Worlds 2026: dates, venues, and the one date that matters to you
The 2026 Pokémon World Championships run Friday to Sunday, August 28 to 30, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, with Sunday’s finals moving across town to the Chase Center. It is the city’s second turn hosting Worlds — the 2016 championships were held at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis, on a scale that would not recognise what the event has become. Running alongside it is PokémonXP, a new official fan convention built around panels, signings and exhibitors rather than competitive play, sharing a badge and a weekend with the tournament for the first time. The Giants are in on it too, with a Pokémon Worlds Night and a drone show at Oracle Park on August 27. None of which you can attend on a whim: multi-day passes went on sale back in September 2025, and single-day passes were allocated from an interest list that closed on June 18 and drew from registrants in mid-July. The date that actually matters to most collectors is a different one, and it is closer. Play! Pokémon stores run 2026 Worlds Celebration tournaments from August 21 to August 30, and everyone who enters one gets a promo card.
The four promo cards, ranked by whether you can actually get one
Four Pokémon TCG promos are attached to Worlds 2026, and they sit at wildly different points on the availability curve. The Pikachu, MEP 093, goes to every participant at a Worlds Celebration tournament at a local store, which makes it the one nearly anyone reading this can hold by the end of the month. A WINNER-stamped version of the same Pikachu goes to the winner of each age division at each of those tournaments — one copy per division, per store, per event. The PXP-stamped Rayquaza goes to every badged attendee at Worlds and PokémonXP, which is a large number of people by ordinary standards and a small one by Pokémon standards. And Paradise Resort, MEP 092, goes into competitor welcome kits — meaning you either qualified for the World Championships or you are buying it from someone who did. Everything below is organised in that order, because that is the order that decides what you will pay.
The Pikachu: Worlds Celebration tournaments, August 21 to 30
This is the accessible one, and the mechanism is refreshingly simple. From August 21 to August 30, Play! Pokémon stores host 2026 Worlds Celebration tournaments, and participating Trainers earn the Pikachu promo — a card carrying the World Championships 2026 logo and a San Francisco-inspired background, with Gardevoir behind Pikachu. That last detail is a nod to Riley McKay of Canada, who won the 2025 Masters Division title in Anaheim with Gardevoir ex and Munkidori; the Worlds Pikachu has taken to pairing the host city with the previous year’s winning deck. DOM illustrated it, as they did the 2025 print. Entry is the only requirement — you do not have to win, or be good, or bring a competitive deck, and the events run for the Trading Card Game, VGC and Pokémon GO alike. Find one through the Pokémon Event Locator by searching the event name “2026 Worlds Celebration.” Two honest caveats. The card is while supplies last and available on a first-come, first-served basis, so a store with a busy league on the first Saturday may run out; go early in the window rather than late. And promotional material beyond the card is at each store’s discretion, so what your local shop hands out may not match what someone posts online.
The WINNER stamp, and the new accessories
Win your age division — Junior, Senior or Masters — at a Worlds Celebration tournament and you take home the same Pikachu with a variant treatment: the Play! Pokémon logo sits at the lower right of the artwork, in the place the World Championships logo occupies on the participation print. The arithmetic on that is worth sitting with. Every entrant gets the standard card; three copies of the stamped one exist per tournament, one per division. New for 2026, winners also get physical prizes rather than just the card, which is the first time league-level winners have been given exclusive accessories: Trading Card Game winners receive a Worlds Celebration deck box and card sleeves, while VGC and Pokémon GO winners get a themed screen cleaner. If you have ever wanted a genuine reason to enter a local tournament, a card that is roughly three hundred times scarcer than the one everyone else is going home with is a reasonable one.
The PXP Rayquaza: a one-dollar card with an expensive stamp
Every badged attendee at Worlds and PokémonXP receives an Ascended Heroes Rayquaza carrying a PXP stamp in the corner — the first time general attendees have been handed a promo card simply for turning up rather than for competing. The underlying card is deliberately unremarkable: a 120 HP Basic Dragon illustrated by nagimiso, with Breakthrough Assault and Dragon Claw, card 153 of Ascended Heroes, and our data has the ordinary unstamped print at about 31 cents. That is the entire point and the entire risk. The stamp is carrying one hundred percent of the value, which makes the badge count the whole supply question, and nobody outside The Pokémon Company knows that number yet. Attendance will land far above the competitor pool that receives Paradise Resort and far below the nationwide store network handing out Pikachu, which puts this card squarely in the middle of the four and makes it the one whose price is hardest to call before the doors open.
Paradise Resort: the card you almost certainly cannot earn
Paradise Resort has been the competitor welcome kit card since 2023, when it took over from Champions Festival, and Naoki Saito has illustrated every print in the run — which is unusual continuity for a modern promo and part of why the series is collected as a series. The 2026 artwork, MEP 092, puts Pikachu and Psyduck on Lombard Street, with Sylveon, Gimmighoul, Sudowoodo, Klawf, Fidough, Charjabug, Spheal and Archaludon filling out the scene. Copies go into competitor welcome kits, alongside a deck box, card sleeves and a playmat, and players who earn 500 Championship Points at Worlds side events receive one as well. Stamped versions for the top 32 finishers through the champion exist in far smaller numbers again. Competitors receive a copy in every language the game prints, which reached thirteen with last year’s run, so non-English copies reach the secondary market in real volume and at a fraction of the English price — a detail that matters enormously when you go to buy one, for reasons covered below.
The Worlds Pikachu as a collecting line
Here is the part that makes this more interesting than a news story. The Worlds Celebration Pikachu is the same card every year — a 70 HP Pikachu with the Scrappy Spark attack — reprinted annually with brand-new artwork tying it to that year’s host city, and a different illustrator behind most of them. The English run so far reads: SVP 101 for Yokohama in 2023, drawn by Jiro Sasumo; SVP 190 for Honolulu in 2024, drawn by Atsushi Furusawa; SVP 225 for Anaheim in 2025, drawn by DOM; and MEP 093 for San Francisco in 2026, DOM again. Four cards, four cities, one Pokémon, one attack. That is a binder row rather than a full page, which is exactly the sort of project this hobby is short of — a themed set with a defined start, a guaranteed annual addition, and no realistic way to be priced out of it. Start it now and you are three cards behind rather than thirty, and the fourth one is free if you can get to a shop in the next fortnight.
What Worlds promos are actually worth
Take these in the order the cards are distributed and the pattern is immediate. The 2025 Worlds Pikachu, handed out on the same broad terms as this year’s, currently trades between roughly $5 and $19 raw with a median near $10, and about one copy moves a day — enjoy that card rather than banking on it. The older prints do better simply because fewer went out: our data has the 2023 Yokohama print, SVP 101, at about $35, and that one started life as a Pokémon Card Gym reward in Asia-Pacific before an English reprint followed. Paradise Resort is a different market entirely. Completed sales for the 2025 English print run anywhere from $125 to $400 with a median near $190, and the three most recent English sales recorded were $300, $302 and $400. This is where the language detail earns its keep: Spanish, Italian, German, Thai and Korean copies settle around $30 to $50, and several price trackers blend all thirteen languages into a single average, which is why you will see a figure near $115 quoted that no English seller has any intention of honouring. Check what language you are buying before you check the price. All figures are as of August 2026 and they move.
Grading them: what you are actually paying for
The temptation with an event promo is obvious — it is dated, it is stamped, it will never be printed again — and it is mostly a trap on the cheap end of this list. Grading fees plus postage exceed the raw value of the Worlds Pikachu several times over, and a card handed across a shop counter at the end of a tournament has been through more handling than you think. The Rayquaza is worse on the arithmetic and better on the story: a card whose ungraded base print costs 31 cents does not become an investment because a stamp and a slab were added to it, however good the slab. Paradise Resort is the one where the numbers can work, and it is also the one you are least likely to own. The general rule holds here as everywhere: when you see a graded promo listed for several hundred dollars, you are looking at the price of the grade and the scarcity of a clean copy, not the price of the card. Run yours through our grading checker before you commit to anything — it exists to talk people out of exactly this decision.
How to get the promos without going to San Francisco
For the Pikachu, go to a shop. A Worlds Celebration tournament is the intended route and the cheapest one by an enormous margin, and select retailers are carrying the card as well. For everything else, the secondary market is the only route, and the sensible move is to wait. Event promos are at their most expensive in the fortnight before an event and their cheapest six to eight weeks after it, once the attendee supply has been listed, opened and largely dumped — the Rayquaza in particular should be considerably easier to buy in October than it will be on August 29. Two things to watch when you do buy. Listings that advertise a Worlds 2026 card before the cards have physically been distributed are selling a preorder at best, and the Worlds stamp is the single most-counterfeited element on a modern promo, so buy graded or buy from someone with a return policy. If the seller cannot photograph the stamp in focus, that is your answer.
The binder page: the artwork, as cards you can actually buy
Paradise Resort 2026 is a crowd scene, and every Pokémon in that crowd has ordinary cards you can own for a few dollars. That is the page. Put the Rayquaza in the centre — the real, unstamped Ascended Heroes print, the one that costs pocket change and is exactly the card the badged attendees are being handed — and build the ring around it out of the Lombard Street cast: Sudowoodo, Fidough, Gimmighoul, Klawf, Charjabug, Spheal and Psyduck, taking the illustration rare of each where one exists, because those are the printings worth looking at. It is a page that documents an event you did not attend, using cards nobody is fighting you for, and it reads better in a binder than a single stamped promo in a toploader ever will. If you would rather commit to the annual project instead, the four Worlds Pikachus down the left column of the same page leaves you five pockets to fill over the next five Augusts.
What happens after August 30
Prices on all four cards will be at their least reliable during the event weekend, and anyone quoting you a firm valuation on August 29 is quoting sentiment. The things worth watching afterwards are specific: how quickly PXP Rayquaza listings accumulate, which tells you roughly what attendance was; whether the English Paradise Resort holds its $190-ish median once the thirteen-language flood is properly indexed by the trackers; and whether the 2026 Pikachu settles above or below the 2025 print’s $10, which will depend entirely on how many stores ran out. We will update this page with real completed-sale figures once there are enough of them to mean anything, and it will say plainly if a card underperforms. The one prediction we are comfortable making is the boring one: the card you can get for free by walking into a shop next week will not make you money, and it is still the best of the four to own.
