The short answer is: probably, but with a major asterisk. Americans almost certainly own more English-language Pokemon Base Set cards than collectors in any other country, based on grading submissions, trade volume, and market activity. But when you expand the question to include Japanese Base Set cards — which were printed two and a half years earlier — the picture gets far less clear. Japan dominates overall Pokemon TCG spending at 41.5% of global revenue compared to America’s 21.7%, and Japanese collectors had access to Base Set cards starting in October 1996, well before the English version hit U.S. shelves on January 9, 1999.
No official body has ever published country-by-country ownership data for Base Set cards, so anyone claiming a definitive answer is guessing. Consider this: PSA, the dominant grading service based in the United States, has graded over 92,000 Base Set Charizards alone — overwhelmingly English-language copies. On eBay, English PSA-graded Pokemon cards outnumber Japanese ones roughly two to one, with 267,316 listings versus 139,074. That volume tells us something real about where these cards ended up and who is still actively collecting them. But grading activity and ownership are not the same thing, and millions of Base Set cards sitting in shoeboxes and binders across Japan never pass through an American grading company. This article digs into the production history, market data, grading statistics, and trade flows that help answer whether Americans truly own the most Pokemon Base Set cards — and where the evidence falls short.
Table of Contents
- Who Owns the Most Pokemon Base Set Cards in the World?
- Why U.S. Grading Data Suggests American Dominance in English Base Set Ownership
- Japan’s Head Start and the Original 1996 Base Set
- Trade Flows and What Import-Export Data Reveals About Card Distribution
- The Limits of Claiming Any Country “Owns the Most” Base Set Cards
- Record-Breaking Sales and What They Tell Us About the American Collector Market
- The Future of Base Set Ownership and Shifting Global Demand
- Conclusion
- Frequently Asked Questions
Who Owns the Most Pokemon Base Set Cards in the World?
Nobody knows for certain, and that is not a cop-out answer. Wizards of the Coast, which produced the English base Set, never disclosed exact print run numbers. The Pokemon Company has not published country-level distribution breakdowns for any set, let alone the original 1999 release. What we have instead are proxy indicators: market revenue data, grading populations, import and export records, and auction results. Each of these tells part of the story, but none of them gives us a clean headcount of who owns what and where. What the proxy data does suggest is a split picture.
The United States was the primary market for English-language Pokemon cards, and in 1999 alone, Wizards of the Coast sold over one billion cards worldwide across all sets. The English Base Set was manufactured in three countries — the USA, the UK, and Australia — with the American market absorbing the largest share by a wide margin. If we are talking strictly about English Base Set cards, the U.S. is the most likely home for the majority of surviving copies. But Japan had its own Base Set printing starting in October 1996, with a collector culture that predates the American Pokemon boom by years. Japanese Base Set cards are a separate product with separate print runs, and Japan’s TCG market was valued at $2.34 billion in 2024. The honest answer is that Americans probably own the most English Base Set cards, Japanese collectors probably own the most Japanese Base Set cards, and the question of which country holds more total Base Set cards across both languages remains unanswerable with publicly available data.
Why U.S. Grading Data Suggests American Dominance in English Base Set Ownership
PSA’s population report is one of the best windows we have into where Pokemon Base Set cards are concentrated. The company has graded 92,856 Base Set Charizards, 46,290 Blastoise, and 41,972 Venusaur. These numbers are overwhelmingly English-language submissions, and PSA’s headquarters and the bulk of its customer base are in the United States. When you see nearly 93,000 graded Charizards from a single set, that reflects a collector market with enormous depth. However, grading data is a flawed measure of total ownership for several reasons. First, only a fraction of existing cards ever get submitted for grading. A collector sitting on a binder of Base Set cards in rural Ohio is not represented in PSA’s population report. Second, the grading boom accelerated dramatically during the 2020-2021 pandemic-era speculation frenzy, meaning many of those submissions reflect recent market activity rather than long-term ownership patterns.
Third, PSA is an American company, which creates an inherent geographic bias. Japanese collectors are more likely to use domestic grading services like BGS Japan or card shops that offer their own authentication, meaning Japanese Base Set ownership is systematically undercounted in PSA data. The eBay listings data reinforces this skew. English PSA-graded Pokemon cards outnumber Japanese ones by roughly two to one on the platform. But eBay is also an American-dominated marketplace. Japanese collectors buy and sell through Yahoo Auctions Japan, Mercari Japan, and local card shops far more than they use eBay. So while U.S. grading and resale data shows clear American dominance, that dominance is partly an artifact of the platforms being measured.
Japan’s Head Start and the Original 1996 Base Set
The Japanese Base Set hit shelves on October 20, 1996, a full two years and three months before the English version launched in January 1999. That gap matters enormously. By the time American kids were ripping open their first Base Set booster packs, Japanese collectors had already been buying, trading, and hoarding these cards for over two years. The Japanese market had time to develop a deep collector base before Pokemon even crossed the Pacific. Japan’s relationship with trading card games is also structurally different from America’s. Card shops are a fixture of Japanese retail culture, and the secondary market for collectible cards has been robust in Japan for decades, predating Pokemon entirely. The country’s TCG market reached $2.34 billion in 2024, slightly exceeding the U.S.
market’s $2.2 billion valuation in 2025. More specifically, Japan accounts for 41.5% of Pokemon TCG revenue globally, nearly double the U.S. share of 21.7%. That spending gap suggests Japanese collectors are not just buying — they are buying more Pokemon cards per capita than Americans. The catch is that Japanese Base Set cards and English Base Set cards are distinct products with different print qualities, different card stock, and different collector markets. A Japanese Base Set Charizard and an English Base Set Charizard are not interchangeable in the eyes of most collectors. So the question of who owns the most Base Set cards depends heavily on whether you are lumping both languages together or treating them as separate populations.
Trade Flows and What Import-Export Data Reveals About Card Distribution
One underappreciated data source is international trade records. According to Volza, the United States leads Pokemon card exports with a 58% share across 1,779 tracked shipments and also leads imports at 51% with 753 shipments. This positions the U.S. as the largest global hub for Pokemon card commerce, meaning cards flow into and out of the country at higher volumes than anywhere else. This trade data cuts both ways for the ownership question. High export volume could mean Americans are selling off their collections to international buyers, which would reduce domestic ownership over time.
High import volume could mean Americans are actively acquiring cards from overseas markets, including Japanese Base Set cards being purchased by U.S.-based collectors. The net effect is difficult to parse without more granular data, but the sheer volume of trade activity confirms that the U.S. market is the most active in the world for Pokemon card transactions. Compare this to a country like the UK or Australia, where English Base Set cards were also manufactured and distributed. Neither country appears as a significant player in global Pokemon card trade flows, despite being original production sites. The English-speaking collector market outside the U.S. is real but substantially smaller, which reinforces the idea that the majority of surviving English Base Set cards are in American hands — whether they were originally purchased domestically or acquired through the secondary market over the past 27 years.
The Limits of Claiming Any Country “Owns the Most” Base Set Cards
There is a fundamental problem with this entire question that deserves direct acknowledgment: as of March 2023, The Pokemon Company had produced 52.9 billion TCG cards total, sold across 89 countries. The Base Set is one release from 1999 (or 1996 in Japan), and its cards have been circulating through private sales, auctions, estate cleanouts, and international shipping for over a quarter century. Tracking ownership of physical objects distributed to millions of people across dozens of countries is effectively impossible without a census that no one has conducted. Cards also get destroyed. They get thrown away by parents who do not understand their value. They get damaged in floods, fires, and moves. A significant percentage of the original Base Set print run no longer exists in collectible condition, and we have no way of knowing whether attrition rates differ by country.
It is plausible that American cards survived at higher rates because the U.S. developed a stronger collector culture around Pokemon earlier, but it is equally plausible that Japanese cards survived better because Japan’s card shop culture provided better storage and trade infrastructure from the start. Another complication is the distinction between ownership and location. A Japanese Base Set Charizard purchased by an American collector on eBay is now owned by someone in the United States, but it originated in Japan. High-value Base Set cards increasingly migrate toward wealthy collectors regardless of nationality. Gary Haase, an American, holds the Guinness World Record for the most valuable Pokemon card collection at $10 million. But the largest Pokemon card collection by volume — 48,339 cards — belongs to Owen and Conner Gray in the United Kingdom. Ownership patterns do not respect national borders the way production and distribution data might suggest.
Record-Breaking Sales and What They Tell Us About the American Collector Market
The auction market for high-grade Base Set cards is dominated by American buyers and American auction houses. In December 2025, a PSA 10 First Edition Base Set Charizard sold for $550,000 at Heritage Auctions, setting a new public auction record for any Pokemon card. Heritage is a Dallas-based company, and the vast majority of its bidders are American. Previous record sales for Base Set cards have also gone through U.S.
auction houses, reinforcing the idea that the deepest pockets in the Pokemon collecting hobby belong to Americans. But record sales reflect the behavior of a tiny elite, not the broader collector base. The person who spent $550,000 on a single Charizard is not representative of typical Base Set ownership. Most Base Set cards in circulation are ungraded, well-loved copies worth between $1 and $50, sitting in collections that will never see an auction house. The auction market tells us where the money is, not where the cards are.
The Future of Base Set Ownership and Shifting Global Demand
The geographic distribution of Base Set cards is not static. As Pokemon continues to grow globally — the franchise reached 89 countries for TCG distribution — demand from newer markets is pulling cards across borders. Collectors in Southeast Asia, South America, and Europe are increasingly active in the secondary market, and online platforms make it easier than ever to buy cards internationally. Over the next decade, the concentration of Base Set cards in any single country will likely decrease as the global collector base expands.
The more interesting trend may be the growing convergence between Japanese and English Base Set collecting. American collectors who once focused exclusively on English cards are now pursuing Japanese Base Set copies for their historical significance and different aesthetic qualities. Meanwhile, Japanese collectors are buying English First Edition cards as prestige items. This cross-pollination means that national ownership patterns for Base Set cards are becoming harder to define, and the question of which country owns the most may become increasingly irrelevant as the collector community goes global.
Conclusion
Americans almost certainly own more English-language Pokemon Base Set cards than any other country’s collectors. The evidence from PSA grading populations, eBay listings, international trade flows, and the dominance of American auction houses all point in that direction. The U.S. was the largest English-language market in 1999, and it remains the most active market for buying, selling, and grading these cards today. But claiming Americans own the most Base Set cards overall requires ignoring Japan’s 2.5-year head start, its higher per-capita Pokemon TCG spending, and its 41.5% share of global Pokemon TCG revenue.
The honest conclusion is that the data does not exist to answer this question definitively. No organization tracks country-level ownership of a 27-year-old trading card set. What we can say is that the U.S. and Japan are the two dominant markets by every available measure, and the answer depends entirely on whether you are counting English cards, Japanese cards, or both. For collectors who care about this question, the practical takeaway is straightforward: if you are hunting for English Base Set cards, the American market is where you will find the most supply and the deepest competition. If you want Japanese Base Set cards, look to Japanese marketplaces first.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Pokemon Base Set cards were printed?
Exact print run numbers were never disclosed by Wizards of the Coast or The Pokemon Company. We know that in 1999 alone, over one billion Pokemon cards were sold worldwide across all sets, but the specific breakdown for the Base Set has never been made public.
When was the Pokemon Base Set released?
The Japanese Base Set was released on October 20, 1996. The English Base Set followed on January 9, 1999, produced by Wizards of the Coast. English booster packs were manufactured in the USA, UK, and Australia.
What is the most expensive Pokemon Base Set card ever sold?
A PSA 10 First Edition Base Set Charizard sold for $550,000 at Heritage Auctions in December 2025, setting the public auction record for a Pokemon card.
Who has the most valuable Pokemon card collection?
Gary Haase of the United States holds the Guinness World Record for the most valuable Pokemon card collection, valued at $10 million. The largest collection by card count belongs to Owen and Conner Gray in the UK, with 48,339 cards verified in July 2024.
How many Base Set Charizards have been graded by PSA?
PSA has graded 92,856 Base Set Charizards as of their most recent population report. They have also graded 46,290 Blastoise and 41,972 Venusaur from the same set.
Does Japan or the U.S. spend more on Pokemon cards?
Japan leads Pokemon TCG revenue at 41.5% of the global market, compared to 21.7% for the United States. However, the overall U.S. trading card game market was valued at $2.2 billion in 2025, while Japan’s collectible card game market was $2.34 billion in 2024.
