Stellar Crown felt like a return to form for the Pokémon TCG, after a fair few sets that have had disappointing pull rates—albeit this time by being an incredibly small set, with many fewer cards to collect. Now, on the verge of the next set Surging Sparks’ release, it’s a good moment to look at which Stellar Crown cards are getting the most love.
Things started going odd for the Pokémon TCG in January 2024, with Paldean Fates. This special set contained a ridiculous 88 baby shinies, and while pull-rates felt amazing, the sheer volume of cards made it utterly impossible to collect. This was followed by Temporal Forces and Twilight Masquerade, two sets with almost identical card numbers and pull rates, both with a galling one-in-five chance of receiving a secret rare or better. (Even bland ex cards were only appearing in one out of every six packs!) While this appears to be the new norm Pokémon TCG in the Scarlet & Violet era (and looks set to continue with November’s Surging Sparks), it’s still hard not to hark back to the joy of sets like Crown Zenith, and wish for better.
So it was even more galling when August’s “special” set, Shrouded Fable, then bemused everyone by featuring the lowest number of cards since the desultory Pokémon Go set in 2022, and making the good ones nightmarishly hard to find. Boy, did everyone get a lot of the same bulk.
So then came September’s Stellar Crown, and while the pull rates still sat at a sulk-inducing 20 percent, it sat at a sweet spot for size. A Goldilocks set, if you will. With a total of 175 cards, rather than the 220+ that had become the norm (and be warned, Surging Sparks has a deranged 252, with an eye-watering 191 of them before the secret rares start), it feels manageable, collectible, and most importantly, is packed with completely gorgeous cards.
Here are the cards fetching the highest prices, whether for the meta, or just because they’re so very pretty. (All prices are correct at the time of writing, but obviously are subject to rapid change.)
It’s been a long while since a gold card has troubled anyone’s wallets, let alone a Stadium card. However, it also represents something of a drop-off in prices, currently selling for just shy of $16.
Tera Pokémon are obviously a big part of the meta right now, so a Stadium card that lets you load your bench with eight cards when you have one in play is a huge deal. Especially if it’s used in tandem with an attack that’s boosted by the numbers on the bench (click next!).
However, this does also seem to mark some sort of return for gold cards, given that just behind it in value is the gold Bravery Charm at $11, and indeed the card you’ll see next.
There was a time when gold cards were heartily sought after, but by the end of the Sword & Shield era, people were just rather fed up. That was usually because the art was always so muted, compared to other versions in a set, and that the market was saturated. However, this year the three-star rarity seems to have gained a bit more traction again, and this card’s fetching almost $22, two months after release.
This is then boosted by Terapagos’s arrival in the TCG via Stellar Crown, and this card’s wild power when combined with that Area Zero Underdepths Stadium. 30 damage per card on your bench, with a possible eight cards total, means a whopping 240 attack just for two Energy. It’s a card so powerful it adds the caveat that you can’t use it on your turn in the first round.
But then it goes even further, offering a 180 attack with a follow-up that Basic Pokémon can’t damage it in the next turn, albeit for the tricky requirement of a Grass, Water and Lightning energy.
I guess put this down to the ol’ PTCG tradition of any card with a full-art female character fetching bigger prices.
Sure, it’s an interesting Trainer, letting you take an extra Prize Card under extremely specific circumstances, but you know. It’s also a really beautiful piece of art! But even so, $25 seems like a big ask.
This makes me so happy! I love Garvantula. For reasons that I genuinely cannot fathom, I adore every spider-based Pokémon, despite being a complete baby about real-life spiders invading my space. Spinarak is my OG fave spidey-type, obviously, but Garvantula just looks so cuddly!
Anyway, this serious analysis aside, this SIR for the Garvantula ex is a really special piece of art, that embraces the color palette of the Tera types, and develops it into something stunning.
It’s also stupidly powerful. If you’re facing another ex (or V), this does 220 damage for two Energy, and no consequence or cost! Then get another of those multi-Energy mixes and you can deliver 180 damage, although this time you lose all three Energy, but also stop your opponent using an Item card.
It’s so pretty, and I have to stop myself spending $26 to get one.
I have very strong feelings about Pokémon made out of food. It’s gross. So I have no time for Dachsbun.
However, given the card is currently changing hands for $30, I’m clearly in the minority. But honestly, I don’t even much like the art on this one—it’s all a bit too glossy, the lighting makes no sense whatsoever.
However, as a healer, it’s crazy. If you’re playing a deck with a lot of evolving cards, this’ll heal all damage across all of them (at the cost of their Energy), simply by being put into play. It doesn’t even need to hit the Active Spot to achieve this. Then it’ll also deal out 130 damage, with added Confusion, for just two colorless Energy.
And here’s your waifu card, the SIR version of Lacey, with a wonderfully detailed piece of art, on a card that’s…fine in play? It’s a good hail mary card, when your opponent’s ahead, and you just need a new hand of cards.
It’s fetching $31 at the moment, down from a ludicrous high on launch of $125. Please, if nothing else, hear that you should never buy a card in the first couple of weeks of a set’s release. Everyone thinks the SIR pretty girl is going to be the next Iono or Miriam, buys super-high, and then the price crashes.
I’m just so pleased this art has proven so popular. It’s bloody marvellous!
It’s also a brilliant card to have in pretty much any deck, because if you can get that two-step evolution done on your bench, you can now attach an extra Energy every single turn, while also healing 30 damage each time, and it’s damned hard for your opponent to do anything about it. Not least with that ridiculous 330HP.
Then, after you’ve had it sitting on your bench supporting the rest of your deck, you can bring it into play to deliver a wild 30x attack for every Energy you’ve got attached to anything else.
All that makes for a card that’s still fetching over $36, only losing $8 from its initial peak.
This card, and the next, demonstrate the continued power of those Base Set starters, almost 30 years later. By the TCG’s own ranking, this is only considered a single-star rarity, a card that should be showing up more frequently than the SIRs below it on the list. Yet here it is, in third place, with an asking price of $40 for a small piece of cardboard.
It certainly helps that Orca’s art is utterly stunning, yet another example of how it’s inexplicable madness that The Pokémon Company doesn’t sell poster-sized versions of these art works in its stores. I’d put this on the wall in an instant.
As a card for your deck, it’s nothing special. It’s nice that it adds a 20HP heal to its 20 attack, but that comes at the cost of needing two Energy for a Basic card with such low damage. But honestly, play this and your opponent will be so distracted, craning their neck to get a better look at it, that you’ll put them right off their strategy.
Poor Bulbasaur, always in third place, behind Squirtle and the all-conquering Charmander. There’s no special Charmander in this set, however, nor even a Charizard, meaning Squirtle gets second place, and first place is a mystery for once!
It’s a lovely card, and it’s great how both this and Bulbasaur feature Pidgey, but come on people, the Bulbasaur art is objectively, scientifically better. That’s taking nothing away from artist Saborteri, because this too is gorgeous.
It’s not often you see two different attacks on a Basic card like Squirtle, so that one-Energy 50:50 chance of preventing damage is a useful device if you’re forced to start this in your Active Spot, before being able to evolve. Or for a silly two Energy, you can do a measly 20 damage.
It’s ahead of Bulbasaur by four bucks, currently going for $44.
Woah.
This is a card of such exceptional detail that it comes close to rivaling Lost Origin’s Giratina V SR! (Which, by the way, has seen a recent revival, currently going for $400 or more.) This is a more subtle affair, though, and I think tempered by its rather twee pastel vibes, but that’s not holding it back much. This card is still, two months on, fetching over $94.
Make sure to enlarge that image above to appreciate the incredible effort from artist Saboteri (yup, the same person responsible for the Squirtle!).
That price is a fair chunk down from its initial high of $150, and part of a more gradual decline following its initial plunge to $115. Will it level out, or continue dropping? I sort of suspect the latter, and imagine this’ll find its base at around $60. Cards of this much artistic complexity tend to keep more value, but it’s hard to argue that Terapagos has gained some sort of mass fan adoration in the way Giratina can claim. It is, after all, a hairy turtle.
In play, this card is exactly the same as the gold version at the start of this list, as indeed is the $8 Double Rare version. Although, given its popularity in the meta, you won’t find it cheaper than that for the moment.
Still, at more than double anything else in the set, this is clearly the card to pull from Stellar Crown. Get it graded at a PSA 10 and that price goes up to $334.
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