Collecting Every Porygon Card – Part 2

(Want to read Part 1 before you read this follow-up? Click here.)

This has been a great year for Porygon fans! Two new official plushes (including an absolutely ginormous mega-plush shipping early next year), an Ultra Pro TCG playmat releasing soon, and several new cards in the Scarlet & Violet TCG series—some of which were actually a challenge to find!

The Porygon family has only been featured in two sets so far in the Scarlet & Violet series: 151, where only the original Porygon was included, and Paradox Rift, which included the entire family along with an illustration rare of Porygon-Z.

But as cool as a full art Porygon-Z is, it’s not the card that collectors should be most excited about—because this year has seen the release of two new blister pack exclusive Porygon promo cards.

Among the supplemental products for the Twilight Masquerade set is a Premium Checklane Blister pack featuring a Cosmos Holo variant of the Paradox Rift Porygon-Z. It uses the same artwork and even the same set code (PAR 144) as the original card, but thanks to the Cosmos Holo it’s a very different card!

And among the supplemental products for the Stellar Crown set is a Single Pack Blister featuring a Cosmos Holo Porygon2—functionally a reprint of PAR 143, but with a brand new artwork and a sparkly new set code: SVP 138. (I know, I can’t believe it. They could have SO EASILY fudged the numbering to make it SVP 137, as a nod to Porygon’s national dex number. But nope!) It also comes with a Dragonite coin, which is pretty cool.

I’ve lamented before that collecting Pokémon cards in the modern era can be pretty dull and impersonal, so as soon as these products were announced, I knew exactly what I had to do to continue to give my collection a personal touch: I had to find and purchase these blister packs myself, in person, from an actual store.

And thus, shortly after the release of Twilight Masquerade, I had a very memorable Memorial Day driving between a bunch of different department stores, Walmarts, Targets, etc., on the hunt for the Porygon-Z pack. I found it after a few hours at a Target, and in the process I learned exactly which local stores stock exactly which kinds of blister packs, which was nice because oh my god all these mildly different types of blisters are so convoluted.

The Porygon2 blister hunt took a little longer. I expected to find it at any of my local department stores, which from my Twilight Masquerade experience I knew they all stocked the most basic single pack blisters, but instead I ended up leaving Walmart empty handed several times and then unexpectedly finding it at my local card shop while I was there to play MTG.

See, that’s the kind of personal touch that you don’t get from just ordering cards off a checklist from TCGplayer or ebay. I’m a huge advocate of “just buy singles” for card games in general, but I’m glad these two cards came guaranteed in a specific pack, allowing me to buy them in person and support my local game store.

And now that I’ve added Porygon2 SVP 138 to my binder, my Porygon family collection is once again complete! Which means, as I promised at the end of my Part 1 blog post, I can finally indulge myself and share some photos of the full collection. (If you’ve read this far, including under the Read More, I can only assume you want to see the full collection. So here you are, whoever you are, this one’s for you.) (And it’s also for me, because gosh I’m proud of this, I can’t deny it.)

And that’s it! I hope you enjoyed this random assortment of collection journaling and card trivia. You can join me again in another few years for Part 3, after enough time has passed that there might be enough new stuff to write about.