Between April 10 and October 2 of 2026, the six English expansions whose cards carry the G regulation mark stopped being legal for Standard play and then went on to move in six different directions. Rotation is the only checkable way an English print run ends, and by itself it prices nothing at all. That first half is the useful one, because a rotation date arrives in a dated announcement while the mark itself is printed on the face of the card, where a sold out notice on a retailer page establishes neither of those things. The second half is what most of the hobby has had backwards all autumn, and it happens to be measurable here for once, because the six sets left the format on the same dated rotation and our tracker has read the price of a matched product from each of them every day since early August. I spent years writing purchase orders for a regional hobby distributor, and the lesson that job teaches before any other is that a legality document and a print document are two separate pieces of paper.
The six expansions that carry the G regulation mark
The cohort was printed across ten months, opening with Scarlet and Violet on March 31 of 2023, closing with Paldean Fates on January 26 of 2024, with Paldea Evolved, Obsidian Flames, 151 then Paradox Rift filling the middle in release order. Between them those six expansions hold 1,480 English cards marked G, counted off the card dump this site rebuilds nightly, and the mark sits in the lower left corner of the card face where any owner can read it without consulting a database. That is what makes the six a cohort rather than a list, because they share a mark, a two year printing window and one retirement date. Everything printed before them in the Sword and Shield era carries D, E or F and left the format in earlier years, while everything printed after them carries H or later and remains legal today. The boundary around this group is therefore sharp in both directions, which is rarer in this hobby than it sounds.
What April 10 of 2026 actually changed, and what it did not
The publisher's own announcement is narrow and worth quoting at its word, because almost nothing written about it this autumn has stayed inside what it says. Cards with the G regulation mark will no longer be legal for play in the 2026 Standard format, and cards marked H, I or J will be legal to use. For in person Play Pokemon events the rotation took effect on April 10 of 2026, and for digital play on Pokemon TCG Live it took effect two weeks earlier on March 26. Nowhere on that page does the publisher say anything at all about printing, allocation, final print windows or supply, so the search results currently telling collectors that G cards are officially no longer being printed are reading a tournament rules notice as a manufacturing notice. We have yet to see any sell sheet ourselves confirming either a reprint or a print stop for any of the six expansions. Until one turns up, the honest reading is that rotation removed the competitive reason to print these sets rather than removing the ability to do it.
The precision cuts the other way as well, since the mark is a property of the card rather than of the expansion, a point the announcement is explicit about. Six expansions that remain perfectly legal today each lost a handful of cards on the same April morning, with Prismatic Evolutions giving up 29 G marked cards, Stellar Crown 8, then Destined Rivals 2. Shrouded Fable, Journey Together plus Black Bolt each lost exactly one card, and nobody described any of those sets as going out of print, because they were reprinting and selling right through the rotation. That is the clearest sign available that the field is treating a card level legality field as though it were a set level supply announcement, and it is the error the rest of this piece is built to avoid. Sealed product is sold by the expansion and graded by the expansion, so the shorthand is forgivable, but the shorthand is exactly where a reader loses the ability to check anything for themselves. A column about supply therefore has to work from the dated announcement and from the printed mark, both of which are available to anybody willing to read the page itself rather than a summary of it.
The configurations that entered the catalogue after each set closed
Before the price comes the allocation, and the closest public substitute for a distributor's allocation record is the order in which product identifiers were created in the marketplace catalogue. That method was worked out in detail for the Prismatic Evolutions catalogue evidence and has been tested on every sealed piece in this section since, and calibrating it against sixteen later expansions whose release dates are known puts the January 2025 launch wave at 593324 and the March 2025 wave at 610929. The September 2025 wave begins at 644279 and the November 2025 wave at 654135, which turns any orphan identifier into an approximate month. On that calendar the only sealed configuration 151 received after its launch wave is the Blooming Waters Premium Collection at 609597, created around the first quarter of 2025, roughly seventeen months after the set reached shelves. Paldean Fates picked up a Great Tusk ex and Iron Treads ex Premium Collection at 665113, which lands near the turn of 2025 into 2026 and close to two years after its own release. A half booster box then reached the Scarlet and Violet base set at 649407, Paldea Evolved at 649413 and Paradox Rift at 649417, in what reads as autumn of 2025.
Obsidian Flames received nothing at all after August of 2023, which makes it the one member of the cohort whose catalogue has not moved in three years. Three of those entries deserve a flag rather than a conclusion, because the half booster boxes carry no market figure on our board at all and therefore have no recorded trade behind them. A catalogue row is evidence that somebody intended to sell a configuration, and it is no evidence that the configuration reached a shelf in volume, a distinction the missing Phantasmal Flames half box turned on from the opposite direction last week. What the catalogue does establish is that five of the six sets kept acquiring new sealed configurations for between seventeen months and two years after release. The relevant question for October is therefore not whether these sets were reprinted, because the catalogue says plainly that packs from five of them kept being packed into new retail product long after launch. It is how long each one stayed open before April closed the reason to bother, and that is the variable rotation hides from anybody reading only the announcement.
Who is still opening these packs, measured against the legal marks
Opening behaviour is the step between allocation and a population report, and the census this site reads, dated September 14 of 2026, counts 1,819,481 lifetime English grades across the six rotated expansions. Of that total, 24,028 grades arrived in the trailing thirty days, which is 1.32% of the cohort's lifetime count inside a single month, against 5.92% for the sixteen English expansions still carrying a legal mark. Those sixteen turned a lifetime total of 3,110,362 into 184,099 new grades over the same window, so the gap is real, and the obvious reading of it is wrong. Age confounds the comparison almost completely, because Pitch Black is three months old and 78.26% of everything ever graded from it arrived in the last thirty days, which is a statement about calendars rather than about format legality. Rotation did not slow these submissions down in any visible way, and the sets being opened fastest are simply the sets that came out most recently, which has been true in every year of this hobby. Both lines track release order, so separating legality from age means looking inside one cohort instead of across them.
Inside the cohort the range is wide enough to be interesting, because the six sets rotated together and are not being opened at anything like the same rate. Trailing thirty day figures run from 1.59% of lifetime grades for 151 and 1.58% for Paldean Fates down to 0.87% for Paradox Rift, so the busiest member of the group is being opened at close to twice the rate of the quietest one. The depth underneath those rates is wider still, because 151 carries 837,207 lifetime English grades against 250,345 for Obsidian Flames, 214,063 for Paldean Fates and 191,480 for Paldea Evolved. The Scarlet and Violet base set sits at 176,485 on that same census date, with Paradox Rift last of the six at 149,901, which is a little under a fifth of the 151 figure. That makes 151 roughly 3.3 times deeper in the census than the next set in its own cohort, which is the kind of figure that usually precedes a paragraph about a crushed premium. It does not precede one here, and the price leg is where this whole argument either holds together or falls apart.
The matched booster bundle, read 43 times in eight weeks
The configuration all six share is the booster bundle, and it is the only one they share because 151 and Paldean Fates were distributed as special sets that never received a standard booster display at all. That makes the bundle the one honest comparison available, since it holds the sealed configuration and the sales channel still while leaving each set's print history as the only variable left moving. Market figures on October 2 of 2026 read $90.60 for Paradox Rift, $104.49 for the Scarlet and Violet base set, $122.01 for Obsidian Flames, $127.73 for Paldea Evolved, $175.27 for Paldean Fates, with $167.96 for 151. Every one of those is the aggregate market figure rather than the cheapest listing on the stack, which is not pedantry on a sealed page. Foreign product and accessories are routinely listed under an English product identifier, so the floor on a booster box page can belong to something else entirely, which is documented on our methodology page and is why our sealed figures differ from the ones quoted elsewhere. Those six bundles ran from the cheapest to the dearest at a ratio of 1.935 to one as the figures stood, from products sharing one era, one printed mark plus one retirement date.
Our snapshots caught all six bundles on 43 separate days between August 8 and October 2 of 2026, and that series is what settles the question one way or the other. Over that window Paldean Fates rose 8.04%, Obsidian Flames rose 3.69%, Paradox Rift rose 3.51% and Paldea Evolved rose 3.32%, while the Scarlet and Violet base set slipped 0.50% and 151 fell 9.49% from an opening reading of $185.57. Four of the six rose and two fell, across 17.53 percentage points of distance between the best and the worst. Every one of the six was equally and identically retired from Standard play across that entire window, which is the point of running the comparison in this shape. The set the search results have spent the autumn describing as spiking after rotation is the one member of the cohort that fell the hardest over that period. The 151 bundle bottomed at $159.73 on September 24 and has recovered 5.15% into the October 2 reading, so the last fortnight genuinely ran the other way and this piece says so rather than rounding it off.
Anybody holding a 151 bundle through the whole window is down on it and anybody who bought the trough is up, which is an ordinary thing for a price to do and a strange thing for a supply event to be credited with. What rotation did was finish a print run in a way a reader can verify, and it is worth being clear about how rare that is, because the Crown Zenith piece earlier in this section found that a sold out notice at the publisher's own store separated nothing whatsoever. A dated announcement plus a mark on the card face is a far stronger artifact than a stock status, and it covers every copy of every card in all six sets at once. What rotation did not do was set a price, and the 1.935 to one range across the matched configuration is the measurement that says so. A mechanism shared perfectly by six products cannot explain a range that wide between them, which is the whole of the finding.
The variable that does track the ordering is how long each set stayed open, and the deepest census together with the longest run of post launch configurations both belong to 151. That is also the only member of the cohort to lose ground over the eight weeks, which is the opposite of the story being told about it right now. None of that makes 151 a weak product, because it still carries the second dearest bundle in its own cohort and more than three times the census depth of any of its five siblings. Our sealed product index carries all six of these bundles alongside 232 other products, and the same test can be run against it on any day without taking our word for the result. The mark is printed on the card, every reading behind this piece carries its own date, and the announcement that started all of this runs to a single page.
The channel after April, and the line this call has to clear
The expectation here is that nothing in the retail channel reopens for the six G marked expansions, because the competitive reason to pack them was removed in April and no sell sheet has replaced it. The plain expectation for October and November of 2026 is therefore that the 151 booster bundle does not recover its August 8 reading of $185.57 before the end of November. That projection rests on one method only, which is the direction of 43 dated readings measured against a fixed opening mark, and it carries no other support than that. A market figure at or above $185.57 on November 30 of 2026 makes the call wrong and this column will print it wrong. A 2027 rotation on the same yearly pattern would retire the H mark and put Temporal Forces, Twilight Masquerade, Shrouded Fable, Stellar Crown, Surging Sparks plus Prismatic Evolutions exactly where these six now stand, though no announcement for it has been published that we have read, so the date stays unstated here rather than guessed at. Until that page arrives, the expectation for November of 2026 is that these six sets keep moving on their own print histories while you read the mark rather than the headline.