I have some takes on the Ascended Heroes release, both from a collector's perspective and as someone who has worked in B2B, warehousing, order management, and enterprise resource planning for the last 10+ years. There are legitimate complaints to be made about how Pokemon handled, and fumbled, this set's release, but other considerations to make as well. Let's rip into this one!

Greninja gets another featured Pokemon TCG set, this time in its Mega Evolved form.

Chaos Rising has been confirmed as the next set release after Ascended Heroes, with another highly anticipated Greninja chase card (the art was already leaked in English, but don't click the link if you're trying to avoid spoilers!).

It's crazy to think we have more info on new mainline sets than the 30th anniversary plans for the TCG, but hopefully the company doesn't disappoint with the 30th Anniversary release.

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Ascended Heroes released with a whimper. Two variants of three-pack tech sticker collections, one featuring a Charmander promo card and the other a Gastly promo card, was all that dropped for this set. To make matters worse, local game stores barely got their hands on product, with some stores showing they received just a single display of 12 blisters—36 packs total on the RELEASE DAY of a new set with cards that have some competitive potential.

This was a horribly, terribly, unmistakably botched release, and I am confident those in charge at TPCi are scrambling right now to ensure the next few target dates are met.

There are a few prevailing thoughts and opinions I have seen circulating around this release, and I wanted to present my take on them here, just to add additional perspective to this horrid release.

Remember, The Pokémon Company International is not just satisfying the demand of their collectors. Their attention is on their competitive card game community, who needs the injection of new cards to fuel their decks for competitive play. Ascended Heroes being in short supply has the potential to hurt their competitive scene, which may be why they moved the dates of certain card legality rules to two weeks after the first major tournament.

Let's talk through a few of my takes on this release and try to make sense of it from the point of view of someone who has worked in manufacturing retail products for wholesale.

This is a massive "what if," and I know I am needling a lot of different things with this take, but I believe that The Pokémon Company is ready to ship everything in Ascended Heroes already and this product scarcity is not to temper scalping but to fuel demand.

I would bet that there are some internal memos and emails circulating in Bellevue, WA, that wanted to see if releasing almost no stock on release day creates a hunger within the consumer base for whatever the next product is. This is outside my realm of expertise, but looking at this as a sneakerhead, there are so many parallels between this and some sneaker releases I've been a part of in the past.

In the sneaker world, when a major brand collaborates with any entity outside of the brand, whether it's a boutique retailer or an artist, they will typically stagger the release of the full quantity of inventory. For instance, in the case of the Union Jordan 1 highs, Union Los Angeles, a boutique in California, released the shoe first on their website and in-store as a "show of loyalty" to their fans and frequenters. Then, a few weeks later, Nike hosts their own release of the shoe on their app, SNKRS. The rest of the stock is bought up, and the product is sold through.

Sold through—that's key. Selling through is good, and selling through quickly is great/ideal for any retailer. It frees up precious space in the aisles/shelves for additional product to be featured. Empty shelves are bad, but not as bad as half-empty to full shelves.

Pokemon appears to be using the same playbook. By releasing Ascended Heroes with minimal stock, they're creating artificial scarcity that ensures future waves sell through immediately. Their bid to direct customers—big-box retailers and distributors—is simple: limited initial releases create pent-up demand that guarantees sellouts during later restocks. They've learned with other specialty sets that simply printing to demand in massive waves won't be the answer moving forward. They're going to constantly replenish stock, maintaining that slim margin between oversupplying the market and creating overwhelming demand.

Now, here's the second part of my hottest take: I truly believe everything is already printed and ready to go.

A company like MJ Holding, which is handling the last-leg delivery of Pokemon product to these big-box retailers, most likely needs 4-6 weeks to get product out to the various warehouse/stock-prep locations. It's pallets being broken down, received, and assortments being put together for each Target, Walmart, Best Buy, Barnes and Noble, etc. This doesn't happen within a week, let alone two.

So MJ Holding is probably sitting on ETBs right now, just holding onto them, taking bulk orders from their end customers and getting stock together to see what they will meet. It's a long process, and without knowing how MJ Holdings handles their order fulfillment from a software/process perspective, I can only guess that they're doing it manually, with teams of people responsible for each major retailer.

February 20th isn't far enough away from January 30th for me to confidently say there were production delays. Heck, even the two-pack blisters that were delayed may have only been so because of the 30th anniversary boxes that dropped the same day. They needed some sort of 30th Anniversary product to be released before February.

Whether MJ Holding is advising on this, or the team internally at TPCi in Bellevue is pulling the strings, we'll never know. But here's my ultimate theory: Pokemon is experimenting with ultra-limited releases this year ahead of their new printing facility to gauge how it affects demand for new sets and how to allocate printer time accordingly—do they always prioritize new sets or do they focus heavily on older sets?

Not selling through a product makes the buyers at these retailers very hesitant to continue buying. Because putting product on sale means you eat into the margin and take up space within the store that could have been used to sell something else.

This won't matter if all product is sold through every time it's released, but my hunch is that TPCi is waiting for the moment when product starts to sit and trying their best to avoid a Shining Fates situation where specialty sets are reprinted in massive quantities only to sit and go on sale. Sure, TPCi wants their fans to be happy. But they need their actual customers—the retailers and distributors—to be happy first. But manufacturing constraints alone don't explain the shortage. Maybe there's another factor at play...

This is probably the next best thought I have as to why more product wasn't printed in time to meet the Ascended Heroes release date.

The uptick in printing Prismatic SPCs and Mega Charizard ex UPCs, alongside the new Unova Heavy Hitters boxes and other collections with coins, stickers, printables, tins, etc., along with trying to print ETBs, must be incredibly difficult to manage.

Let's take a second to consider the following: These are all assembly items. Meaning you don't just print the cards, package them, and then label them and ship them off. Building collection boxes is labor-intensive—each requires assembling cards from multiple sets plus various accessories like dice, status markers, booklets, and promo packs. This assembly bottleneck means that TPCi's commitment to meeting Prismatic Evolutions demand likely pushed Ascended Heroes production down the priority list.

When TPCi said back in January/February of 2025 that they are planning to meet demand for Prismatic Evolutions, this is the impact of that. It pushes the timelines for producing future ETBs and future product in general. Considering Ascended Heroes was always set for a February release and the booster bundles aren't arriving until April, building this product could be taking a backseat to more important and pressing sets like Destined Rivals, Mega Evolution, and Phantasmal Flames products.

However, even if production wasn't an issue, TPCi has strategic reasons to limit supply...

They've been burned before.

We've discussed why sell-throughs are a good thing for retail. So if product sits, not only does it look "unpopular," but buyers from these retailers start to review and reconsider how much product they are buying.

Shelf space in a Target is incredibly competitive. And I guarantee you companies like Bandai and Ravensburger are vying for the shelf space that Pokemon is dominating at the moment. So if Pokemon wants to maintain their shelf space in these stores, they'll have to keep demand extremely high.

This would mean that every new set is going to be released in very small quantities and restocked in small quantities every week. I suspect Pokemon is monitoring secondary market prices and resale volume to gauge true demand, using that data to determine what to print more of and when. It's speculation on my part, but it would make sense—why wouldn't they use real-time market signals to inform their production decisions?

Even for intellectual property globally loved like Pokemon, demand is a fickle spouse. Given how fast society moves between trends now, I do not envy those who are forecasting demand and making decisions about manufacturing.

Manufacturing scarcity is important during a cycle like now, when the market is plateauing or starting to fall. Building up hype and, quite honestly, creating FOMO helps ensure future restocks are guaranteed to be sold through.

Remember, Pokemon themselves are not responsible for the assortments that reach Target in the end. It's the MJ Holdings and marketing companies that are assessing demand and building product assortments from the inventory they have. And no one has more incentive to create scarcity and limited demand than a distribution company masquerading as a marketing group.

Given these strategic supply constraints—whether by design or necessity—here's what us collectors should do: Be wise, don't spend money beyond MSRP for newer sets. In fact, sit out and avoid buying just any product for the sake of buying. I have passed on numerous restocks because of the wait or because of what products were going to be available. I avoid regular ETBs and will pass on booster bundles, blisters, and sleeved boosters of sets I have no interest in collecting.

By doing so, maybe Pokemon will assess the landscape and reprint the important things only, like most booster boxes, UPCs/SPCs, and booster bundles from Prismatic Evolution and Destined Rivals.

Pokemon 151 is at an incredibly precarious spot right now (more on that in a future issue). But even considering the guaranteed hit in the Snorlax Promo, this box feels incredibly overpriced. The price-per-pack value of this product, minus the promo, is about $44, which is a premium of +$27 over a single booster pack of 151.

To put this into perspective, a 151 booster bundle is currently at $118 per bundle, making it $19.63 price-per-pack value.

To add more perspective, Evolving Skies is currently $49.58 a booster pack, with the regular Evolving Skies ETB being $48.64 price-per-pack value.

This means that the SV:151 ETB is insanely overvalued and could see a drop in price heading into this summer, unless something changes with the prices of 151 singles (again, more on this in a future newsletter).

I'm leaning toward the sealed product trending downward rather than the singles and pack value trending up, so I would keep a close eye on any listings near you and keep a close eye on the graphs for 151 sealed product you're hunting.

Catch deals. Pull grails.