Pokemon's 30th Anniversary Set Sold Out Overnight. Two YouTubers Who Cover It Just Had Their Best Week in Months

Sep 19, 2026 · ShinyPull Data Team

Pokemon turned 30 this year, and the Pokemon Company marked it the way the franchise always marks a big anniversary: a set nobody could buy. The 30th Celebration TCG expansion launched worldwide on September 16th, the first time a Pokemon set has dropped simultaneously across every region at once. It sold out almost everywhere within hours. What's left of it right now is mostly on eBay, priced like a collectible rather than a $4 pack of cards.

What happened at the stores

This wasn't a quiet online sellout. People showed up. At a Best Buy in Colorado Springs, customers started camping outside at 9 p.m. Tuesday night, about 13 hours before the doors opened Wednesday morning, and by sunrise dozens of people were wrapped around the building. In Roanoke, Virginia, the card shop BLADE Gaming said Friday's release drew its longest line in the store's history. News crews in New Jersey found shoppers who'd slept outside or driven to a second and third store after striking out at the first.

Retailers clearly saw this coming. Best Buy capped the 30th Celebration Tech Sticker Collection at one per order. The Entertainer in the UK limited customers to three launch items total, only one per product group. Independent shops posted one-per-household rules with warnings that using multiple accounts to dodge the limit would get the whole order canceled. Pokemon Center ran a virtual queue for its own website traffic, and stores started banning what staff call "ghost chairs," reserved spots held in line by someone who isn't there to buy anything. None of that fully worked. Professional resellers still showed up with folding chairs, multiple cards, and stock-alert apps running, competing directly with the kids the set's 6+ age rating is aimed at.

The set itself explains some of the appetite. All 199 English cards are foil, every pack guarantees a Pikachu rare alongside five other foil cards, and the headline feature is 30 different Pikachu illustrated by 30 different artists, a collect-them-all mechanic sitting on top of an already collectible product.

The creators covering it saw it in their own numbers

Two YouTube channels ShinyPull tracks in the Pokemon collectibles space had their numbers move right along with the sellout, on the exact days the story broke.

Phillips Collectibles, a channel built entirely around Pokemon pack openings and card content, had been adding a fairly steady 25,000 to 52,000 views a day for the two weeks leading into the launch. On September 19th, three days after the set dropped and the sellout headlines started landing, that jumped to 81,932 views in a single day, more than double the channel's own average from the days right before it.

Royalty Gaming Pokemon, which posts live pack openings and Pokemon news, tells a similar story at a smaller scale. Its subscriber count had sat flat at 52,900 for over a week, then ticked over 53,000 the day after the launch, a small but clean round-number crossing timed almost exactly to the release. Its view count moved harder: from a baseline of roughly 3,000 to 12,000 views a day, it jumped to 30,118 views the day after launch and stayed elevated at 20,384 the day after that, three times its normal pace and still climbing.

Why the sellout is the story for both sides

A sold-out product launch usually reads as bad news for the people trying to cover it, there's nothing to open on camera if nobody can find the boxes. What happened is closer to the opposite. A line wrapped around a Best Buy, a store's longest queue ever, and a virtual waiting room for a trading card website all make for a story people want to watch someone else navigate, whether that's a pack opening, a restock alert, or just footage of the chaos itself. The scarcity didn't shrink the audience for coverage of the set. It gave two channels their busiest stretch of the month.

Whether that holds depends entirely on restocks. BLADE Gaming told customers to expect more inventory in about two weeks, and Target has a follow-up drop scheduled for October 2nd with the ETB and themed boxes still to come. If the sellout cycle repeats itself in two weeks the way it did this week, expect the same channels to see the same kind of bump again, right when the next wave of product lands.