Switzerland, Land of Pokémon: A Close Look at Our Passion for Collecting
On the last weekend of August, a Swiss player stood in the final of the Pokémon World Championships in San Francisco. Maxwell Ember, known in the scene as "MEweedle", played his way to the final of the Pokémon GO tournament and lost there to Japan's Hiroki Yamauchi. Second place in the world, from little Switzerland. Anyone who has followed the scene for a while already knew the name: back in 2022 in London, Ember had won the Senior category in Pokémon GO and had already been a world champion once.
A finalist from a country of nine million people stands out, especially when the toughest competition comes from big nations like Japan and the United States. But it is less surprising than it looks. Pokémon is rooted in Switzerland in a way that is easy to underestimate from the outside, and Ember's second place is a good moment to look at how deep that goes.
From the schoolyard to the attic and back again
It started in 1999. That year the first trading cards reached Switzerland, in October Pokémon Red and Blue for the Game Boy followed, and within months the schoolyard was a trading floor. Anyone with a holographic Charizard was surrounded by kids they had never met. Trades followed rules that changed from one schoolyard to the next, games were mostly played without the rulebook, and the real currency was not the cards but knowing which ones you must never hand over.
What happened back then is best described as imprinting. If you learn at the age of eight that a card can be precious, you rarely unlearn it. The collection later moves into a shoebox, the shoebox into the attic, and then comes puberty, when trading cards with imaginary creatures on them are the last thing on your mind. For many, things went quiet for ten or fifteen years. But the imprint stayed too, and it came back in waves.
The first big wave came in the summer of 2016, when Pokémon GO brought the country out onto the street. Crowds gathered on the Casinoplatz in Bern, power bank sellers had their first heyday, the police got calls from residents unnerved by the groups standing there in silence staring at their phones, and suddenly thirty-year-olds were talking about Pikachu again as if no time had passed. For some, that was the moment they pulled the shoebox back out of the attic.
Others found theirs while moving. Sascha Haslauer, for instance, came across his old cards during a move, wanted to start again right away and went on to found the Pokémon-Liga Ostschweiz, which today runs the Pokémon Swiss Cup. Sandro Menzi from Gossau only started playing at all in his mid-thirties, and a few years later his eleven-year-old son finished in the top 15 at the European Championship in Berlin. Patrick Landis, also from the eastern Swiss league, explained the appeal to SRF in a single sentence: other people play chess, he plays Pokémon cards.
The second wave came with the pandemic. People sitting at home in 2020 cleared out the attic, and a surprising number of attics had cards from 1999 in them. At the end of 2020, two Swiss collectors auctioned an unopened German booster box from the first Base Set print run on Ricardo, bought a few years earlier for around CHF 800. After 48 hours the bid stood at over CHF 25'000, and the leading bidder announced publicly that he wanted to open the box and hand the cards out into the Swiss community. When McDonald's put cards into the Happy Meal for Pokémon's 25th anniversary in 2021, adults bought the kids' meals by the dozen.
This journey through time ends with a Swiss family that never stopped in the first place. In May 2026, a 20-year-old woman from German-speaking Switzerland, using the pseudonym Jolina Gisèle, showed what she and her father had put together since 2013: over 60'000 cards, around 12'000 of them graded by PSA, among them the first Pikachu Illustrator ever graded by PSA. The Aargauer Zeitung put the value in the high tens of millions of CHF. The collection sits in a vault today, and the family is thinking about a sale, ideally to someone who will turn it into a museum. This collection, too, started with a child who thought cards looked nice.
The upswing of the past few years
What came back as nostalgia in 2016 is now a market, and a big one. In 2023, Digitec Galaxus sold 46 times as many trading card products as in 2019, while board games and puzzles stagnated, and in the first quarter of 2024 sales grew by more than half again year over year. The customers behind those numbers are exactly who you would expect: almost half between 30 and 39, another quarter between 20 and 29. Steven Soland of the Pokémon retailer Zadoys summed it up for 20 Minuten in one sentence: the kids of the 90s are adults now, and they have the money.
When the "Prismatic Evolutions" expansion arrived in January 2025, there was a line outside the CardCollectors store that the team could only handle by issuing tickets, and shortly afterwards SRF ran a headline calling it a Pokémon frenzy in Switzerland. Co-founder Pascal Landolt describes his customers as a mix of schoolkids and bankers. That hits the nail on the head: the Pokémon community in Switzerland is about as diverse as a community gets.
There is a downside as well. Watson reported in the spring of 2026 that children can barely get hold of cards in some places, because adults snap them up and resell them at wildly inflated prices. Where there is sun, there is bound to be shadow.
That Switzerland collects rather than primarily plays is confirmed, incidentally, by the distributor that supplies the Swiss stores: by its estimate, only 15 to 20 percent of the cards sold are actually played with, the rest are collected.
Where the scene meets
The scene has grown over the past few years, but above all it has become visible. The Pokémon-Liga Ostschweiz, founded in 2014, held the Pokémon Swiss Cup for the seventh time in Gelterkinden in August 2025, an official League Cup with Championship Points toward World Championship qualification.
But we are a country of collectors, and for collectors it is the conventions that count. CardCon Zurich at the Albisgüetli drew 2'500 visitors in its third edition in April 2026, sold out completely, and day passes with a regular price of CHF 14.90 were traded on Ricardo for over CHF 100. Over the weekend, according to the organizers, cards worth more than CHF 1 million changed hands. August brought CardFusion in Winterthur with over 40 dealer tables and the Trading Card Convention in the Stadthalle Dietikon, spread across more than 1'000 square meters. We were in Dietikon ourselves: rarely have we spent so long looking for a parking space, only to land one that was a ten-minute walk from the hall. On top of that, the first two entry slots were completely sold out. Anyone who waited too long to get a ticket, unfortunately, was left with whatever the morning crowd had not already picked over. October brings Cardshow Swiss at the Wankdorf Stadium in Bern, also for the seventh time, then Collectibles Universe, and in November Cardmania in Schattdorf. In between, there are the small, regular trading meetups, at the House of Cards in Bern, in the Emmen Center or at the Sammelkartenarena in Mollis, and at Fantasy Basel the Swiss card dealers stand with singles and slabs among the cosplayers.
The community around Pokémon GO, the one where Ember made his name, is a world of its own again. At the global GO Fest in July 2026, 433 players came together at ETH Zurich on Saturday, in 33 degrees Celsius no less, to take on Mega Mewtwo together; on Sunday morning another hundred or so gathered in front of the Swiss National Museum.
And it just keeps going: 30 years, an anniversary set and a full calendar
The next date is fixed. On 16 September 2026, the "30th Celebration" expansion arrives for the 30th anniversary of the trading card game, and it is a first in several respects. For the first time, a set releases worldwide on the same day, from Japan through Europe to Brazil. Every booster contains five holographic cards plus a holographic Basic Energy card, and every booster holds one of 30 Pikachu cards, each illustrated by a different artist. On top of that come 30 classic cards from earlier expansions, reprinted with an anniversary stamp, and a new rarity tier. For anyone who was there in 1999, the set is an invitation that is hard to turn down.
The release stretches across the whole fall. The September launch brings the 2-Pack Blisters, the Knock Out Collection with an Eevee promo and the Elite Trainer Box with nine boosters. The fourth quarter follows with the Booster Bundles of six boosters, the Binder Collection with a binder and five boosters, a Poster Collection, Mini Tins, Battle Decks with Espeon ex and Umbreon ex, the Pokémon ex Boxes with Sylveon ex or Greninja ex, a Premium Collection with Ditto, and an Ultra-Premium Collection in a day and a night version with 30 boosters, one of them a Classic Collection booster pack. For collectors, the Binder Collection and the Ultra-Premium Collection are the interesting pieces; the rest is essentially boosters with something added. You'll find the exact Swiss dates and every other set of the year, updated as we go, in our release calendar, and every single card in the set, as soon as it is known, in the Pokémon card list.
And because four out of five cards in Switzerland are never played, the question left at the end is how the thirty Pikachus will survive the next attic. We have everything you need for card storage:
And of course we'll also help you protect your best pulls, with everything you need for card protection, from soft sleeves to toploaders to grading supplies (nobody wants to give PSA a break). You'll find it all here:
If you have questions about a product, feel free to write to us. We'll be happy to look at it with you. And if you find yourself standing in a line somewhere on 16 September, say hi to everyone for us.
