The next Japanese Pokémon Trading Card Game set, Aura Seeker, arrives on 27 November, and the daily card reveals have begun. They began, as all the best heists do, with a cat counting money.
The first pair out of the bag were Meowth and Persian. Meowth is an 80 HP Basic whose Pay Day attack does 10 damage and draws you a card. Persian, a 100 HP Stage 1, has an Ability that lets you draw two cards once a turn so long as you’ve got at least two Pokémon in play with Pay Day, plus an attack, Greedy Slash, that deals 20 damage for every card in your hand. It’s a business model, really. The Meowths on the bench do the till work, and the big cat converts the cash flow into violence. Persian doesn’t actually know Pay Day itself, which several players on the PokeBeach forums only noticed after getting very excited, and which is about as close to a real-world economics lesson as Pokémon gets. The card has been doing brisk business on X all weekend regardless, mostly on the strength of its artwork.
The headline card is Mega Lucario Z ex, which brings the Z Mega Evolutions from the Mega Dimension DLC for Pokémon Legends: Z-A into the card game for the first time. It’s a 330 HP Metal Pokémon whose Ability, also called Aura Seeker, fetches a Supporter from your deck, and whose attack does 120 damage, doubled against Pokémon ex. Mega Garchomp Z ex and Mega Absol Z ex are among the other Z forms already shown. Aura has been Lucario’s whole personality since Lucario and the Mystery of Mew back in 2005, so naming the set after it is less a creative leap than a formality.
The card most likely to make grown-ups stop scrolling, though, is a Crasher Wake Supporter illustrated by Tetsuo Hara, the artist of Fist of the North Star. Crasher Wake is the masked professional wrestler who runs the Pastoria City gym in Sinnoh, so handing him to the man who drew Kenshiro is the most sensible commission in trading-card history. Hara has said he focused on getting the strength and the muscles right, which, with the greatest respect, is a bit like Rembrandt mentioning he paid attention to the lighting. It’s his second Pokémon card, after a Palafin ex in Prismatic Evolutions.
In Japan, packs cost ¥200 for five cards, roughly a pound, which Persian would regard as start-up capital. The main set runs to 78 cards, with secret rares on top. English-speaking players will get the cards in Flowing Fists, which PokeBeach reports is due on 5 February 2027, with prerelease events from 23 to 31 January. The Pokémon Company hasn’t formally confirmed that yet, though PokeBeach’s record on these things is good.
A set called Flowing Fists with the Fist of the North Star artist tucked inside is either a happy accident or the most elaborate pun in card-game history. Either way, the competition is already dead. It just doesn’t know it yet.
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