Celebrating last week’s launch of Pokémon 25: The Album, The Pokémon Company has mocked up a trio of trading cards featuring anime versions of artists Katy Perry, J Balvin, and Post Malone with various pocket monster partners. None of them are real, physical cards, but dammit, they should be.
Update, 10/25/2021, 3:30 p.m. ET: The Pokémon Company has sent Kotaku a statement confirming the artist cards are promotional only.
“The images of the Pokémon TCG cards seen on the Pokémon 25th anniversary website are promotional only. The Pokémon TCG is iconic to the franchise and the development of these images was a fun way to celebrate these artists’ participation in our P25 Music program. The artists were gifted with a printed version of their respective card as a special thank you for their collaboration and contributions to the program. There are no plans at this time to print these cards for promotional consumer use or for purchase.”
Pokémon 25: The Album is the culmination of the year-long partnership between Universal Music and The Pokémon Company celebrating the 25th anniversary of the storied video game RPG series. It began with Katy Perry, whose Pikachu team-up tune “Electric” has been stuck in my head for months. Following the initial P25 announcement, Post Malone performed a virtual concert featuring a slew of different pocket monsters. Finally, Colombian singer J Balvin played us out last week with the release of his song “Ten Cuidado,” which is just as muchan earworm as Katy Perry’s tune.
To celebrate the album’s three most popular artists, The Pokémon Company created three official-looking cards starring Katy, Post, and Mr. Balvin.
Each card is Basic, each has 180 hit points, and each are V cards. In the bottom left-hand corner of each card is a little P25 logo and what looks like a card number but actually represents the birthday of the featured artist. Katy Perry’s birthday is October 25, Balvin’s is May 7, and Post Malone’s is July 4.
Unfortunately for eager fans of the Pokémon Trading Card Game, this trio of star-crossed cards are not currently physical objects that you can purchase. We’ve reached out to The Pokémon Company to see if any further plans are in the works for these designs, but for now they’re just a trio of cool promotional images you can download from the P25 music website. Enterprising fans could simply print them out, of course, or find someone on a site like Etsy to do it for you.