The Pokémon TCG illustrator index · 386 artists · 20,237 cards

Pokémon TCG Illustrators

Every Pokémon TCG illustrator Catchinary has indexed, with career stats, portfolio value, and a dedicated page per artist. Pokémon card art has been credited in-set since 1999, and the illustrator is now a meaningful price signal: a card drawn by Mitsuhiro Arita or Ken Sugimori routinely trades above identical-rarity cards by less-recognizable artists. Use the search below to find a specific artist, or scan the featured strips for the most prolific and most valuable portfolios.

Most prolific Pokémon TCG illustrators

Ranked by total card count across every English-language set. Click any tile for their full portfolio, career bookends, and signature rarity.

5ban Graphics 1,610 cards · 86 sets Top: Dialga-EX

Ken Sugimori 1,109 cards · 101 sets Top: Shining Tyranitar

Mitsuhiro Arita 721 cards · 125 sets Top: Celebi

Kagemaru Himeno 656 cards · 127 sets Top: Dragonite

Kouki Saitou 650 cards · 121 sets Top: Charizard δ

01 Illustrators 101

Why the illustrator matters

Pokémon TCG cards credit their artist by name on the card itself. For collectors, that credit has turned into a real price signal. A Charizard drawn by Mitsuhiro Arita (who illustrated the original 1999 Base Set Charizard) trades at a meaningful premium over identical-rarity Charizards by less-recognizable artists. Alt-art tiers like Illustration Rare and Special Illustration Rare doubled down on this: the art itself becomes the product, and the illustrator becomes a brand.

Catchinary tracks every credited artist, their full portfolio, and an ACIV (Artist CIV) that normalizes their average priced-card value into an S&P-style index number. That makes it easy to spot illustrators whose portfolios are undervalued relative to their output, or whose output has moved in response to a recent chase card going viral.

The most active era in our index is Sword & Shield with 3,529 cards attributed. Top portfolio value right now belongs to Kimiya Masago at ACIV 18932.3 (average priced card $189.32).

Top 5 illustrators by portfolio value (ACIV)

Artists whose average priced card commands the highest market, requiring at least 5 priced cards so a single chase card doesn't skew the number.

Kimiya Masago ACIV 18932.3 · 21 priced $189.32 avg

Pokemon Rumble ACIV 18134.5 · 16 priced $181.34 avg

Hikaru Koike ACIV 17212.9 · 46 priced $172.13 avg

Top-priced card by Shinji Higuchi + Sachiko Eba

Shinji Higuchi + Sachiko Eba ACIV 14986.4 · 10 priced $149.86 avg

Masakazu Fukuda ACIV 13096.4 · 466 priced $130.96 avg

Every Pokémon TCG illustrator

All 386 indexed artists. Sort by card count, portfolio value (ACIV), or alphabetically. No wall-of-cards - 48 tiles per page with an explicit Load more button.

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? Illustrator FAQ

Pokémon TCG illustrator FAQ

Click any question to expand. Every answer pulls from live Catchinary index data.

How many people have illustrated Pokémon TCG cards?

Catchinary tracks 386 unique illustrators across 20,237 English-language cards. The most prolific are led by 5ban Graphics (1610 cards) and include Mitsuhiro Arita, Ken Sugimori, and Kagemaru Himeno.

Who illustrated the original 1999 Base Set?

Mitsuhiro Arita drew the iconic Charizard, Blastoise, and Venusaur. Ken Sugimori (who designs Pokémon for the games), Keiji Kinebuchi, and Kagemaru Himeno contributed most of the rest. Base Set illustrator credits carry a significant collector premium in raw and graded markets.

What's an ACIV?

ACIV (Artist CIV) is Catchinary's normalized portfolio-value index per illustrator. Calculated as the arithmetic mean of market prices for that artist's priced cards, multiplied by 100 so the number reads like a stock index (e.g. ACIV 432.5 = average priced card of $4.33). Requires at least 5 priced cards to show up on the Top 5 ACIV list, so a single chase card doesn't skew the number.

Can I see every card a specific artist drew?

Yes. Every illustrator has a dedicated page linked from the tiles above. The page shows a career span, signature rarity, career bookends (first + latest tracked card + peak year), top 5 most valuable, most-drawn Pokémon, and a filterable gallery of every card sorted by price, rarity, or set.

How are illustrator credits collected?

Credits come from the pokemontcg.io API, which pulls them from official card metadata. Alternate-art variants that credit a different illustrator than the base card are tracked separately on the base card's detail page.

Do Japanese-only illustrators appear in this index?

Not yet. The index currently mirrors the English-language data pokemontcg.io provides, which credits illustrators as they appeared on the English release. Japan-exclusive artists (CoroCoro inserts, Japanese Promo prints, Campaign cards) are on the roadmap once a second data source is added.

Why do some illustrators have wildly different ACIVs at similar card counts?

ACIV measures value per priced card, not total portfolio. An illustrator with 30 cards all in modern alt-art sets (where baseline prices are high) will score a much higher ACIV than one with 300 cards mostly in common slots. Use the card-count sort to find productivity, and the ACIV sort to find prestige pricing.