The Illustrators of Pokémon Cards, by the Numbers

Counted as credits in the card index of my app, Kiradex, as of October 2, 2026, Pokémon cards carry 392 distinct illustrator names in English and 314 in Japanese, kept apart because the two catalogs list different sets and draw their credits from different sources.¹ 20,536 of the 21,256 English printings (96.6%) carry a credit, and 10,573 of the 12,781 Japanese ones (82.7%); the Japanese gap is mostly whole eras the catalog never credited.¹² The most-credited name in both languages is a studio, 5ban Graphics, with 8.55% of English credits and 7.72% of Japanese, and it leads every English era from Black & White (2011) on.³⁴ The first-set names are still in print: Ken Sugimori and Mitsuhiro Arita are two of the four names on Base Set in 1999 and both have English credits in 2026 sets, though Ken Sugimori’s 1,120 English printings carry 717 distinct card names, because a reprint counts once per set.⁵³ The hand count has grown: 39 to 69 names per English era from e-Card to XY, 243 in Scarlet & Violet, and 75 English names with a first non-promo credit in a 2024 set, more than any year before.⁶⁵ In a 2023 column on the official illustration contest site, Creatures’ illustration director said there are “approximately 250 illustrators active in the Pokémon TCG”; the index finds 221 names credited in 2024 sets across both languages, a different count of a different thing, set side by side below.⁷⁸ Every count here is of credits in a catalog, not a judgment of anyone’s work, and every “most” carries its date.

TL;DR

• The unit is a credit on a printing, by language. One printing is one card number in one set of one language’s index; a printing credited to two names gives one credit to each; English and Japanese are never added together unless a line says “both regions.” On that rule the index of October 2, 2026 holds 20,556 English credits on 20,536 credited printings and 10,576 Japanese credits on 10,573.¹⁹
• A studio leads, and two Base Set names follow. 5ban Graphics holds 1,757 English credits, 637 more than Ken Sugimori’s 1,120, then Mitsuhiro Arita 735, Kouki Saitou 670 and Kagemaru Himeno 667. The top ten English names hold 34.0% of credits; the median name holds 14.³¹⁰¹¹
• Printings are not artworks. Reprints count once per set, so a printing count overstates the art behind it: Keiji Kinebuchi’s 219 English printings carry 92 distinct card names, the lowest ratio in the English top 25.³¹²
• The hand count grew late. English eras from e-Card to XY credit 39 to 69 names each; Sun & Moon 113, Sword & Shield 156, Scarlet & Violet 243. 2023 and 2024 brought 44 and 75 first English non-promo credits, and 237 of the 380 English names with a non-promo credit (62%) have a credit in a 2025 or 2026 set.⁶⁵¹³
• Contest winners are in the credits. In English printings: takuyoa 84, whose contest-site profile says he won the second Grand Prix, and Jiro Sasumo 37, whom Bulbapedia names that contest’s winner (it lists takuyoa as its 3D Excellence Award recipient); the 2022 contest’s three winners, Taiga Kasai 24, REND 23 and Julie Hang 9; the 2024 winners one or three printings each so far, promos or the newest sets.¹⁴¹⁵¹⁶
• Counting strings is not counting people. Kiradex’s index of everyone lists 403 names where the ledger finds 392, because it gives pages to an “N/A” placeholder, to two-person credits as one name, to credits with a director inside the name, and to misspellings beside the right spelling; its Many Hands pin counts the same strings.¹⁷¹⁸¹⁹
• What this gives Kiradex. A brief, not a shipped feature: split and merge the names at build time with a reviewed table, count credited names rather than strings for Many Hands, show both languages’ printings with an as-of date, sort by printings and by first set, show “Promo” instead of a promo run’s start year, link only official features and the kiradex.app page, read the Japanese credits from a bundle instead of the live card detail alone, and say when the catalog has no credit.¹⁷²⁰

1. How this post counts

Every figure in this post comes from one table, a ledger of 34,037 rows, one per card printing in the index Kiradex ships inside the app, and from the scripts listed in Section 9 that read it. The rules below were written into the ledger’s codebook before any figure was taken, and they are stated here before the first count for the same reason: a number about illustrators means nothing until you know what it counts.⁹¹

The unit: a printing, in one language’s index, on a stated date

A printing is one card number in one set of one language’s index. Kiradex’s index has two files, English and Japanese, both dated October 2, 2026 on disk: 201 English sets holding 21,256 printings and 116 Japanese sets holding 12,781.⁹²¹ So:

• Reprints count once per set. A card reprinted in Base Set 2, Legendary Collection or 30th Classic Collection is a printing in each of those sets. The ledger cannot tell a reprint from new art.⁹
• Separately numbered alternate arts count once each. A Trainer Gallery card, a Galarian Gallery card, a number past the printed set size, a “50a”-style number: each is its own printing. Finishes are not: reverse holo, stamped and 1st Edition copies are not in the index, so they are not counted.⁹
• Promos and trainer kits are in, and flagged. Promo sets (a set whose name says Promo or プロモ: 11 English sets and two Japanese) count toward every total, but because the index dates a promo set by the start of its run (basep July 1, 1999; svp March 31, 2023; SV-P November 29, 2022), every first set, last set and per-year figure leaves them out, and totals are given with and without them where it matters.⁹²¹
• No jumbo cards. The index holds no jumbo or oversize set; none are counted.⁹²¹

The index is the app’s, built from TCGdex, a free online card catalog; it leaves out the digital-only TCG Pocket sets.⁹

Where the credits come from

English credits are the app’s own bundle, Illustrators-en.json, dated October 4, 2026, which the Kiradex repository’s scripts/build_illustrators.py writes from TCGdex’s en/illustrators listing. I cross-checked it against a fresh fetch of that listing on October 5, 2026, and the two agree on all 21,256 English printings, which shows they are consistent, not that they are right.⁹²²²¹ Japanese credits come from TCGdex’s ja/illustrators listing, fetched the same day at 14:28 to 14:29 UTC; the app does not read them yet. The two listings named 412 English and 321 Japanese credit strings.²²

A credit here is what the catalog says, not what I read off a card: no card was inspected for this post.⁹

A credit, a split, a merge

• A credit is a pair of a printing and a name. A printing credited to two names gives one credit to each, not half to each, which is why credits exceed credited printings: by 20 in English and 3 in Japanese.⁹¹²
• Splits. A credit naming more than one party is split at “+”, “/” and “&”. A part beginning “Direc.” is a direction credit, recorded but not counted as an illustrator: 18 English printings carry one (16 for The Pokémon Company Art Team, 2 for Shinji Higuchi), no Japanese printing does. Four credits are split by hand. In two, nothing separates the names: Sumiyoshi Kizuki"Big Mama" Tagawa runs two names together, and Ken Sugimori Yusuke Ohmura separates two names only by a space. In the other two, the separators are there but a split at them alone gives the wrong parts: in Illus. & Direc. The Pokémon Company Art Team the “&” joins two labels for one studio, credited as both illustrator and director, and in Shinji Higuchi + Noriko Takaya 樋口 真嗣 + 高屋 法子 the two names repeat in Japanese, so a split at “+” alone would leave one part holding a romanized name and a Japanese one together. One English printing is credited “N/A”, which counts as no credit.⁹²³¹²¹
• Merges, of spellings only. Two credits that are the same once case, accents, width, spacing and punctuation are set aside are one name (6 such merges, for example MikiTanaka into Miki Tanaka). Two spellings one edit apart (two from ten letters on) are merged only when Bulbapedia’s list of TCG illustrators carries exactly one of them and the dropped spelling has fewer rows: 10 such merges, for example Souchirou Gunjima into Souichirou Gunjima and Kenji Kinebuchi into Keiji Kinebuchi. 6 close pairs failed that test and stay apart (Dr.Ooyama and OOYAMA, nagano and Narano, among them).⁹²³
• Kept as printed. A studio and its members (PLANETA, PLANETA Mochizuki) stay separate names, as do a stage name and a person (Imakuni?, Tomoaki Imakuni). A studio credit is a company’s published name and is counted as a studio, not as a person; a pen name counts as a credit and nothing else about anyone is inferred from it.⁹

The merge table has 34 rows: 6 case-and-spacing merges, 10 spelling merges, 6 pairs left apart, and 12 split rows, which are 9 splits, 2 folds of a doubled or stray-quoted name, and the “N/A” row.²³¹²

Four more units

• Credited printing: a printing with at least one name. Uncredited printings stay in every denominator.⁹
• Set appearance: a distinct set where a name holds at least one credit.⁹
• Distinct card names: the number of distinct card names a name is credited on, names folded for case, accents, width and punctuation. The measurement script calls this column the artwork floor, and the post reads it as a lower bound on distinct artworks only on an assumption it did not check card by card: that one artwork never appears under two different card names in the same index. Where that holds, an illustrator credited on 717 card names drew at least 717 artworks, because one who drew the same card name twice, with new art, counts once; where an artwork was reissued under a changed name, the count would overshoot. One pattern was tested: eight English Energy names also exist with a “Basic” prefix, and no name is credited on both forms. Printings are the upper bound on distinct artworks. No exact count of distinct artworks exists in this post.⁹²⁴
• Active in a year: a credit in a non-promo set whose index year is that year.⁹

Two languages, never summed

English and Japanese are separate universes: different set lists, different credit sources. No figure here adds them unless it says “both regions,” and a both-regions name count is a union of names, not a sum.⁹

The ledger’s denominators, as of the index of October 2, 2026, with English credits of October 4 and Japanese credits of October 5.¹

Across both regions there are 402 distinct names: 304 credited in both indexes, 88 in English only and 10 in Japanese only.¹

The Japanese column describes this index, not Japanese printing history. TCGdex carries no Japanese credit for any card of the neo, VS, web, e or PCG eras, 1,727 printings between them (all 722 of PCG and all 492 of the e series among them), and the Japanese index has no ADV, DP, DPt, LEGEND, BW or XY main sets at all, nor S1 to S4a.²¹²⁹²⁵ Outside those five uncredited eras, 10,573 of 11,054 Japanese printings carry a credit (95.6%).¹² The English gaps sit elsewhere: 290 of the 720 uncredited English printings are in trainer kits, and SWSH Black Star Promos alone has 133 of its 307 printings uncredited.²¹²

As of

Every “most”, “top” and rank in this post is as of the index of October 2, 2026, with English credits of October 4 and Japanese credits of October 5. The newest English sets in the index are 30th Celebration and 30th Classic Collection (both September 16, 2026); the newest Japanese set is M6 (July 31, 2026).⁵ A new set adds printings and can reorder any two names that sit close together; Section 3 says which ranks are that close.

Ranks are competition ranks: names tied at a count share a rank, and the next count’s rank skips the tied places (three names tied for second are all second, and the next name is fifth). Where a list stops at a count other names share, it names them or says how many there are; where a table must put tied names in an order, it says the order is by name.²⁶²⁷

2. The credit line, in the publishers’ words

Before the counts, what the publishers themselves say about the line being counted, and about the people named on it. Everything in this section is quoted or paraphrased from The Pokémon Company group’s own pages, or from the official contest site whose rules name Creatures Inc. and The Pokémon Company International as sponsors, with the page and the date; where only a wiki says it, the sentence says so.²⁸

The line is a printed part of the card

Japan’s official how-to-play page numbers 16 parts of a Pokémon card, and part 16 is “イラストレーター名” (illustrator’s name).²⁹ The English rulebook packed with the 151 set labels no illustrator line in its “Parts of a Pokémon Card” diagram, as the rarity guide on this site recorded, but its rules use the credit: all four copies of a Pokémon V-UNION in a deck “must be part of the same set and illustrated by the same artist.”²⁵³⁰ On my reading, that is the one place in the rules I read where the name on the card changes what you may play.

The same rulebook credits its own packaging: “Booster Pack Illustrations: N-DESIGN Inc.”³⁰ N-DESIGN Inc. is also a card credit in the ledger, a studio, with 77 English and 66 Japanese credits.³¹

On English cards the credit reads “Illus.” and the name. I describe that from secondary evidence only: Bulbapedia captions card images that way (its page for the CoroCoro “Pokémon Illustrator” promo is captioned “Illus.” and the illustrator’s name), and one credit string in the catalog still carries the prefix whole, “Illus. & Direc. The Pokémon Company Art Team.” No official English page I read this session names the prefix.³²²³ Kiradex’s card inspector shows the credit the same way, as “Illus.” and the name.³³

One English card carries a photographer’s credit instead of an illustrator’s. Bulbapedia’s list puts the Wizards Black Star Promo numbered 26, “commonly known as Snap Pikachu,” alone in its table of photographers with artwork released internationally, credited to Gakuji Nomoto, and calls it “the only card with a photo credit instead of an illustrator credit released outside of Japan.”³⁴ The catalog lists that credit like any other, so Gakuji Nomoto is one of the ledger’s 392 English names, with one printing, in a promo set.²¹³⁵⁵ A count of “illustrators” from the catalog is, on that one row, a count of credited names.

Who decides what is drawn

In a 2023 column on the 2024 contest site, Creatures art director Satoru Nagaya says “The production of Pokémon TCG cards is mostly up to Creatures Inc.”, and that for the illustrations, one of a card’s several creative elements, “we employ the help of outside illustrators.”⁷ On collecting, the same column: “you can enjoy the illustrations as they are and, for example, try to gather cards featuring your favorite illustrator.”⁷ On my reading, that sentence is what Kiradex’s illustrator pages are for.

The column’s date depends on the source. The saved page’s own metadata gives a publication date of September 8, 2023 and a modification date of September 25, 2023; Bulbapedia’s page on the contests says this column, with Satoru Nagaya, Haru Saito and Kevin Lalli, “was posted on October 12, 2023”. This post does not settle which is right and dates the column only to 2023. The same holds for the site’s other columns cited here: each date given for them is the page’s published-date metadata, and Bulbapedia records each as posted later (Section 9).⁷¹⁵

pokemon.com’s Pokémon Creator Profile: Mitsuhiro Arita (July 6, 2018) describes the process from the illustrator’s side. I read it through a fetch tool because pokemon.com walled the page saver, so I paraphrase it rather than quote it: it says he had been illustrating cards for more than 20 years, since the first cards in Japan in 1996; that the binder it describes held 537 cards, in chronological order; that planning, illustration and approval together take about seven weeks for one piece of card art; and that Creatures helps determine an artwork’s setting and tone.³⁶ The column profile of Atsushi Furusawa (October 25, 2023) names one of those steps: “Pokémon TCG illustrations must go through supervision at the draft stage.”³⁷

The 537 in that profile and the ledger’s counts are different units eight years apart: the ledger credits Mitsuhiro Arita on 735 English printings and 223 Japanese ones as of October 2026, first in Base Set (January 9, 1999) and in the Japanese 拡張パック (Expansion Pack, PMCG1, October 20, 1996).³³⁸ I do not subtract one from the other.

How many illustrators are working: the official figure and the ledger’s

In the same column, Haru Saito, who directs illustrations at Creatures: “There currently are approximately 250 illustrators active in the Pokémon TCG.”⁷

The ledger can count something near that, but not that. Counting names with a credit in a non-promo set the index dates to a year, both regions together (a union of names, not a sum):⁸¹²

Names credited in each year’s non-promo sets, as of the index of October 2, 2026.⁸

The two figures measure different things, and neither is wrong on the other’s terms. The column does not define “active”; on my reading, it counts people working on cards in 2023, including art in progress that would print months later and work for products the index does not hold. The ledger counts names whose credit is already printed in a set the catalog lists, by the set’s release year; it merges spellings, keeps studios as one name each, and cannot see unreleased work. The 2023 count (165) is the one dated nearest the statement; the 2024 count (221) is 29 fewer than 250. On my reading, art in progress in 2023 would print in 2024 and later sets, so the official figure and the 2024 to 2026 ledger counts look at the same workforce from two sides, before release and after; the ledger cannot test the official figure, and it is not offered as a test.⁷⁸¹²

The illustrators in the publishers’ pages

The official pages I could read name a handful of illustrators, and each is named here only with what those pages say about their work and what the ledger credits them with.

• Tomokazu Komiya and Kouki Saitou. The contest site’s “A Conversation with Two Pokémon TCG Official Illustrators” (first dated April 25, 2022). Tomokazu Komiya: “I started working on the Pokémon TCG in 1996”. Kouki Saitou: “I have been working on the Pokémon TCG since 2002.”³⁹ In the ledger, Tomokazu Komiya’s first credit is in PMCG1 (October 20, 1996, Japanese), the year he names, with or without promo sets counted. Kouki Saitou’s first is in Aquapolis (January 15, 2003, English), the year after the one he names, and no promo credit of his is dated earlier; the index cannot check 2002 in Japanese, because the catalog carries no credits for the Japanese e-series of 2001 to 2002.³⁸²⁴⁰
• Atsushi Furusawa. The column profile: “Atsushi Furusawa has been illustrating Pokémon cards since 2021. He made his Pokémon TCG debut after applying to the first Pokémon Trading Card Game Illustration Grand Prix in 2018.” The ledger: first Japanese non-promo credit in S6H and S6K (two sets dated April 23, 2021), first English non-promo credit in Chilling Reign (June 18, 2021); he also holds credits in SWSH Black Star Promos, a run the index dates from November 15, 2019, so by the index’s date alone his first English credit is that promo set; 53 English and 51 Japanese printings.³⁷³⁸⁴⁰
• takuyoa. The column profile (November 21, 2023): “He won the second Pokémon Card Game Illustration Grand Prix held exclusively in Japan between 2019 and 2020. He mainly works on Pokémon ex illustrations”. The ledger: 84 English and 98 Japanese printings, first in Fusion Strike (English, November 12, 2021) and S8 (Japanese, September 24, 2021), promo sets in or out. Bulbapedia records that contest’s result differently, naming Jiro Sasumo its winner and takuyoa its 3D Excellence Award recipient; Section 7 sets the two sources side by side.¹⁶³⁸¹⁵
• YOSHIROTTEN. pokemon.com’s Look Into the Future of the Pokémon TCG in this Video Interview with YOSHIROTTEN (August 18, 2026), read through a fetch tool and paraphrased: 30th Celebration has Futuristic rare cards by the Japanese artist, and the interview is conducted by Creatures art director Satoru Nagaya.⁴¹ The English ledger credits YOSHIROTTEN on 2 printings, both in 30th Celebration (September 16, 2026), both listed by TCGdex as Futuristic Rare; there are none in Japanese, whose index ends at M6 (July 31, 2026).³⁸²¹
• Julie Hang. pokemon.com’s Cardist Corner interview with her, dated November 12, 2024 in search results, could not be read: the saver was walled and the fetch tool got a 404. Her contest placement comes from the contest site instead (Section 7).⁴²

None of these pages is about anything but the work, and neither is this post: no portraits, biographies or private details, here or in the app.

3. Who is credited most in English

Denominator: 20,556 English credits on 20,536 credited printings, in the index of October 2, 2026, with English credits of October 4. The table counts printings credited to each name; “No promo” leaves the 11 promo sets out; “Set appearances” counts distinct sets; the last column counts the distinct card names a name is credited on, the conditional lower bound on distinct artworks defined in Section 1.³⁹

The 25 English names with the most credits, as of the index of October 2, 2026. No two of them share a count, and the 26th name, Kyoko Umemoto, has 179, so the list is not cut inside a tie. A rank is a count of credits in a catalog, not a judgment of anyone’s work.³

English credits per name, top 20, with the distinct card names under each; drawn from the ledger.⁴³

A studio leads, by a wide margin

5ban Graphics is a studio, and its credits are a company’s, not one person’s. Its first English credit is Black & White (April 25, 2011), and it holds 637 more English credits than the next name. The gaps from rank 1 to 2, 2 to 3 and 3 to 4 are 637, 385 and 65 credits.³⁸¹¹¹² Two of the top 25 are studios (5ban Graphics and aky CG Works); the studio credits are listed in Section 6.³³¹

Reprints flatter the first-set names

A printing count adds every reprint. Counting distinct card names takes them back out, at the cost of undercounting an illustrator who drew the same card name twice, and it is a lower bound on distinct artworks only under Section 1’s unchecked assumption that no artwork appears under two card names. Read with that caveat, the number of distinct artworks sits between the two:⁹

• Ken Sugimori’s 1,120 English credits carry 717 distinct card names (64.0%). His English credits run to 30th Celebration and 30th Classic Collection (both September 16, 2026), the second a reprint set, while his last Japanese non-promo credit in the index is S12a (December 2, 2022); his one Japanese promo credit sits in the MEGA promo set, which carries that run’s index date, July 28, 2025.^3384012
• Keiji Kinebuchi’s 219 credits carry 92 distinct card names across 31 sets, 42% of the credits, the lowest share in the English top 25; next lowest are aky CG Works (92 of 187) and 5ban Graphics (871 of 1,757). On my reading, part of the reason is in Section 6: he is the credited illustrator on the six credited printings of each of four basic Energy cards.³⁴⁴¹²
• At the other end, the three highest shares of distinct card names in the English top 25 are Mizue’s (92.5% of credits), Miki Tanaka’s (91.5%) and kawayoo’s (91.0%), with Tomokazu Komiya’s next (90.5%): nearly every printing is a different card name.¹²

So a sentence saying that someone drew 1,120 cards is wrong twice: they are printings, not cards, and they include the same artwork reprinted. The sentence the ledger supports is that the name is credited on 1,120 English printings in this index, on a stated date.

Concentration

The top 10 English names hold 34.0% of credits, the top 20 hold 45.8% and the top 50 hold 66.8%. The median name holds 14 credits and the mean is 52.4; 49 names have 100 or more and 5 have 500 or more.¹⁰

What a new set would change

Ranks 4 and 5 (Kouki Saitou 670, Kagemaru Himeno 667) are 3 credits apart. Each adjacent pair from rank 12 to 15 is within 10, and so is every adjacent pair from rank 16 to 25.¹¹¹² On my reading, a single set that credits one of those names a handful of times can swap a pair; the order of ranks 1 to 3, with gaps of 637 and 385 credits, would need hundreds of new credits to change, and rank 3 stands 65 above rank 4. That is why every rank here carries the index date, and why the newest English sets it holds are named: 30th Celebration and 30th Classic Collection, both September 16, 2026.⁵

4. Who is credited most in Japanese

Denominator: 10,576 Japanese credits on 10,573 credited printings, in the index of October 2, 2026, with Japanese credits fetched from TCGdex on October 5. Read the Japanese table as a ranking of two windows, 1996 to 1999 and 2015 to 2026, not of thirty years: outside the six original PMCG sets the index has no Japanese credits before 2015.³²⁶

The 25 Japanese names with the most credits, as of the index of October 2, 2026. The # column is the competition rank: four pairs tie (ranks 15, 17, 21 and 24), and the two names in each tied pair are listed by name. The 26th name, Hitoshi Ariga, has 94, so the list is not cut inside a tie. A rank is a count of credits in a catalog, not a judgment of anyone’s work.³

Flatter at the top

The top 10 Japanese names hold 24.6% of credits, the top 20 hold 35.2% and the top 50 hold 58.0%, against 34.0%, 45.8% and 66.8% in English. The median Japanese name holds 16 credits and the mean is 33.7; 20 names reach 100 credits and one, 5ban Graphics, reaches 500.¹⁰ The gaps from rank 1 to 2, 2 to 3 and 3 to 4 are 431, 101 and 61 credits.¹¹¹²

Three of the Japanese top ten are studios (5ban Graphics, aky CG Works, Studio Bora Inc.), against one in the English top ten, and the fewest distinct card names relative to credits in the Japanese top 25 are aky CG Works’s (56 card names on 135 credits), takuyoa’s (41 on 98) and 5ban Graphics’s (367 on 816).³¹²

Rows 7 to 25 are a crowd

In the table’s rows 7 to 12, and again in rows 13 to 25, every adjacent pair is ten credits or fewer apart. Four pairs tie outright: kawayoo and Oswaldo KATO at 107 (both rank 15), GIDORA and Souichirou Gunjima at 105 (rank 17), takuyoa and Teeziro at 98 (rank 21), and kodama and Mizue at 95 (rank 24).¹¹³ On my reading, the next Japanese set can reorder most of that stretch; the newest Japanese set in the index is M6 (July 31, 2026).⁵

Why the English numbers are bigger

The same names are credited on more English printings because the English index has credits from 1999 to 2026 throughout and the Japanese index has none from 2000 to 2014.⁸² Ken Sugimori’s English credits are 2.91 times his Japanese ones and Mitsuhiro Arita’s 3.30 times; that ratio describes the two catalogs, not the two careers.⁴⁵¹² Section 6 sets the two regions side by side for the 15 names credited most in both.

5. Eras and years

English, era by era

An English era here is one of the 13 series the app’s Every Era pin counts: Base, Neo, e-Card, EX, Diamond & Pearl, Platinum, HeartGold & SoulSilver, Black & White, XY, Sun & Moon, Sword & Shield, Scarlet & Violet and Mega Evolution. The app’s own comment calls Gym, Legendary Collection, POP, trainer kits, Call of Legends, McDonald’s and the promos side series that “sit inside an era without being one,” and this post treats them the same way.¹⁹ Names counts every distinct name credited in the era’s sets, promo sets of that era included; studio share is the share of the era’s credited printings that carry a studio or studio-member credit.⁶⁴

The 13 English eras of the app’s Every Era pin, in the index of October 2, 2026: printings, credited printings, names, the name with the most credits (no era’s lead is tied), and the studio share of credited printings.⁶⁴¹⁹

The side series, in the same terms: Gym (2000) 264 printings, all credited, 7 names, Ken Sugimori 195; Legendary Collection (2002) 110 printings, 8 names, Ken Sugimori 43; POP (2003 to 2009) 193 printings, 30 names, with Atsuko Nishida, Kouki Saitou and Masakazu Fukuda tied for the most credits at 20; trainer kits (2004 to 2017) 475 printings of which only 185 are credited, 49 names; Call of Legends (2011) 106 printings, 28 names; McDonald’s Collection (2011 to 2024) 166 printings, 58 names, 5ban Graphics 14. One “Miscellaneous” printing dated 1996 carries no credit.⁶

Names credited in each English era, with the studio share; drawn from the ledger.¹³

Two things stand out.

• The hand count more than tripled. English main eras from e-Card to XY credit 39 to 69 names each. Sun & Moon credits 113, Sword & Shield 156, Scarlet & Violet 243, three and a half times XY’s 69, and Mega Evolution 225 in its first year in the index.⁶¹²
• A studio leads every English era from Black & White on, and studios hold between 13.0% and 22.9% of each of those eras’ credited printings. Before Black & White, the only studio credits in a main era are CR CG gangs’ 27 Neo printings.⁴⁶

Japanese, era by era

Japanese eras in the index of October 2, 2026, by the Japanese index’s own series; the app’s Every Era pin lists only the English index’s series ids, so this grouping is this post’s, not the pin’s. Five eras carry no credits in the catalog; the index has no Japanese sets from 2007 to 2014 at all.⁶⁴⁹¹⁹

The Japanese counts follow the English shape where both can be seen: 110 names in Sun & Moon, 138 in Sword & Shield, 244 in Scarlet & Violet and 233 in MEGA, with 5ban Graphics leading every one of those four eras.⁶⁴

Names active per year

A name is active in a year if it holds a credit in a non-promo set the index dates to that year. English and Japanese are counted apart; the last column is the union of the two name lists, not their sum.⁸

Names with a credit in each year’s non-promo sets, as of the index of October 2, 2026. Japanese zeros from 2000 to 2014 and in 2020 are gaps in the index, not years without art.⁸

Names credited per release year, English and Japanese, never summed; drawn from the ledger.⁴⁶

First credits by year: the 2023 and 2024 intake

Counting each name once, by the year of its first credit in a non-promo set: in English, the years 1999 to 2022 each add between 1 and 23 new names. Then 2023 adds 44 and 2024 adds 75. 2025 adds 8 and 2026 so far 12.⁵¹² “First” follows the rule: 13 of the 44 and 21 of the 75 hold an English promo credit the index dates earlier, the three 2022 contest winners among the 21, each in SWSH Black Star Promos, a run dated from November 15, 2019.⁴⁰ In Japanese, 2015 adds 17, 2016 adds 32, 2021 adds 39, and 2024 again adds 75.⁵ On my reading, the two Japanese waves of 2015 to 2016 and 2021 are partly the index’s own gaps: a name whose first Japanese card was in a set the index lacks or carries without credits (2000 to 2014, or S1 to S4a) appears as new in the first set the index has. The 2024 wave appears in both languages.⁵

Most remain credited in recent sets, reprints included: 237 of the 380 English names with a non-promo credit (62%) and 235 of the 311 Japanese names (76%) have a credit in a 2025 or 2026 set. A credit in a new set is a printing, not evidence that anyone is working now; the ledger cannot see that.⁵¹²

The longest runs, and the first-set names

The longest English runs, first non-promo set to last, are 27 years: Kagemaru Himeno, Ken Sugimori, Miki Tanaka and Mitsuhiro Arita. Atsuko Nishida, Hironobu Yoshida, Naoyo Kimura, Sumiyoshi Kizuki and Tomokazu Komiya follow at 26.⁵ Those are non-promo runs, by the rule in Section 1. All five of the 26-year names also hold a credit in Wizards Black Star Promos, a run the index dates from July 1, 1999, so with promo sets counted each of their runs would read 27 years from that date. The four 27-year runs do not change in years: Miki Tanaka’s credit in the same Wizards run is dated before her first non-promo set, Fossil (October 10, 1999), but in the same year, and the other three have no promo set dated before their first non-promo set.⁴⁰ In Japanese the longest are 30 years, for Ayaka Yoshida, Mitsuhiro Arita and Tomokazu Komiya, the first of which rests on a 1996 credit the two catalogs disagree about (below).⁵⁴⁷

The first English set in the index, Base Set (January 9, 1999), is credited on all 102 of its printings, to four names: Keiji Kinebuchi, Ken Sugimori, Mitsuhiro Arita and Tomoaki Imakuni.⁵² The first Japanese set, 拡張パック (Expansion Pack, PMCG1, October 20, 1996), is credited on every printing, to nine: “Big Mama” Tagawa, Ayaka Yoshida, Hideaki Hakozaki, Keiji Kinebuchi, Ken Sugimori, Mitsuhiro Arita, Ryo Ueda, Tomoaki Imakuni and Tomokazu Komiya.⁵⁶

The two catalogs disagree about 1996

The Japanese and English catalogs credit same-named 1996 Trainer cards to different people. TCGdex’s Japanese listing gives five PMCG1 Trainers to names other than Keiji Kinebuchi: きずぐすり (Potion) to Ayaka Yoshida, ポケモンいれかえ (Switch) to Hideaki Hakozaki, and プラスパワー (PlusPower), 退化スプレー (Devolution Spray) and パソコン通信 (Computer Search) to Ryo Ueda, while the English credits give Base Set’s Potion, Switch, PlusPower, Devolution Spray and Computer Search (base1 94, 95, 84, 72 and 71) to Keiji Kinebuchi. The pairing is by card name, my gloss of each Japanese name against the Base Set name; whether each pair carries the same artwork was not checked against the cards.⁴⁷²¹²⁴ Those five came out of a screen, not a card-by-card comparison: 11 of the 457 Japanese 1996 to 1999 printings (2.4%) are credited to a name that the English index never credits in the Base, Gym or Neo series, and the other six, one in PMCG2 and one in PMCG4, two each in PMCG3 and PMCG6, dated 1997 to 1999, were not paired with an English printing, so for them the screen gives a candidate, not a disagreement.⁴⁷¹²²⁴ Which credit is right was not checked against the cards. My reading is that one catalog carries a later reprint’s credit for the five paired cards, but that is a reading, and until a card settles it the app should keep all 11 credits and mark them unverified (brief item 6).

Promo-only names

12 English names and 3 Japanese names are credited only in promo sets, so they have no first or last set by the rule above: in English, 2017 Pikachu Project, 2019 Pikachu Project, Acorviart, Anderson, Craig Turvey, Gakuji Nomoto, Ito Kyoko, Kunihiko Yuyama, Miranda Branley, Natsuko Shoji été, Q-rais and Yamazaki Rei; in Japanese, Acorviart, REOspikee and YU NAGABA.⁵ Their only dates in the index are the promo runs’ start dates, which is why a promo-only name should never be shown with a year (Section 11).

6. One card, the most-printed cards, the chased rarities and the studios

Names with one card

Many names in the index hold a single printing; one of them, as Section 2 showed, is a photographer’s credit. The counts, per region and as of the index of October 2, 2026:³⁵¹²

Names with very few credits, per region.³⁵¹²

The one-printing names include Acorviart, the 2024 contest’s best standard card winner, in both regions, and Anderson, its best ex card winner, in English; the full lists are in the measurement output.³⁵¹⁴

The most-printed cards and who drew them

“Most-printed” here means the card name with the most printings in a region’s index, reprints and new artworks together. Card names appear in this section only as facts about published cards, because the count needs them.⁴⁴

The most-printed card names per region, as of the index of October 2, 2026. Printings are reprints and new artworks together; names are distinct credited names; English names in parentheses are my glosses of the Japanese card names. The last column lists names down to a count and includes every name tied at that count.⁴⁴

The English rows run down to 43 printings, eleven card names in unbroken order; three more tie next at 41 (Magneton, Metal Energy and Snorlax). The Japanese rows run down to 22. One more Japanese card name has 25 printings: the catalog lists it as 未知, with no credit on any of them; what card that string names was not checked.⁴⁴

• The most-printed English card has 71 different credited names, two studios and one project among them. No single name holds more than 8 of the 145 Pikachu printings (5.5%). Collecting one card name across its printings is, in the index, collecting dozens of hands.⁴⁴¹²
• Basic Energy is the uncredited card. 54 of 60 English Lightning Energy printings carry no credit in the catalog (90%), 44 of 50 Water, 42 of 48 Fighting and 41 of 47 Psychic; the six credited printings of each are Keiji Kinebuchi’s. Those four cards alone account for 181 of the 720 uncredited English printings. Whether the cards print no credit or the catalog lacks one was not checked.⁴⁴¹²
• Trainer cards are drawn by few hands. English Potion has 45 printings and 6 names; Japanese Switch has 25 printings and 4 names, 15 of them Studio Bora Inc.’s.⁴⁴
• Set the Energy aside and the English list is six card names deep before a tie: Pikachu, Eevee, Raichu, Potion, Magnemite and Charmander, then Magneton (41 printings, 27 names) and Snorlax (41 printings, 31 names, Ken Sugimori 7), tied at 41.⁴⁴

The rarities collectors chase

Joining the ledger to TCGdex’s rarity listings (cached October 4, 2026), the illustration rarities, Illustration rare and Special illustration rare, are spread wide:²⁶

Credits on the illustration rarities, as TCGdex names them (catalog strings, not printed symbols), as of the index of October 2, 2026.²⁶

Where each region’s five names with the most credits overall stand on these rarities, counting Illustration rare and Special illustration rare credits together, as competition ranks (a tie shares the rank):³²⁶²⁷

• English. Three of the five, 5ban Graphics, Ken Sugimori and Kagemaru Himeno, hold no credit on either rarity. Mitsuhiro Arita holds 10, tied for 8th with six others: Akira Komayama, DOM, GIDORA, Jiro Sasumo, nagimiso and Yano Keiji. Kouki Saitou holds 4, tied for 64th with 17 others. So one of the five is in the English top ten, on a tie: 14 names have a rank of 10 or better, because seven share 8th.
• Japanese. Three of the five, 5ban Graphics, Ken Sugimori and Toyste Beach, hold none. Kouki Saitou is 2nd, alone, with 11, and Mitsuhiro Arita holds 8, tied for 5th with Akira Komayama, nagimiso and Yano Keiji.

On my reading, these rarities are led mostly by names other than the overall leaders, though not only by newcomers. In English, 12 of the 14 names ranked 10th or better have their first non-promo credit in 2015 or later; the two exceptions are Akira Komayama (2011) and Mitsuhiro Arita (1999). Five of the 14 first appear in 2023 or 2024, the two years Section 5 shows adding the most new English names. The Japanese first years cannot be read the same way, because the Japanese index has no credits from 2000 to 2014. A credit count says nothing about a card’s price.²⁷

Studios, by their published names

Studio and studio-member credits are counted under the name the catalog prints: a studio is a company by its published name, and a PLANETA name with a second word is a studio member (rule K), marked “member” below. English: 5ban Graphics 1,757; aky CG Works 187; PLANETA Mochizuki (member) 145; Studio Bora Inc. 118; PLANETA Tsuji (member) 91; N-DESIGN Inc. 77; PLANETA Igarashi (member) 51; PLANETA 48; NC Empire 40; CR CG gangs 27; PLANETA Yamashita (member) 23; ConceptLab 20; The Pokémon Company Art Team 16; MPC Film 15; PLANETA Otani (member) 15; MUGENUP 13; Framestore 11; PLANETA Hiiragi (member) 7; ORBITALLINK Inc. 6; GAME FREAK inc. 5; D.A.G Inc. 2.³¹⁹

Japanese: 5ban Graphics 816; aky CG Works 135; Studio Bora Inc. 134; PLANETA Mochizuki (member) 104; N-DESIGN Inc. 66; PLANETA Tsuji (member) 48; PLANETA Igarashi (member) 28; NC Empire 27; PLANETA Yamashita (member) 26; ConceptLab 10; PLANETA 10; PLANETA Otani (member) 9; PLANETA Hiiragi (member) 7; GAME FREAK inc. 5; MUGENUP 5; ORBITALLINK Inc. 5; D.A.G Inc. 4.³¹

The PLANETA names with a second word are kept as studio members, separate from PLANETA itself, because the catalog prints them that way (rule M3). Two English credits are neither studio nor person in the codebook: 2017 Pikachu Project (7 printings) and 2019 Pikachu Project (3), counted as projects.⁹³¹

Two regions, one list of names

304 names are credited in both indexes. The 15 with the most credits, English and Japanese side by side (never added):¹⁴⁵

Names credited in both regions, in the order the measurement lists them (the two counts added together, used here only to sort), as of the index of October 2, 2026.⁴⁵

The English figures are larger for the reason in Section 4: the English index has credits from 1999 to 2026 throughout and the Japanese one has none from 2000 to 2014.⁴⁵⁸ 88 names are credited only in English. The 10 credited only in Japanese are 575381, Hachinana, Kenichi Yamaguchi, REOspikee, Satoshi Ito, tayu, TOMATO MARKET, Tomoki Sone, YU NAGABA and Yuta Kawazu.¹

7. The contests, and the credits that followed

The illustration contests are the one public route onto the credit line that I found in the publishers’ pages, and they show up in the ledger. What follows is each contest as its own pages or Bulbapedia describe it, then what the ledger credits its named winners with. Prize amounts are left out on purpose: they are not facts about anyone’s work.

1997: the CoroCoro contest

Bulbapedia dates the first contest, the Pokémon Card Game Illust Artist Contest, to the November 1997 issue of CoroCoro Comic. Winners received a Trainer card, “Pokémon Illustrator,” whose text certifies the holder as an “Officially Authorized Pokémon Card Illustrator.”¹⁵³² That rests on Bulbapedia alone; I found no official page for it.

2018 to 2019: the first Grand Prix

pokemon-card.com (a notice whose address is dated September 20, 2019): the Pokémon Card Game Illustration Grand Prix, run from December 2018 to March 2019 by Creatures, which the page calls the game’s developer, on the theme “ポケモンのいる風景” (Pokémon in a landscape), drew 5,343 entries, and its grand-prize work became a promo card given at Pokémon Centers and Pokémon Stores from October 4. The translation is mine.⁴⁸

Atsushi Furusawa is not named as that contest’s winner, but his column profile says he made his debut after applying to it in 2018 (Section 2).³⁷

2019 to 2020: the second Grand Prix

Bulbapedia: the second Grand Prix, December 2019 to March 2020 and open in Japan only, drew 4,050 entries; of the fifty entrants whose work was published, seven have since illustrated official cards, among them the winner, Jiro Sasumo, and the 3D Excellence Award recipient, takuyoa.¹⁵ The official contest site’s column profile of takuyoa says otherwise about the top place: “He won the second Pokémon Card Game Illustration Grand Prix held exclusively in Japan between 2019 and 2020.”¹⁶ The two sources disagree. Bulbapedia names Jiro Sasumo the winner and takuyoa the 3D Excellence Award recipient; the official profile says takuyoa won. I did not find the contest’s own results page among the saved sources, so this post does not settle it and attributes each claim to its source. The ledger credits Jiro Sasumo on 37 English and 35 Japanese printings, first in Brilliant Stars Trainer Gallery (English, February 25, 2022) and VMAX Climax (S8b, Japanese, December 3, 2021), promo sets in or out; takuyoa on 84 English and 98 Japanese.¹⁴³⁸⁴⁰

2022: the first contest open outside Japan

Bulbapedia: the Pokémon Trading Card Game Illustration Contest 2022, open to Japan and the United States, drew 10,830 entries, and three winners’ art became promo cards, by REND, Taiga Kasai and Julie Hang. “Across the 300 submissions that made it to the public showcase, 19 artists have since illustrated official cards”, the same page says, and the sentence then names 20: three winners, six finalists, six semifinalists and five quarterfinalists. The 19 and the 20 are both Bulbapedia’s, and this post repeats neither as a count of its own.¹⁵²⁴

The contest site’s interview with those three winners (December 21, 2023) adds a line every reader of this section should keep: “Employment at Creatures Inc. is not awarded to contest winners. While some winners of past contests have received additional opportunities to work with Creatures Inc., employment is not guaranteed.”⁴⁹

The ledger, as of the index of October 2, 2026:¹⁴³⁸

The 2022 winners’ credits in the ledger. Each also has English credits in SWSH Black Star Promos, a run the index dates from November 15, 2019, so by the index’s date alone each one’s first English credit is that promo set; REND’s first Japanese credit, read the same way, is the SV-P promo run, dated from November 29, 2022.¹⁴³⁸⁴⁰

2024: six countries

The Pokémon Company International’s press site (September 23, 2024): the 2024 contest ran from October 12, 2023 to January 31, 2024, “resulted in over 10,000 imaginative entries” on the theme “Magical Pokémon Moments,” and its three winners, grand prize Kazuki Minami, best standard card Acorviart and best ex card Anderson, “will have their submissions featured in upcoming promo cards”.⁵⁰ The directors’ column, whose page metadata dates it before the contest opened, says the contest was accepting submissions “from Japan, US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.”⁷ pokemon-card.com (February 7, 2025): the three winning works became cards, distributed in Japan from March 14, 2025, while supplies last; the translation is mine.⁵¹

Bulbapedia gives the 2024 total as 10,830, the same figure it gives for 2022; the official page says only “over 10,000,” and this post uses the official wording.¹⁵⁵⁰ Bulbapedia also records that on June 25, 2024 the contest announced some top-300 entries “were in violation of the official contest rules and would be disqualified,” with six replacements named on July 2, 2024. That is secondary: the archived official notices were not fetched, and no entrant is named here.¹⁵

What the ledger credits the 2024 contest’s named winners and first runners-up with, as of the index of October 2, 2026:¹⁴³⁸

The 2024 contest’s winners and first runners-up in the ledger.¹⁴⁵⁰

The pattern across contests, on my reading: winners’ first credits are promos of their winning work, and later credits, where there are any, come in main sets one to two years on. The 2022 winners’ first non-promo credits arrived in 2023 and 2024; the 2024 winners’ arrived, where they have, in the newest sets of 2026, 30th Celebration in English and M6 in Japanese.¹⁴³⁸ The employment line above is the publisher’s own caution against reading that pattern as a promise.

A book of the art

Bulbapedia records the Pokémon Card Game Art Collection (OVERLAP, September 16, 2016, 192 pages), “more than 350 selected illustrations chosen from over 10,000 cards released throughout the history of the Pokémon Card Game,” from 1996 through the XY BREAK series.⁵² Its “over 10,000 cards” and this post’s printings are different units, counted a decade apart.

8. A check against Bulbapedia’s list

Bulbapedia’s “List of TCG illustrators,” a fan wiki under a CC BY-NC-SA license, is the closest public list to the ledger, so I compared the two. Its raw wikitext, saved October 5, 2026, has 405 rows in its table of illustrators with artwork released internationally.⁵³³⁴

• Names. Of the ledger’s 380 English names with a non-promo credit, 375 are in Bulbapedia’s international table (98.7%). The five that are not: Dr.Ooyama, Imakuni?, OOYAMA, booota and nisimana.⁵³¹² Two of those are the close pair the merge rule left apart, and one is the stage name the ledger keeps apart from Tomoaki Imakuni (Section 1).²³⁹
• First sets. For 351 of those 375 names (93.6%), Bulbapedia’s first set and the ledger’s first non-promo set agree once set names are normalized.⁵³¹²
• Where they disagree, it is mostly the catalog’s gaps, the promo rule, or a set name the normalization did not match. Bulbapedia starts “Big Mama” Tagawa, K. Hoshiba and Hiromichi Sugiyama in Neo Genesis, where the ledger’s non-promo rule starts them in Expedition Base Set; the index has 9 uncredited Neo Genesis printings that could hold those credits, and two of the three also hold a Wizards Black Star Promos credit the rule leaves out. Bulbapedia starts several names in a promo set (Julie Hang in SWSH Black Star Promos, Kazuki Minami in SVP Black Star Promos), which the ledger’s first-set rule leaves out by design. Two of the 15 printed disagreements are one trainer kit under two spellings (Kent Kanetsuna: Bulbapedia’s “Diamond & Pearl Trainer Kit” against the index’s “DP trainer Kit” with the half-kit’s name in parentheses; Kyoko Koizumi: “EX Trainer Kit” against “EX trainer Kit” likewise), and in one the ledger is the earlier of the two (Atsuko Ujiie: Skyridge in the ledger, “EX Team Magma vs Team Aqua” in Bulbapedia). Only 15 of the 24 disagreements are printed, so “mostly” rests on those 15.⁵³²¹⁴⁰
• Counts were not compared. Bulbapedia’s page says “the amount of cards only lists unique cards released,” a count of distinct artworks, and 263 of its 426 rows compute that number from wiki categories when the page is rendered, the names with the most credits among them, so the raw text holds a number for only the other 163 rows; counts were not compared.³⁴

On my reading, the agreement is good enough to use Bulbapedia as the tie-breaker for spellings, which is the only thing the ledger uses it for (rule M2), and not good enough to replace the catalog as the source of credits.

9. What is measured and what is not

Measured for this post. All in the author’s evidence folder for this post, or, for arith.py, lookups.py and figures.py, in the author’s working folder for this post, run on October 5, 2026 (the two close-read scripts later that day):

• fetch_tcgdex_illustrators.py: TCGdex’s English and Japanese illustrator listings, 412 and 321 names and 23,165 and 10,610 card rows, fetched 14:28 to 14:29 UTC.²²
• build_ledger.py: the ledger, illustrators_ledger.csv (34,037 rows), and the merge table name_merges.csv (34 rows), by the rules in ledger_codebook.txt.⁹²³
• measure_illustrators.py: every count in this post, output measure_illustrators.out.txt, sections A1 to Z4. After review I changed how it prints lists that stop at a count: none is now cut inside a tie without saying so, and the illustration-rarity lists print competition ranks. Every count it printed before is unchanged; the prior script and output are kept beside the new ones.¹²⁶
• r1_illustration_rare_ranks.py: the illustration-rarity credits per name in each region, with competition ranks and every tie printed whole, and where each region’s five most-credited names stand, output r1_illustration_rare_ranks.out.txt.²⁷
• cr_first_last.py and cr_brief_checks.py, written after a close read of the post: for every name the post makes a first, last, latest, still, since or run statement about, the first and last credit per region with promo sets left out and with them in, naming every set tied at the date; and the facts behind the brief’s checks, among them today’s bundle against the ledger printing by printing (174 of 21,256 English printings differ), the years the app’s pages show with and without promo sets, the Japanese counts with the 11 flagged credits kept and left out, the five PMCG1 Trainer pairs, the bundle’s keys, the Bulbapedia 2022 count, and the “Basic” Energy test behind the distinct-card-names caveat.⁴⁰²⁴
• arith.py and lookups.py (in the author’s working folder for this post): every share, difference and ratio, and the single-row facts, derived from that output and the ledger.¹²²¹
• figures.py: the three charts, drawn from the ledger and checked against the measurement output.⁴³⁴⁶¹³

Not verified, or weaker than it reads.

• The credits are the catalog’s, not the cards’. No card was inspected. The English bundle agrees with a fresh TCGdex fetch on every index printing, which shows consistency, not correctness. The catalogs credit five same-named 1996 Trainer cards to different people, paired by card name and not by artwork, and six more 1997 to 1999 Japanese credits are a screen’s candidates, paired with nothing (Section 5).²¹⁴⁷²⁴
• The Japanese index is partial. No credits for neo, VS, web, e or PCG; no ADV, DP, DPt, LEGEND, BW or XY main sets; no S1 to S4a. Japanese ranks and years describe 1996 to 1999 and 2015 to 2026 only.⁹²
• Artwork counts are bounds, one of them conditional. Printings overcount reprints; distinct card names undercount a second artwork for the same card name, and read as a lower bound on artworks only if no artwork appears under two card names in the same index, which was not checked card by card. No exact distinct-artwork figure is given anywhere in this post.⁹²⁴
• What the inspector shows for a Japanese card is read from the code and from the roadmap’s recorded example, not run on a device: no live card detail was fetched for this post, so whether the live detail carries a credit for the printings the bundle leaves uncredited is unknown (Sections 11 and 12).³³²⁰
• Spelling merges lean on a wiki. The 10 spelling merges use Bulbapedia’s list as a tie-breaker; 6 close pairs were left apart; romanization variants more than one or two edits apart were not searched for.²³
• pokemon.com walled the page saver. The Arita profile and the YOSHIROTTEN page were read through a fetch tool, so this post paraphrases them and quotes neither. The Julie Hang interview returned a 404 to the fetch tool and the wall to the saver; pokemon.com’s 2024 contest promo page and its Obtain Special Pokémon TCG Promos page could not be read either; pokemoncenter.com answered 403.³⁶⁴¹⁴²
• The archived contest notices were not fetched. The 2024 disqualification and replacement dates rest on Bulbapedia, as do the CoroCoro contest history, the 2016 art book and the photo credit on the Wizards promo 26.^15325234
• The contest site’s dates are each page’s published-date metadata, and Bulbapedia records a later posting date for every column cited here: October 12, November 17 and December 15, 2023 and January 19, 2024 for the four 2024-site columns whose metadata says September 8, October 25, November 21 and December 21, 2023, and April 27, 2022 for the Komiya and Saitou conversation dated April 25. Neither source is treated as settled. The site’s official rules name Creatures Inc. and The Pokémon Company International as sponsors.²⁸¹⁵
• “Approximately 250 illustrators active” is an official statement from a 2023 column that counts things the index cannot see; the ledger’s counts are set beside it, not used to test it.⁷⁸
• The 2024 entry count is “over 10,000” in the official release; Bulbapedia’s 10,830 repeats its 2022 figure and is not used.⁵⁰¹⁵
• kiradex.app’s counts for Mitsuhiro Arita (741 cards, 136 sets) differ from the app’s (735, 134); the cause was not traced (Section 11).⁵⁴¹⁷
• Translations of pokemon-card.com sentences are mine.
• “Illus.” on English cards is described from Bulbapedia captions and the catalog’s strings; no official English page I read names the prefix.³²

10. The craft, as rules with numbers

What the sections above add up to, as rules for anyone counting credits, a collector or an app. Every count is as of the index of October 2, 2026, with English credits of October 4 and Japanese credits of October 5.

11. Illustrators in Kiradex today: what the app shows, measured

Kiradex is my collector’s app for trading cards, in TestFlight. TestFlight build 38 added illustrators: the credit on a card’s entry opens its illustrator, every card the catalog credits to that name, set by set, newest first, with how many are yours; Search finds illustrators by name and lists every one of them; cards and illustrators share as kiradex.app links.⁵⁶ This section reads that code and measures what it shows against the ledger. Nothing here was changed in the app.

What is built

• The credit is a link. In the card inspector, a credit the bundled book knows is a SwiftUI NavigationLink labeled “Illus.” and the name, in the kit’s caption style, to that name’s page; a name the book does not know stays plain text.³³
• The credit has two sources. The inspector asks the bundled book first and, when it has nothing, falls back to the credit in the card’s detail, loaded live from the catalog: IllustratorBook.shared.name(of: card) ?? loaded?.illustrator. The book answers English cards only, so a Japanese card’s credit comes from the live detail alone, when it loads: for SV1a-001 the roadmap records the catalog’s answer as Taira Akitsu, a name the English book also holds, so by the code the line is a link, and the page it opens lists that name’s English cards, because the illustrator page reads the English index only. A Japanese credit the English book does not hold stays plain text; offline, or before the detail loads, a Japanese card shows no credit at all. Read from the code, not run on a device.^33552057
• The illustrator page. IllustratorView lists the name’s English cards set by set, newest first, each section headed by the set’s name and release year, with a “Yours” line (as in “Yours 012/708”), the span of years, the sentence “as the catalog credits them,” and a ShareLink to the name’s page on kiradex.app.⁵⁷
• The index of everyone. IllustratorsView groups every name by first letter, in name order, with a count and the years on each row; Search’s field reads “Card or illustrator” and offers an “Every Illustrator” link.⁵⁷⁵⁸
• The data. IllustratorBook reads the bundle Illustrators-en.json, written by scripts/build_illustrators.py from TCGdex’s English listing; the builder folds a name doubled or ending in a stray quote, and carries a Japanese spelling for eight names checked by hand. The book’s own header says what the page is: “The credit is the whole of it: no portrait, no biography, no signature”.⁵⁵⁵⁹
• The game around it. A pin, Many Hands, asks the collector to “Own cards by 50 different illustrators,” and a weekly quest, A new hand, counts an illustrator whose first card of yours arrived that week.¹⁹⁶⁰
• Tests. IllustratorTests covers the book, the roster, search, links and routing.⁶¹
• Open. The roadmap’s unchecked item: “Credits on Japanese cards.” The builder’s header says the Japanese catalog “is not read here.”²⁰⁵⁹

No timing or memory figure was taken for loading the book or building the roster, so this post makes no claim about either cost.

The book counts strings, not people

I transcribed IllustratorBook.roster(in:) into Python and ran it on the same bundle and index as the ledger.¹⁷

The app’s English bundle holds 410 names (TCGdex’s English listing, fetched October 5, named 412); 7 of them have no card in the index, so the app’s index of everyone lists 403. The ledger, after its splits and merges, has 392 English names. For 372 of the 403 roster names the app shows the same count as the ledger; the other 31 differ, and every difference is a split or a merge:¹⁷¹²²²

Where the app’s roster and the ledger differ, as of the index of October 2, 2026 and the bundle of October 4.¹⁷²³

So three things the pages do today, measured:

• A placeholder has a page. “N/A” is listed as an illustrator with one card, an English trainer-kit Lightning Energy, and the inspector links to it.¹⁷²¹
• Two-person credits are missing from each person. Shinji Higuchi’s page shows 5 cards; split, the ledger credits him on 20 (5 alone, and 15 shared). Sachiko Eba (10 printings), Noriko Takaya (5), Nobusawa (3) and Mochipuyo (3) have no page of their own at all.¹⁷¹²
• A misspelling splits a name. Souchirou Gunjima has a page with 3 cards next to Souichirou Gunjima with 102.¹⁷

On my reading, the bundle’s 20,537 credits and the ledger’s 20,536 credited English printings are the same cards: the one difference is the printing credited “N/A”. The ledger’s 20,556 credits are 20 more than its 20,536 credited printings, because each of the 20 printings credited to two names gives a credit to each, and 19 more than the bundle’s 20,537, because the bundle’s count also holds the “N/A” printing, which the ledger counts as uncredited.¹⁷¹¹²

Many Hands counts strings too

Progression counts hands as Set(cards.compactMap(\.illustrator)).count, and the weekly quest keys on the same name string.¹⁹⁶⁰ So the 18 raw strings the ledger splits or merges can each count as a separate hand: “N/A” is a hand; Souchirou Gunjima and Souichirou Gunjima are two; Shinji Higuchi + Sachiko Eba is one hand that is neither of its two people.¹⁸ On my reading of the code, a collector chasing the pin’s 50 can be credited for a typo and denied a person.

The years on a promo-only name

An illustrator’s years come from each set’s index year (Facts.years, from index.year(ofSet:)), and the same year appears in two more places: the page heads each set section with the set’s release year, and the index of everyone prints the years on each row.⁵⁵⁵⁷⁶² A promo set’s index year is the start of its run, so a name credited only on an SVP promo shows 2023 in all three. kiradex.app shows exactly that: Acorviart, “1 card · 2023.”⁶³ The contest that produced that card ran from October 12, 2023 to January 31, 2024, and the Japanese distribution of its winners’ cards began on March 14, 2025.⁵⁰⁵¹ The year on the page is the promo run’s, not the card’s.

What agrees

For Mitsuhiro Arita, the app’s numbers are 735 cards, 134 sets, 1999 to 2026, equal to the ledger. The app sorts its index by name only; ranked by count, its top ten equals the ledger’s top ten in order, with one difference: Ken Sugimori at 1,119 against the ledger’s 1,120, the one credit the hand split of Ken Sugimori Yusuke Ohmura adds.¹⁷

kiradex.app’s own page for him, fetched October 5, 2026, says “741 Pokémon cards carry the name Mitsuhiro Arita in the public catalog, from 1999 to 2026, across 136 sets.” The site and the app differ by 6 cards and 2 sets. The cause was not traced; my reading is that the site’s catalog holds sets the app’s index leaves out.⁵⁴¹²

The site’s index page also says “Every Pokémon card carries the name of the person who drew it” and “These are all 410 names the public catalog credits on the English cards”. In the ledger, 720 English printings have no credit in the catalog, one carries a photographer’s credit, and the app bundle’s 410 strings come to 392 names once the 7 with no card in the index are set aside and the rest are split and merged (TCGdex’s English listing, fetched October 5, named 412).^631341722

What the rarity guide’s 410 counts

The rarity guide on this site says Illustrators-en.json “holds 410 names and 20,537 card credits across 195 sets”. That is true of the file: it holds 410 names and 20,537 credits across 195 sets.²⁵¹⁷ It is not the number of illustrators. 7 of the 410 have no card in the index, so the app shows 403, and after splitting and merging the index has 392 English illustrator names.¹⁷¹ The same guide’s brief describes the illustrator chip as “Illus.” and the name, linking to the illustrator’s page; with the credits as shipped, that link opens pages for “N/A” and for two-person names. That is a gap in the data the design reads, fixed by brief item 1 below, not a wrong statement about the design.²⁵¹⁷

12. The brief: what Kiradex builds and the checks it must pass

This is what the app should do with the facts above. None of it has shipped; each item ends with a check that a unit test, a script or a capture can verify, says what the same check would show today, and names any earlier item it needs. The page stays what the app’s own header says it is: the credit and the cards, nothing about the person.⁵⁵ Nothing proposed here draws, names or depends on any creature; the fixtures below are credit strings, card ids and basic Energy.

1. Fix the names before showing more

In the Kiradex repository’s scripts/build_illustrators.py, apply the ledger’s split and merge rules at build time and ship the result, so the app, the site and Many Hands agree on what a name is.⁵⁹⁹

Acceptance: a comparator reads the rebuilt bundle and the ledger printing by printing, set id and card number against the names on each, and exits non-zero on any difference. measure_illustrators.py section X1 reads one name per card today and would fail on the new shape, so the comparator is X1 updated to the per-card lists. Run against today’s bundle, that comparison reports 174 of 21,256 English printings whose names differ from the ledger’s (cr_brief_checks.py, section B1), so it cannot pass before the rebuild; against the rebuilt bundle it must report 0. A unit test asserts that book.illustrator(named: "N/A") is nil (today the bundle holds that name); that book.facts(of: "Shinji Higuchi", in:) counts 20 in the English index of October 2, 2026 (today 5); and that no name in the book contains ” + “, “/” followed by “Direc.” or the string “Illus. & Direc.” (today six such strings are names: three with ” + “, two with “/Direc.” and one beginning “Illus. & Direc.”).¹⁷²³²⁴

2. Many Hands and A new hand count credited names

Progression.Card.illustrator is one string from the book (ProgressionBook.swift, line 17, IllustratorBook.shared.name(of: entry.ref)), and the weekly quest keys on the same call. After item 1, both hold the list of names the rebuilt book gives a card, and the hand tally counts distinct names under the ledger’s rules: a person, a studio or a project is one hand each, a direction credit is none, and a stage name and a person stay two, as the ledger keeps them (rule M3). The pin’s words, “50 different illustrators,” then mean 50 credited names after the split and merge, which is what the ledger can count; it cannot count people.^1960649

Acceptance (after item 1): a ProgressionTests case builds Progression.Card values whose credit lists are what the rebuilt book gives the printings in question, and asserts (today the fixtures cannot be built, since illustrator is one string, and the tally counts each raw string as a hand): cards with [Shinji Higuchi, Sachiko Eba] and [Sachiko Eba] count 2 hands; a card with an empty list, the printing the catalog lists as “N/A”, counts 0; two cards with [Souichirou Gunjima], the list the rebuilt book gives both the printing the catalog spells Souchirou Gunjima and one it spells Souichirou Gunjima, count 1; a card with [5ban Graphics] counts 1, and one with [2019 Pikachu Project] counts 1; cards with [Imakuni?] and [Tomoaki Imakuni] count 2. The test feeds lists, as ScanReasonsTests feeds a string today; it does not split raw strings, because after item 1 nothing in the app does.¹⁸⁶⁴²⁴

3. What an illustrator’s page shows

Keep the page as it is, the credit and the cards, and add a facts block in which every line names its unit, its language and its date:

Today a name’s years come from every set’s index year, promo sets included (Facts.from and to, IllustratorBook.swift lines 144 to 153), the page gives each set section the set’s release year as its subtitle (IllustratorView.swift, line 79), and the index of everyone prints the same years on each row (line 187). A promo set’s index date is the start of its run, so in all three places the year is the run’s, not the card’s. The change: a promo set is one whose name contains “Promo” or “プロモ”, the ledger’s rule, and the builder writes the list of promo set ids into the bundle; Facts.from and to leave those sets out, in facts(of:in:) and roster(in:) alike; a name credited only in promo sets shows Promo instead of a year, in the facts block and on its index row; and a promo set’s section subtitle reads Promo, never the run’s start year. With promo sets left out, 84 of the 380 English names with a non-promo credit show a later first year than today and none a different last year, and 200 of the 392 English names have at least one promo-set section. The block’s date follows item 8’s rule: the build date the bundle records.^{55576233854024}

Acceptance: after items 1 and 8, a capture of Acorviart’s page shows Promo in the facts block and as the subtitle of its one set section, SVP Black Star Promos, and no year in either, and the index row for Acorviart reads Promo; today the facts line, the section subtitle and the index row all read 2023. After item 6, a capture of Mitsuhiro Arita’s page shows both languages’ counts and the as-of date (today the panel shows 735 cards across 134 sets and the years 1999 to 2026, with no Japanese count and no date). A script over the rebuilt bundle, a transcription of roster(in:) as section X1 is of today’s, asserts for every name in the rebuilt book, not only the top-40 listing printed in section C3, that its first and last years equal the years of its first and last non-promo sets computed from illustrators_ledger.csv, and that the 12 English promo-only names show Promo; the ledger sits in the author’s evidence folder, so that script runs there, beside the ledger, and not in the repository’s tests.⁵⁶³²⁴

4. The index of everyone: two more sorts

The default stays by name; it is a directory. Add two sorts, each with its date in the header by item 8’s rule (a bundle built on October 4, 2026 would give as of 4 October 2026; today’s bundle records no date, so the header waits on item 8):

• Most printings, descending, ties by name and no rank numbers, so a tie is never shown as an order, with a language switch (after item 6), and the column labeled “printings,” not “cards.” Acceptance (after item 1): the English top ten reads 5ban Graphics 1,757; Ken Sugimori 1,120; Mitsuhiro Arita 735; Kouki Saitou 670; Kagemaru Himeno 667; Masakazu Fukuda 486; Ryo Ueda 458; Atsuko Nishida 419; Midori Harada 355; Toyste Beach 316, equal to ledger section B1, with the studio marked as a studio; today’s roster puts Ken Sugimori at 1,119 (Section 11).³¹⁷
• First set, ascending by the first non-promo set, ties by name, which puts the four 1999 Base Set names first and groups the 2023 and 2024 newcomers; the names credited only in promo sets have no first set by that rule and come last, under Promo. Acceptance (after items 1 and 3): the first rows are Keiji Kinebuchi, Ken Sugimori, Mitsuhiro Arita and Tomoaki Imakuni, the four names on Base Set, and the last twelve are the English promo-only names of Section 5.⁵

Refused: a “most popular” or value sort. The page counts credits; it does not rank people.

5. Which sources to link

Link only The Pokémon Company group’s own pages, the official contest site, an illustrator’s own official site where they publish one (not researched here; added only by hand and verified), and the kiradex.app page. Keep them in a small reviewed table, Kiradex/Resources/IllustratorFeatures.json, name to title, publisher, date and address, seeded from what this post read. The contest-site and press titles below are the saved pages’ own <title> text, character for character; the pokemon.com titles are as read through the fetch tool, which is a manual-read record and not a saved copy:^{3639371649415042}

Acceptance: a script checks every row before a build and fails on any row that has neither of two records, or whose date does not name its source (the page’s own metadata, or the publisher’s dateline). The first is a saved copy of the page, fetched by the script with an answer of 200, whose <title> or main heading contains the row’s title character for character; the two “Behind Drawing” titles carry the page’s own quotation marks with no space before them, and a row that drops them fails. The second, for a host that walls scripts (pokemon.com walled the page saver for this post), is a recorded manual read: the date, who read it, and the title as read on the page. A row with neither, such as the Julie Hang row today, is left out of the shipped file. The script also fails if a row links a wiki, a fan site or a store listing, or names anyone the ledger does not credit.

6. Japanese credits

Read TCGdex’s ja/illustrators listing, which the builder already notes is there, into Illustrators-ja.json, keyed like the rebuilt English file and built by the same rules and the same table; the ledger’s Japanese column is that build.⁵⁹⁹ The book then answers Japanese cards from the bundle, where today name(ofSet:number:language:) returns nil for any language but English (IllustratorBook.swift, line 111) and the inspector shows a Japanese credit only when the live card detail carries one (Section 11). Show the Japanese credit as “Illus.” and the romanized name the catalog gives, linked to a page that lists the name’s Japanese cards (the page reads the English index only today, IllustratorView.swift, lines 38 and 60), and add no Japanese spelling beyond the eight checked by hand. Keep the 11 PMCG printings of Section 5 in the bundle, flagged credit unverified and shown with that word, so the denominators stay the ledger’s; leaving them out would give 10,562 credited Japanese printings, not 10,573.⁴⁷⁵⁷²⁴

Acceptance: a unit test asserts that book.names(ofSet: "SV1a", number: "001", language: .ja), the list form item 1 gives the lookup, returns ["Taira Akitsu"], the credit the ledger and the roadmap’s example both give that card; today name(ofSet:number:language:) returns nil for .ja (IllustratorBook.swift, line 111), and IllustratorTests (line 16) asserts today that a lookup in Japanese returns nil, so the new case sits beside it with that comment corrected. The inspector check is taken offline, with the live detail unable to load: SV1a-001 shows the name as a link, and the page it opens lists Japanese cards; online, today’s build already shows that name from the live detail, so an online capture proves nothing about the bundle. The item 1 comparator, run on Illustrators-ja.json against the ledger’s Japanese rows, reports 0 differing printings and 10,573 credited of 12,781, the 11 flagged among them.^2061121

7. Say when the catalog has no credit, and only then

The inspector’s credit line is silent in three states today and does not tell them apart: the bundle has no credit and the detail is still loading; the detail failed to load; the detail loaded and carries no credit either. When a printing has no credit in the bundle (720 English and 2,208 Japanese today) the line is empty until the live detail answers, and whether the detail carries a credit for those printings was not checked, because no card detail was fetched for this post. Show No credit in the catalog, in the inspector’s quiet caption style, only in the third state, so the absence reads as the catalog’s, not the card’s; show nothing while the detail loads, and Credit not loaded when it failed. A credit that arrives from the detail passes through the same split and merge as the bundle’s (the table of item 1 ships in the bundle for that), so a fallback credit is never a raw string the book would have split.¹³³

Acceptance (after item 1): a unit test of the credit line’s state, a pure function of the bundled names and the detail’s phase, covers four cases: bundled names show at once; none and loading shows nothing; none and failed shows Credit not loaded; none and loaded without a credit shows No credit in the catalog. A capture of an English basic Lightning Energy printing the bundle leaves uncredited, taken online, shows the live credit or the last line, and the report says which, because the ledger cannot predict it.⁴⁴

8. Count the next set honestly

Each catalog update changes the counts. The facts block, the sorts and Many Hands read the rebuilt bundle. One rule dates every count the app shows, in item 3’s facts block and item 4’s headers alike: the build date the rebuilt bundle records for its language, written by the builder into the file under a built key (today’s bundle records none: its only keys are names and sets, and its file is dated October 4, 2026 on disk), not the index’s date and not a hard-coded string.²⁴

Acceptance (after item 1): a unit test builds the book from a fixture bundle in the rebuilt shape with a stated built date and asserts that the facts block’s and the headers’ date is that date, and that a bundle without the key shows no date rather than a wrong one.

Not in this brief

• Portraits, biographies, ages, schooling, earnings or any private detail about a person. The page is the credit and the cards.⁵⁵
• Card art as figures, in the post or the app; the charts are drawn from counts.
• Contest prize amounts. They are not facts about the illustrators’ work.
• A Japanese spelling invented for a name. The eight hand-checked spellings stay; none is added without the same check.⁵⁹
• A value or popularity ranking. A credit count is not a price and not a verdict.
• Tracing the site’s 741 against the app’s 735. It was not traced for this post; it belongs to the site’s build, not this brief.⁵⁴

Key Takeaways

If you collect

• The illustrator’s name is a printed part of the card; Japan’s official diagram numbers it 16 of 16.²⁹ Collecting by illustrator is something a Creatures art director suggests in so many words: “try to gather cards featuring your favorite illustrator.”⁷
• A count of “cards by” a name is a count of printings, reprints included. Ken Sugimori’s 1,120 English printings carry 717 distinct card names; read any total as printings unless it says otherwise.³
• The most-printed English card has 71 different credited names (two studios and one project among them) across 145 printings, and no name holds more than 8 of them.⁴⁴
• 5ban Graphics, the name you will see most, is a studio, not a person; it leads every English era from Black & White on.³⁴
• Basic Energy is where credits go missing: 54 of 60 English Lightning Energy printings carry no credit in the catalog.⁴⁴
• Japanese and English credit lists are different catalogs; never add their counts, and expect them to disagree: five 1996 Trainer cards carry different credits in the two, and six more Japanese credits from 1997 to 1999 are flagged as candidates (Section 5).¹⁴⁷
• Rankings move. English ranks 4 and 5 are 3 credits apart as of October 2, 2026; check the date on any “most” you read, this post’s included.¹¹ Nothing here is financial advice.

If you build the app

• Split two-name credits and merge spellings at build time with a reviewed table; never merge identities. A string is not a person: today’s roster lists 403 strings for 392 names.¹⁷²³
• Count credited names after the split and merge, not raw strings, anywhere a number rewards a collector: a studio or a project is one name, a direction credit is none. Many Hands counts “N/A” as a hand today.¹⁸¹⁹
• Never date a promo-only name by its promo set; the index dates a promo set by the start of its run.⁹⁶³
• Show the unit, the language and the as-of date on every count, and label a studio as a studio.³
• Show absence as the catalog’s, and only once the catalog has answered: 720 English and 2,208 Japanese printings have no credit in the bundle, and the inspector today falls back to the live card detail before it shows nothing.¹³³
• Link only official features, the publishers’ pages, the contest site and an illustrator’s own site, and the kiradex.app page, checked by script before each build.⁴²

FAQ

Who has illustrated the most Pokémon cards?

Counted as printings in Kiradex’s index of October 2, 2026, the most-credited English name is a studio, 5ban Graphics, with 1,757 credits (8.55%), followed by Ken Sugimori (1,120), Mitsuhiro Arita (735), Kouki Saitou (670) and Kagemaru Himeno (667). In Japanese the leader is again 5ban Graphics (816), then Ken Sugimori (385) and Toyste Beach (284). Printings include reprints: Ken Sugimori’s English total carries 717 distinct card names. The ranking is of credits in a catalog on that date, and a new set can reorder names that sit close together.³¹¹

How many Pokémon card illustrators are there?

It depends on what you count. The card index behind Kiradex credits 392 distinct names on English cards and 314 on Japanese cards, 402 across both, after splitting two-name credits and merging spelling variants; the app’s English credit bundle holds 410 strings, and TCGdex’s English listing, fetched October 5, 2026, named 412. In a 2023 column on the official contest site, Creatures’ illustration director said there are “approximately 250 illustrators active in the Pokémon TCG”; the index counts 221 names credited in 2024 sets across both languages. The two figures count different things: people at work, and credits already printed.^1177822

Who illustrated the first Pokémon cards?

In Kiradex’s index, the first Japanese set, the Expansion Pack of October 20, 1996, credits nine names, among them Ken Sugimori, Mitsuhiro Arita, Keiji Kinebuchi, Tomoaki Imakuni and Tomokazu Komiya. The first English set, Base Set (January 9, 1999), credits all 102 of its printings to four: Keiji Kinebuchi, Ken Sugimori, Mitsuhiro Arita and Tomoaki Imakuni. The two catalogs disagree about who drew five of the 1996 Trainer cards, and six more Japanese credits from 1997 to 1999 are flagged as candidates for the same disagreement (Section 5).⁵²¹⁴⁷

What does “Illus.” mean on a Pokémon card?

It introduces the illustrator credit: “Illus.” followed by the name of the person or studio credited for the card’s art. That reading comes from Bulbapedia’s captions and the catalog’s own credit strings; no official English page I read names the prefix. Japan’s official card diagram calls the same line the illustrator’s name.³²²⁹

Are all Pokémon cards credited to an illustrator?

No. In Kiradex’s index, 720 of 21,256 English printings and 2,208 of 12,781 Japanese printings carry no credit in the catalog; most of the Japanese gap is five whole eras the catalog never credited, and many English gaps are basic Energy and trainer-kit cards. Bulbapedia also records one English card, the Wizards promo numbered 26, with a photographer’s credit instead of an illustrator’s.¹²⁴⁴³⁴

How do you become a Pokémon card illustrator?

The public route the publishers describe is the illustration contest. Creatures’ first Grand Prix (2018 to 2019) drew 5,343 entries, and illustrators such as Atsushi Furusawa made their debut after entering; the 2024 contest accepted submissions from six countries and drew over 10,000 entries. The contest site says employment is not awarded to winners and is not guaranteed. In the index, winners of the 2022 contest now hold 9 to 24 English printings each.^48377504914

Can I collect cards by a single illustrator in Kiradex?

Yes, for English cards today: a card’s credit opens the illustrator’s page, which lists every card the catalog credits to that name, set by set, with how many you own. A Japanese card shows its credit when the card’s detail loads from the catalog, and, when the English book holds that name, the page the credit opens lists English cards only. The brief in Section 12 adds Japanese credits from a bundle, printings per language with a date, sorts by printings and by first set, and fixes the names that today count as strings rather than credited names.^56573317

Related on this site: Pokémon Card Rarity and Set Symbols, English and Japanese reads the rest of the card’s bottom line, the rarity, the set code and the regulation mark, from the same index; How Card Centering Is Judged, and How to Measure It covers what the graders measure on the card’s front; Pixel-Art Worlds on iPhone is Kiradex World, the pixel town where a collector’s cards are shown; Pixel-Art People: Characters and a Creator on iPhone and Pixel-Art Structures: Houses, Halls and Interiors on iPhone are the rest of that series.

Sources