How Are Pokemon Cards Made?
There is not a lot of footage or information about the specific process of creating and manufacturing Pokémon cards. This is most likely due to The Pokémon Company and the printing factories wanting to keep unreleased Pokémon cards away from the public eye and so they don’t give away their secrets. What you’ll find in this article is mostly speculation and research of my own. The information I’ve been able to confirm is just what you see in videos that are linked below and past knowledge.
How They’re Made (Most Likely)
How are Pokemon cards made? First multiple layers of paper are glued and compressed together to make a giant sheet of high quality cardboard. They then put multiple layers of different color ink to print out the art of each card on the sheet. This is most likely done with CMYK color combinations, meaning they use a combination of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black to make all the colors they need for the art. If there are holographic cards on the sheet, they’ll also add texturing and holographic on top of the art. After the printing is finished they cut the sheet into several cards. From here it’s unclear how they organize them into different packaging. It seems like it would be pretty random so you don’t know what cards are in each pack but they still organize them into categories such as common, uncommon, and rare cards before packaging them further. Here you can see a video that features snippets of the manufacturing process.
Uncut Sheets of Pokemon Cards
Sometimes these uncut sheets of Pokémon cards leave the factory. How they get out into the world, no one knows. But what we do know is what they look like and how cool they are. Here’s a clip of a Pokémon YouTuber, Ando (AKA UnlistedLeaf) receiving an uncut sheet of cards from a $5000+ mystery box.