Pokemon Card Size: [Helpful Guide]

Pokemon cards are a lot of fun, but it can definitely be stressful to play with them when you’re afraid of damage. As with any TCG, it’s important to know their size when prepping them for play! It could affect the way you store and transport them.

Pokemon cards are the standard trading card size, which is 2.5 x 3.5 inches or 6.3 x 8.8 centimeters. This means that any card sleeves in the standard size will fit pokemon cards as well as MTG cards or Flesh and Blood cards. However, some pokemon cards have been printed in larger sizes.

That certainly makes keeping your pokemon cards a lot easier! You can use pretty much any card binders, sleeves, or boxes for your pokemon cards without having to worry about them being the wrong size. But why are pokemon cards made to be the size that they are?

Standard Card Size

2.5 x 3.5 is a card size with something a bit of history, even if that history is not particularly interesting to everyone. This size originated with the first playing card decks in France in the 1370s. These cards were quite similar to modern playing cards and were used in about the same way to play a variety of games.

Modern-day playing cards come in a number of sizes, with casinos using cards that are slightly smaller in order to save money. The standard size for poker cards is, however still 2.5 x 3.5.

There doesn’t seem to be any particular reason for the cards to be this size, as slightly larger or smaller cards tend to work just fine for playing parlor games. However, the 2.5 x 3.5 inch size stuck around and has continued to be the standard up to the current years.

In order to take advantage of the same facilities that print poker cards, when Wizards of the Coast started printing Magic the Gathering, they decided to print using the standard poker card size. Since Wizards of the Coast also produced the first several Pokemon sets, it makes sense that they would continue to print using the same size.

By the nature of two of the most popular card games in the world being made with. a common size, most other TCGs have the same card sizes so that their players can take advantage of the same infrastructures as Magic and Pokemon. Players of all types of games can use standard-size things like card storage, sleeves, and binders. This does not include some Japanese titles such as Yu-Gi-Oh or Card Fight Vanguard, but most new trading card games do tend to use the standard poker-size cards. At the end of the day, the usual size just came from a tradition that was passed down by multiple games and companies.

Protecting Pokemon Cards

Because pokemon cards use the standard card size, it isn’t very difficult to find things like deck boxes or sleeves that will fit your cards. Dragon shield and Ultra-Pro are both reputable brands that aren’t too difficult to shuffle and do a great job of protecting your cards. Their matte finish sleeves are especially effective.

Binders are also a great way to keep your Pokemon card collection safe. Binders are great for cards that you aren’t currently using in a deck since they can block out humidity and provide extra pressure to prevent cards from bending. Ultra Pro is the premier producer of trading card binders, but most brands are serviceable, including the Pokemon Company’s own binder.

As far as whether three-ring or fixed page binders are better, ring binders can continue to accommodate an expanding collection while fixed page binders cannot. However, the pages on ring binders can be damaged from overuse, while fixed page binders are a little more secure. Either one will protect your cards just fine though, so whichever you think will better fit your collection will probably be best.

Oversized Pokemon Cards

Jumbo or “oversized” pokemon cards are generally used as promotional material to be given out at special events or as a part of special bundle sets. Oversized cards have been around since the beginning of Pokemon, with the first oversized card being a 6 x 8 inch version of the base set Pikachu.

Unlike in other games where certain gameplay variants allow for the use of oversized cards, there is no gameplay use for oversized pokemon cards. These cards are made for purely aesthetic purposes, although they can be a lot of fun to collect.

Because oversized cards are printed in such limited quantities, they tend to grow in value over time, even if their value is unlikely to catch up to cards that are popular in the current format or cards that have a powerful nostalgia value. This being said, most oversized cards can be bought and sold in the ten-dollar range.

After the Pokemon Company took direct control over the Pokemon TCG, they decided to increase the size of oversized cards to somewhere around 8 x 9 inches in order to create a bigger draw. Some of these cards would even be printed using lenticular images.

These cards would be distributed at special events such as JR Train Stamp Rallies, the theatrical releases of new pokemon movies, and the opening or re-opening of Pokemon centers. Such cards tend to go on the market for between ten and twenty dollars in the US. While a few of these materials were only distributed in the locality of their events, others such as the Black Star DP Promo series would be distributed worldwide.

Although the 6 x 8 inch size would be revisited in reprints, the official size wouldn’t change again until the Sword and Shield expansion, which brought the size of promotional cards down to a slightly smaller 5.75 x 8. The reason for this decrease in size was so that the cards would fit with the new oversized card binders that the Pokemon Company started to print, which can hold up to forty oversized cards.

Some of these products can only be found in Europe, where figurines cannot be sold alongside trading cards. Because of this, the Pokemon Company would replace the figurines with oversized cards for the purposes of promotion.

Compared to oversized Magic cards, which tend to be around 3.5 x 5, oversized Pokemon cards are fairly large and unwieldy, which is fine for a product with no functional purpose. However, it does mean that they take up a lot of space.

Protecting Oversized Cards

Oversized cards can be difficult to find sleeves for, but fortunately, there are a couple of products on the market for collectors who want to keep their Jumbo cards safe.

First off, there’s the Pokemon Company’s own oversized card binder which can be found at most retailers that sell Pokemon cards. This is great for anyone who only started collecting oversized cards recently. Unfortunately, if you have some of the larger 6 x 9 cards then this might not be a very good solution for you.

A better solution might be 6 x 9 Ultra Pro top loading clear sleeves. For those not familiar with trading card games, Ultra Pro is a fairly high-quality manufacturer of sleeves and other supplemental products for various kinds of trading cards. Their sleeves are generally of fairly high quality, and 6 x 9 will probably fit even the most Jumbo of cards on the market.

On the other hand, oversized cards aren’t as badly in need of protection as normal cards are. Since they’re usually made from thicker cardstock, they aren’t likely to naturally curl like some lower-quality cardstock do. Since nobody is going to be playing with them they won’t get damaged that way either. All in all, they just don’t need as much protection as other cards.

Undersized Pokemon Cards

While the Pokemon Company does not produce any undersized cards, several artists produce cards at miniscule scales either to sell or as a general art project. Several 1:12 scale sets of Pokemon cards in both foil and non-foil can be found for purchase on Ebay from various artists and novelty companies.

Just like oversized cards, these cards cannot be used in tournament play. Not only are most miniature or doll house pokemon cards not in the current format because of their age, but they are also too small to be shuffled into a standard size pokemon card deck.

Nevertheless, these cards can be a lot of fun to look at. There’s a certain thrill to looking at something that is usually big but is now smaller than usual.

Other Novelty Cards

Novelty cards are a common promotional tool used by the Pokemon trading card game throughout its history. Aside from the giant Pikachu mentioned earlier, other early promotional cards include the Egyptian Mew card and metal cards given away at Burger King

The Burger King metal cards are particularly interesting. They are the same size as ordinary Pokemon cards but are plated with a gold-colored metal that makes them fairly unique. Because the metal isn’t actually gold, the cards aren’t worth very much today, but they are still quite cool to look at.

These metal cards aren’t tournament legal because they are much thicker than normal pokemon cards, which would make it easy to tell where they were in were in your deck. They also aren’t allowed because they didn’t have any text on them.

Along with official novelty cards like the Burger King promo and oversized cards, there is also a thriving fan community on Etsy and other platforms that make all sorts of custom pokemon cards. Like other novelty cards, these cards aren’t legal for tournament play. However, they can be fun to try out in kitchen table games if your friends are okay with it.

Counterfeit Cards

Counterfeit Pokemon cards are usually the same size as normal cards if they are made well. This is because it is incredibly easy to tell if a card is made wrong if it isn’t the same size as the other cards in your collection.

A better indicator of whether a card is counterfeit or not is whether the card can be seen through when held up to the light. Most trading cards are manufactured with a layer of opaque card stock in between the front and the back, which prevents people from being able to see through their opponent’s hand during play.

Counterfeiters often don’t have a good way of replicating this, meaning that even if they get everything else about the card right, this particular feature will still be lacking.

Cheating With Card Sizes

One of the reasons that all pokemon cards are exactly the same size is to prevent cheating. If players are able to feel the difference between different cards (or even see it) they might be able to use this to their advantage while shuffling, putting that deck closer or further from the top, depending on where they want it.

This is the reason that cards that are excessively damaged are often not allowed in tournament play if their backs are showing. Any easy way to differentiate between two cards without looking at the front can be used to cheat.

However, cheating with card sizes isn’t as easy as just cutting off the edges. If your opponents can easily see that your cards are the wrong size, then they’ll call you out and your cheating days will be over. Because of this, most cheaters use more subtle methods to rig their games.

The most common cheating method is trick shuffling, which is often used because it doesn’t require any extra tools to pull off and it can be used with cards that are entirely tournament legal. Of course, any kind of cheating is bad for the game, as the many people who have been knocked out of a tournament only to later learn that their opponent had cheated can attest.

So that is the guide to everything about Pokemon card sizes! Thank you to our friends at Game Pulse who helped us find the information we used for this article! Hopefully, now you know everything that you need to know about Pokemon cards, how big they are, and why it matters that your cards are 2.5 x 3.5 inches.