The short answer
A World Championship does not visibly move the price of existing Worlds cards. We tested it properly, on 82 products with a price on both sides of Worlds 2026 in San Francisco, and the median move was zero in all three windows. 70 of the 82 products — 85.4% — did not move at all across the event.
This is the finding most pages about Worlds and card prices will not give you, because “nothing happened” is harder to write than a spike. But it is the one that saves you money: there is no evidence here for timing your buying around a championship, so buy when it suits you.
The real price event is not the championship. It is the issue of a brand new promo — and that moves hard, in one direction, and down. That is the section to read if you are going to Singapore.
How the study was built
Worlds 2026 · San Francisco · 28–30 Aug 2026. We took every Worlds product in our 375-snapshot daily series that carried a published ungraded price on both sides of the event, and measured the move across three windows. The price basis is PriceCharting’s PriceCharting `loose-price` — the ungraded/raw price column in USD.
The data hole. Five consecutive days immediately before Worlds 2026 (28–30 Aug, San Francisco). The last pre-event mark is 23 Aug and the first mark after the hole is 29 Aug, which is day 2 of the event itself — so "after" in our event study means "mid-event", not "after the event". The last snapshot before the five-day hole is 23 Aug and the first after it is 29 Aug, which is day 2 of the event. "post0" therefore means mid-event, not post-event.
The smoothing. `loose-price` is a trailing monthly average, so a six-day window cannot resolve an event-week spike even if one happened — roughly a month of trading has to pass before the average fully reflects it. The 30-day column is the only one with enough lag to show a real move, and it still blends pre-event trading into the average.
Both of those cut the same way: they make the study less able to detect a short-lived event-week spike. So read the null result as “no move large or durable enough to survive a monthly average”, not as proof that no trading happened in the hall.
The result: nothing moved
| Window | Products | Median move | Unchanged | Range |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The 30 days into the event (24 Jul → 23 Aug) | 81 | unchanged | not computed | — |
| Across the event (23 Aug → 29 Aug, spanning the 5-day hole) | 82 | unchanged | 70 of 82 (85.4%) | — |
| Event to 30 days after (23 Aug → 28 Sep) | 82 | unchanged | not computed | −50.3% to +75.5% |
Three windows, three zeros. The 30-day window — the only one with enough lag for a monthly average to have absorbed event-week trading — has a range running from −50.3% to +75.5%, which looks dramatic until you notice it runs both ways and the middle of the distribution is flat.
Across Worlds 2026 in San Francisco, 82 products had a price on both sides of the window. The median move was zero in all three windows tested, and 70 of the 82 — 85.4% — did not move at all between 23 Aug and 29 Aug. Over the following 30 days the median was still zero, with the tails running from −50.3% to +75.5% in both directions and concentrated in thin, old rows.
What did move, and why it is noise
“The median did not move” is not “nothing moved”. Here are the ten largest 30-day moves, so you can judge the tails yourself rather than taking our word for it:
| Product | Locale | Before | 30 days on | Move | Sales |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Champions Festival #XY27 | EN | US$225.00 | US$394.95 | +75.5% | 10 sales |
| Paradise Resort #SV-P | CN | US$39.75 | US$64.94 | +63.4% | 50 sales |
| Tropical Wind [Worlds 09] | JP | US$1,200 | US$596.00 | −50.3% | 14 sales |
| Paradise Resort [World Championships 2023] #SV-P | KR | US$39.91 | US$57.41 | +43.8% | 18 sales |
| Champion's Festival [World Champions 2022] #S-P | JP | US$168.09 | US$217.29 | +29.3% | 22 sales |
| Tropical Wind #DP25 | EN | US$605.93 | US$755.99 | +24.8% | 13 sales |
| Pikachu [World Championships] #225 | EN | US$6.28 | US$7.77 | +23.7% | 533 sales |
| Paradise Resort [World Championships 2025] #SV-P | JP | US$110.49 | US$125.00 | +13.1% | 135 sales |
| Pikachu [World Championships Winner] #225 · winner | EN | US$120.00 | US$131.38 | +9.5% | 68 sales |
| Paradise Resort [World Championships 2025] #224 | EN | US$117.51 | US$119.89 | +2.0% | 87 sales |
Read the top of that table closely. The biggest riser is a 2015 English Champions Festival card on ten recorded sales. The biggest faller is a 2009 Japanese Tropical Wind on fourteen. Neither has anything to do with the 2026 event — they are old, thinly-traded cards where a single sale re-prices the whole row. Meanwhile the best-traded attendee promo in the dataset, the English 2025 Paradise Resort at 87 recorded sales, moved +2.0%, and the single most-traded card of all — the 2025 Pikachu at 533 sales — moved +23.7% over the same window.
That is the shape of noise, not of an event effect: large moves concentrated in thin rows, small moves in liquid ones, and both directions represented.
The one thing that looks like an effect
There is exactly one pattern in this data we think might be real, and we are going to describe it as a suspicion rather than promote it to a finding.
The largest move in the best-traded attendee promo landed just outside the 30-day window.
Paradise Resort 2025 #224 was US$117.51 on 23 Aug, US$119.89 on 28 Sep — a 2% move, which is why the event study records nothing — and then US$174.82 on 29 Sep and US$177.03 on 2 Oct. The jump is +46% and it happened at day 37.
A trailing monthly average cannot show event-week trading until roughly a month of it has washed through. Day 37 is exactly where a lagged effect would first appear, and the same window shows the Japanese 2025 card stepping from US$110.49 to US$135.14.
One card, one championship, no control group, and the same card made moves of similar size in January and June 2026 with no event anywhere near. A 30-day window on a monthly average was always going to be too short, which is a reason to extend the window at the next championship, not a reason to call this an effect.
Here is the full thirteen-month track of that card, so you can see both the September 2026 jump and the similarly-sized moves it made in January and June with no championship anywhere near:
Paradise Resort [World Championships 2025] #224 — a full year after Anaheim
| Date | Ungraded | Sales behind it |
|---|---|---|
| 2025-09-30 | US$250.00 | 1 sale · not a price |
| 2025-11-30 | US$257.48 | 41 sales |
| 2025-12-31 | US$215.00 | 62 sales |
| 2026-01-31 | US$175.00 | 73 sales |
| 2026-02-28 | US$147.75 | 176 sales |
| 2026-03-31 | US$171.25 | 153 sales |
| 2026-04-30 | US$175.00 | 136 sales |
| 2026-05-31 | US$175.00 | 124 sales |
| 2026-06-30 | US$117.97 | 113 sales |
| 2026-07-31 | US$116.30 | 104 sales |
| 2026-08-31 | US$117.60 | 96 sales |
| 2026-09-30 | US$174.82 | 88 sales |
| 2026-10-07 | US$177.03 | 87 sales |
Month-end marks, forward-filled. The arc is not a decay curve: from the first trustworthy mark of US$257.48 at end-November 2025 it fell to a sustained US$105–118 through June to August 2026, then jumped back to US$174.82 in the last days of September 2026. Down 54%, then up 48%, in thirteen months, on a sale count that never dropped below 34.
What we will do about it: at Singapore 2027 we extend the window past day 30 and look at day 37 to day 60 first, which is where a lagged effect on a trailing monthly average would actually surface.
New cards are the real story
If a championship does not move existing prices, what does it do? It issues a new card, and that is where the money moves. This is the one genuinely large, genuinely repeated price effect in our data, and it points the opposite way to what most people assume.
A brand-new Worlds promo loses about a third of its value in its first five weeks.
The 2026 Worlds Pikachu (#93) is the only Worlds promo whose entire post-issue life is inside our 375-day series. From its first mark with real volume behind it — US$29.00 on 2 Sep 2026, 1,038 recorded sales — it fell in twelve consecutive steps to US$18.73 on 6 Oct, −35.4% in 34 days, while the monthly sale count fell from 2,140 to 408. The 2025 Pikachu (#225) did the same thing a year earlier: US$16.49 at end-September 2025 to US$7.47 thirteen months later.
Do not buy the current year’s promo at the event or in the weeks after it. If you want the Singapore 2027 card and you are not being handed one, the evidence says wait at least a quarter. If you are handed one and you intend to sell it, the first fortnight is the best price you will see.
The full week-by-week track of the 2026 Pikachu, the staff and winner multiples, and the locale spread all live on the promo price history page. The short version: the day you are handed the card is close to the best price it will see.
The one Asian-host product
Singapore 2027 is the first Southeast Asian World Championships, and the natural question is whether an Asian host does something different to prices. Our dataset contains exactly one product tied to an Asian host city, and it is the only Worlds product in the series that is meaningfully up:
Yokohama Deck (JP) — the only Asian-host product in the series
| Date | Ungraded | Sales behind it |
|---|---|---|
| 2025-09-30 | US$300.00 | 16 sales |
| 2025-10-31 | US$300.00 | 16 sales |
| 2025-11-30 | US$297.07 | 20 sales |
| 2025-12-31 | US$268.14 | 20 sales |
| 2026-01-31 | US$278.08 | 19 sales |
| 2026-02-28 | US$284.26 | 18 sales |
| 2026-03-31 | US$306.84 | 43 sales |
| 2026-04-30 | US$300.00 | 43 sales |
| 2026-05-31 | US$294.22 | 42 sales |
| 2026-06-30 | US$300.00 | 39 sales |
| 2026-07-31 | US$399.72 | 51 sales |
| 2026-08-31 | US$440.00 | 49 sales |
| 2026-09-30 | US$431.47 | 44 sales |
| 2026-10-07 | US$431.28 | 44 sales |
Flat near US$300 for nine months, then a step to US$476 at its 20 July 2026 peak and US$431.28 now: +43.8% year on year. It is the only Worlds product in the dataset tied to an Asian host city and the only one meaningfully up. We cannot tell you why, and the step began five weeks before Worlds 2026 rather than after it.
We cannot tell you why, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. One product is not a pattern, and the step up began five weeks before Worlds 2026 rather than after it, which rules out the obvious explanation. It is on the watch list for Singapore 2027 as a hypothesis, not a reason to buy anything.
What to do at Singapore 2027
Five instructions, each tied to something above rather than to a general feeling:
- Do not time your buying around the event. The median Worlds product did not move across Worlds 2026 in any window we tested. Buy a card you want when you see it at a price you like.
- Do not buy the 2027 promo during event week or the month after. Both cards whose first year we can observe fell hard and immediately — 35% in 34 days for the 2026 Pikachu, 53% over thirteen months for the 2025 one.
- If you are handed one and intend to sell it, sell early. The first fortnight is the best price the evidence shows.
- Ignore any figure quoted without a sale count. The largest moves in this dataset are all on thin rows, and PriceCharting marks a card with one recorded sale the same way it marks one with five hundred.
- Watch the locale, not the calendar. Which regional printing gets distributed in Singapore is, on our figures, worth several times more than any event timing effect — the 2025 card ranges 4.54x across printings.
What this study cannot tell you
We would rather you knew the limits than trusted the headline, because the limits here are substantial:
One championship. The five-day August hole removes the run-up and day 1; the series starts a month after Worlds 2025 Anaheim, so there is no second cycle to compare against. Any sentence of the form "Worlds does X to prices" is unsupported by this dataset, in either direction.
- One championship, n=1. Our series begins 2025-09-19, a month after Worlds 2025 in Anaheim, so there is no second cycle to compare against.
- The run-up and day 1 are missing. A five-day snapshot hole removes exactly the days an event-week spike would appear in.
- The price column is a trailing monthly average, which cannot resolve a six-day window by construction.
- It measures secondary-market averages, not what you will pay in Singapore. Local counter prices during event week are a different question and this dataset has nothing to say about them.
What we will do differently in 2027
This page gets re-run after Singapore 2027 with a window that was designed in advance rather than reconstructed afterwards. The queue, with dates:
| The gap | When we revisit |
|---|---|
| The +46% move in Paradise Resort 2025 #224 at day 37 after Worlds 2026 is either the lagged event effect or ordinary noise, and one card cannot tell them apart. | 2027-09-15 — one month after Singapore 2027, with a pre-event window that has no data hole in it this time. |
| The event study is n=1 championship, with the run-up and day 1 of Worlds 2026 missing to a five-day snapshot hole. | 2027-08-01 — confirm the daily snapshot cron is healthy before the Singapore event week, so the 2027 window is complete. |
The important one is the last: the daily snapshot cron gets checked for health before Singapore event week, so that Fri 13 – Sun 15 Aug 2027 produces a complete window with no hole in it. An event study on two championships is worth more than twice one on a single championship, and that is the real reason this page exists now rather than in a year.
Sources
- PriceCharting — World Championship Pokémon list — The underlying price source. Our figures come from dated daily exports of it, not from the live page, so expect the live page to have moved.
- Bulbapedia — World Championships promotional cards — The encyclopedic record: which card was handed out in which year, in which locales, and which variants exist. We do not rebuild this.
- championships.pokemon.com — The only binding source on what is actually distributed at a World Championships, and on pop-up access.
Price basis: PriceCharting PriceCharting `loose-price` — the ungraded/raw price, USD, as of 2026-10-07, from 375 daily snapshots beginning 2025-09-19. The event study was computed by script over those snapshots; no figure on this page was calculated by hand.