has been handed out yet: the store tournaments do not open until 21 August and Worlds itself is 28 to 30 August. Anyone quoting you a price for these right now is inventing it.
One confusion is already circulating and it is worth naming. Listings between roughly $120 and $250 for a "WINNER Pikachu" are the 2025 card, SVP 225. No 2026 winner has been crowned yet, so an English MEP 093 with a WINNER stamp cannot exist in anyone's hands.
The Japanese Pikachu is a different card economically
Japan distributes its version of the Worlds Pikachu, numbered 133/M-P, at Pokémon Card Gym events from 20 June to 30 September. That is a 103-day window against ten days for the English card, and one copy per participant for anyone who plays an event to the end.
The practical consequence is that the Japanese version will be far more common than the English one, and its price shows it. Raw copies ask roughly $8 to $13 in completed sales, with outliers to about $22, and bulk lots work out at around $7 a card. European buyers on Cardmarket pay more, a €13.70 trend against a 30-day average nearer €18, and that line is falling week by week. It should keep falling: the tap stays open until 30 September. If you are buying rather than earning, know which one you are buying.
One claim to retire
You will read that the Rayquaza is the first Pokémon promo ever given out for simply attending Worlds. It is a good line and it is not true.
The 2004 Tropical Wind had a spectator version with no stamp, and it is the only one in the series that did. From 2005 onward every Worlds card was stamped. The accurate version of the claim is that this is the first in twenty-two years, and the first tied to a paid attendee badge. The wall had already been softening anyway: since 2023, regular attendees could earn a Paradise Resort by accumulating 500 Championship Points in side events.
What you cannot do on site
If your plan involves flipping anything at the venue, read this first. The event registration site states plainly that buying or selling of any kind is prohibited at PokémonXP, including in the Collect and Trade area. That area is for trading official Pokémon items, with registered Trader tables and Explorer browsing, and no commerce.
Separately, PokeBeach reported in May that TPCi has barred partnered vendors from selling graded slabs, items over $1,000 and most Japanese Pokémon Center products at its own events, Worlds included. That report is credible and has been corroborated by a first-hand account from the North America International Championships in June, but it is worth being precise: The Pokémon Company has never announced it publicly, and no Pokémon-owned page confirms it.
For scale, what the old trophy cards do
Worth remembering when a modern promo gets called a grail. The 1997 and 1998 Japanese trophy Pikachu cards, of which fewer than ten of each are listed on the PSA census, sold at Heritage in December 2025 for $450,000 (Gold No. 1 Trainer, PSA 9), $275,000 (Silver No. 2) and $225,000 (Bronze No. 3). A CGC Pristine 10 Kangaskhan from the 1998 Parent/Child Mega Battle took $640,507 at Goldin in March 2026.
Even the participation cards of that era are in another league: the 1999 Tropical Wind, of which 586 were distributed, sits around $6,451 ungraded. And a common error worth avoiding, it was never distributed in Hawaii.
Modern Worlds promos are collectibles. Those are artefacts.
Prices cited are market values from completed sales and move constantly; they were re-checked on 5 August 2026 against PriceCharting, the TCGplayer pricing API and Cardmarket, with asking prices kept separate from sold prices throughout. Dates and distribution rules come from Pokémon's official event pages except where attributed otherwise.