Pokémon TCG rotation: which sets are legal right now, and what leaves next

The letter at the bottom of your card, and what it decides

The regulation mark is one capital letter printed in a small box at the bottom left of every modern card, beside the collector number. During a game it does nothing at all. It matters before the game, when you are choosing what goes in the deck.

Standard is the format of official tournaments and of ranked play in Pokémon TCG Live, and it only ever allows a handful of letters at once. Right now those are H, I and J. A card with an older letter cannot go in a Standard deck, however good it is and however much you love it.

Roughly once a year the oldest letter still allowed stops being allowed. That is rotation. Every card carrying it leaves the format on the same day, whatever set it came from and however strong it is. It feels brutal the first time it happens to you, and it is meant to: without it the same four decks would still be the best decks five years from now, and there would be no reason left to open a booster.

Watch out for the thing most people get wrong here. The letter belongs to that PRINTING of the card, not to the Pokémon. The same Pokémon can carry a H in an older set and a J in a recent one. Those are two different cards, often with different attacks, and only the one with a still-legal letter can be played. So turn your cards over one by one before a tournament. Your memory will let you down on this, and it always lets people down on the same card.

What the next rotation takes: 866 cards

Of the 1,951 different cards legal today, 866 carry a H and leave together — 44% of the format. The other 1,085, marked I and J, stay.

That is a lot, and it is much better to know now than on the morning of a tournament. Nearly half of what you can play today has an expiry date on it. If you build a deck this month and fill it with H, you are building a deck you will have to rebuild from scratch.

Now the part that matters more than the total, and that we have never seen anyone else publish. We counted card NAMES rather than printings. 294 names that leave with H also exist under a letter that stays, so you replace them by buying the newer printing of the same card. But 434 names exist under H and nowhere else. Those ones genuinely disappear, and there is nothing to buy instead — the card is simply gone from the format until the publisher decides to print it again.

One warning on the replacements, because it catches people out at the worst moment. Two printings sharing a name do not always share their text. The newer Iono is not guaranteed to do what the older Iono did. Read both before you spend anything, and read the attacks rather than the picture.

And one small piece of good news to end on. 8 cards carry no letter at all: those are the basic Energy cards. They never rotate. The Grass Energy you have had since your very first deck will still be legal for as long as the game exists.

Set by set: what goes, what stays, and what was never affected

6 sets lose ALL of their cards at the next rotation, 7 lose part of theirs, and 7 lose nothing. The table below gives the exact count for each one.

The sets that go entirely are the oldest ones still allowed: Temporal Forces, Twilight Masquerade, Shrouded Fable, Stellar Crown, Surging Sparks, Prismatic Evolutions. If your most expensive cards came out of those, this is the moment to find out rather than later. Keep playing them while they are legal, and stop building around them.

The half-hit sets are the ones that deserve your attention, because everybody assumes they are safe. They shipped while the letter was changing over: their earliest cards still carry the old one and the rest carry the new one. Two cards from the same set, bought in the same shop on the same day, can have opposite fates. The letter decides. It always decides.

A word on how to read the numbers, because they will look wrong if you add them up. Each row counts the cards PRINTED in that set. A card reprinted across two sets therefore appears on two rows, while it counts once in the total of 1,951. That is exactly the number you want when you are looking at one set. Do not sum the columns.

When is the next rotation? We do not know, and we are not guessing

That date is announced by the publisher on its own site, and it is written nowhere in the card data we read. So we do not have it. What we do have is the letter that goes next, which is H, and every card attached to it.

Here is how this page is made. We read the catalogue of legal cards, we count the letters, we count the sets, and everything above comes out of that counting. An announcement date is not something you can count.

What we can tell you is what to do about it. When you hear that a rotation is coming, go and find the official announcement rather than the post commenting on it. And on the day it lands, come back here: the catalogue gets rebuilt, the legal letters change by themselves in the table above, and you will see straight away what you have left.

What this changes for your deck, and for your money

Before you buy or trade an expensive card, turn it over and read the letter. A H stops at the next rotation. A J will still be legal several seasons from now, and nobody in the shop is going to point that out for you.

This is not a reason to stop buying, and we are not trying to frighten you. A card that leaves Standard is not broken: you can still play it at home, in other formats, and it looks exactly as good in the binder. What changes is whether you are allowed to put it on the table on Saturday.

Where it really helps is when you are stuck between two decks. Same price, same power, and one of them is half H while the other is not. Take the second one. You are buying yourself an extra year of play for the same money, and that is the kind of thing you only notice once it is too late.

And if your favourite deck is the one getting hit: start again with the Trainer cards. They are the cheap part, they carry over into every deck you will build afterwards, and they are what makes the machine run at all. Buy the expensive Pokémon last.

If you mostly play on Pokémon TCG Live, all of this applies to you too. Ranked play uses the Standard format, so the same list of legal cards governs it. On rotation day a deck holding a card that just became illegal simply stops being selectable until you fix it.

These pages are about the same corner of the game. If you came away from this one still wondering about something, start with one of them.