The Pokémon TCG Dictionary: 60 Terms Every Collector Should Know

Every hobby develops its own dialect, and this one is worse than most. Scroll any collecting group and you’ll hit sentences like “LP moonbreon, comps minus 10, open to trade-backs” — completely opaque unless someone hands you a dictionary. So here it is: the Pokémon TCG terms we find ourselves explaining most often, all in one place.

We’ve organised the 60 entries into five groups — products, rarities, condition and grading, market slang, and player terms — so you can read it straight through or jump to the bit you need. Bookmark it, send it to the friend who just fell down the rabbit hole, and nobody has to nod along pretending again.

Pokémon TCG terms: products and sealed

Sealed product has its own family tree, and knowing it stops you overpaying for repackaged packs. These are the names you’ll meet on shop shelves and pre-order pages:

• Booster pack — the basic sealed unit: ten cards (five in Japan) with at least one guaranteed hit slot in modern sets.
• Booster box — a factory-sealed box of 36 English boosters (Japanese boxes vary, commonly 30 packs).
• Half box — 18 packs, sold as a cheaper way into box odds.
• ETB (Elite Trainer Box) — the flagship starter product: typically 9 packs plus sleeves, dice, energies and an exclusive promo card.
• Collection box — a themed box pairing packs with promo cards and sometimes an oversized card or figure.
• UPC (Ultra-Premium Collection) — the top-shelf collection box tier: more packs, metal or special promos, premium accessories.
• Tin — a metal tin containing packs and a promo; mini tins are smaller with no promo in most lines.
• Blister — carded retail packaging holding one to three boosters, often with a promo.
• Sleeved booster — a single pack in hanging retail packaging.
• Booster bundle — a slim box of six loose packs, usually the cheapest per-pack sealed option.
• Promo — a card distributed outside normal sets, via products, events or giveaways.
• Black Star promo — the official promo numbering series, marked with a black star.
• Wave — a print run. “Wave 2” means a later reprint batch of the same product.
• Allocation — the limited quantity a distributor grants each shop of a hot product; the reason pre-orders cap.
• Case — the sealed carton shops receive, containing several booster boxes or a set ratio of products.

Rarity terms

Rarity language is where newcomers drown, because the tiers have been renamed across eras and the community happily mixes old and new names in the same sentence. Here’s the current vocabulary, with the legacy terms you’ll still hear:

• Common / Uncommon / Rare — the base rarity ladder, marked by circle, diamond and star symbols.
• Holo — a card with foil artwork.
• Reverse holo — foil on everything except the artwork; one appears in nearly every modern pack.
• ex — the current era’s stronger Pokémon cards (lowercase ex, double rare tier).
• Full Art — a card whose artwork covers the whole face, usually the ultra rare tier.
• IR (Illustration Rare) — modern alternate-art cards with painterly, scene-based artwork.
• SIR (Special Illustration Rare) — the premium alternate-art tier; most modern chase cards live here.
• Alt art — the previous era’s name for the same idea; still used loosely for any alternate-art chase.
• Hyper rare — the gold-card tier at the very end of a set list.
• Secret rare — any card numbered above the set’s printed total, e.g. 200/191.
• Master Ball reverse — an ultra-scarce reverse holo pattern found in select sets; the hardest modern pulls. The Poké Ball reverse is its more common sibling.
• Baby shiny — a shiny Pokémon card with the sparkle background, from Shiny Vault-style subsets.
• Chase card — whichever cards drive demand for a set; the ones everyone rips packs hoping for.
• God pack — a rare (mostly Japanese) pack in which every single card is a top-tier hit.
• Pull rate — the odds of opening a given rarity, usually expressed per pack or per box.

Condition and grading terms

Condition vocabulary is the money vocabulary — the same card can differ in price several times over depending on the two-letter code attached to it, so these are the terms most worth learning precisely:

• NM / LP / MP / HP / DMG — the raw condition scale from Near Mint down to Damaged; the biggest price lever outside rarity.
• Whitening — white card core showing through worn edges, especially on the back.
• Print line — a factory-printed line across a card’s surface; a defect even though it isn’t wear.
• Centring — how evenly the borders are cut; off-centre cards grade lower.
• Raw — any ungraded card.
• Slab — a graded card sealed in its tamper-evident case.
• PSA / BGS / CGC / ACE — the major grading companies; PSA dominates globally, ACE is the popular UK-based option.
• Gem Mint — the perfect 10 grade.
• Subgrades — separate scores for centring, corners, edges and surface offered by some graders.
• Cert number — the unique ID on a slab, checkable against the grader’s database.
• Pop report — a grader’s published count of how many copies exist at each grade; low “pop” means scarce.
• Crossover — resubmitting a card graded by one company to another, hoping for a better label.

Market slang

None of this is official — it’s the living dialect of collecting groups, auction chats and rip videos. It also contains the hobby’s most important warning labels, so don’t skip this section:

• Rip — to open sealed product. A “rip and ship” is a seller opening your packs live.
• Mail day — the ritual posting of whatever arrived in the post.
• PC (personal collection) — cards you keep for love, not resale. “PC’d” means it’s not for sale.
• Grail — the card you want most; usually expensive, always personal.
• Bulk — low-value commons, uncommons and cheap rares, traded by the hundred.
• Hit — any pull above the ordinary: SIRs, hyper rares, big IRs.
• Comps — comparable recent sold prices; the basis of any fair valuation.
• BIN — Buy It Now, a fixed-price listing.
• Sniping — bidding in an auction’s final seconds.
• Weighed pack — a loose booster weighed to detect and remove the hit before resale; the reason to buy loose packs only from trusted shops.
• Reseal — opened product refactory-sealed to look untouched; the sealed market’s nastiest scam.
• Scalper — someone buying retail stock purely to flip at inflated prices.
• FOMO — fear of missing out; responsible for more bad purchases than every scam combined.
• LGS — local game shop.

Frequently asked questions

Player terms collectors hear

Even if you never sleeve up a competitive deck, the playing side of the game leaks into collecting constantly — tournament results move single prices, and rotation announcements ripple through the market. The essentials:

• Standard / Expanded — the official competitive formats defining which sets are legal to play.
• Rotation — the annual removal of older sets from Standard; can nudge card prices either way.
• Meta — the current landscape of dominant decks; “meta cards” carry play-driven value.
• Trainer — the card class covering items, supporters, tools and stadiums.
• Energy — the resource cards that power attacks; basic energies are near-worthless, special ones sometimes not.
• Deck — a legal 60-card pile; “netdecking” is copying a proven list.
• Prize cards — the six face-down cards you claim as you knock out opponents.
• Mulligan — redrawing an opening hand with no Basic Pokémon in it.

A final tip on actually absorbing all this: don’t memorise the list. Pick it up the way everyone does — watch one box opening with the rarity section open in another tab, read one marketplace listing translating the abbreviations as you go, and sit in one collecting group chat for an evening. The terms stick within a week because you’ll see them used fifty times a day. The only ones worth learning deliberately, today, are the warning-label trio: weighed, reseal and comps — the first two protect your money, and the third is how you make sure you’re never the person paying asking price in a sold-price world.

That’s the whole dialect — or at least enough of it to read any listing, watch any rip and haggle at any show without subtitles. For deeper lore on any set or card, Bulbapedia is the community encyclopaedia we reach for constantly.

Keep learning: the rest of our blog goes deep on most of these Pokémon TCG terms — pull rates, grading maths, spotting reseals and more — and our guide to pull rates is a natural next read. Got a term we’ve missed or a question the dictionary didn’t answer? Our FAQ covers the shop side of things, and we’re always happy to translate collector-speak in person.