The Five Most Valuable Blastoise Cards in Pokémon TCG
Squirtle’s final form has been a collector magnet since the very beginning, and the market still treats it that way.
Blastoise occupies a strange spot in the hobby. It was the face of Pokémon Blue, it anchored one of the most famous deck archetypes of the Wizards of the Coast era, but it has never quite escaped Charizard’s shadow on the price charts.
However, there is one card that deserves a mention that lies outside our forthcoming list.
In January 2021, a Blastoise Commissioned Presentation Galaxy Star Hologram sold at auction for $360,000. Wizards of the Coast had Cartamundi print a pair in mid-1998 to show Nintendo what an English Pokémon card would look like.
It carries the test print identifier 009/165R, and there is a reason that number belongs to this Pokémon: Blastoise was the first card test printed for the English game, ahead of Charizard and everything else.
The copy that sold has a blank back and an 8.5 grade, and the second one’s whereabouts are unknown. It is a museum piece rather than a market attraction, so it sits outside the rankings.
Here are the five you can actually chase, ranked by current market value. The shared figures reflect completed sale data as of early August 2026.
Blastoise ex 200/165 – Scarlet & Violet 151, Special Illustration Rare
The modern entry, and the one most likely to be sitting in a binder right now. Mitsuhiro Arita, the artist behind the original Base Set Charizard, handled the Special Illustration Rare print and framed Blastoise mid-surge with the cannons deployed.
The regular and full art versions use PLANETA Yamashita artwork, so the Arita treatment is exclusive here.
It is a Stage 2 with 330 HP, an ability shaving 30 damage off incoming attacks, and a finisher hitting for 140 per Basic Water Energy discarded from hand, up to two.
The reported pull rate sits around one in 225 packs.
Raw Near Mint copies trade near $145 and have been flat over the past month, with graded 10 examples around $638.
For a set still widely available at retail, that is a solid floor, and Arita’s involvement gives it a hook most modern chase cards lack.
*Buy Blastoise ex 200/165 cards on eBay and TCGPlayer
Blastoise & Piplup GX 215/236 – Sun & Moon: Cosmic Eclipse, Ultra Rare
The TAG TEAM alternate full art is one of the more appreciated cards of the Sun & Moon block. It pairs two Water type starter lines in a bright scene that reads more like a poster than a battle card, and it has aged well against the era’s more cluttered full arts.
Trackers disagree by a wide margin. Recently completed Near Mint sales land in the mid-to-high $200s, while some aggregators put it above $400. Graded 10 sales hover around $3,200.
*Buy Blastoise & Piplup GX 215/236 cards on eBay and TCGPlayer
Blastoise ex 104/112 – EX FireRed & LeafGreen, Rare Holo ex
Hikaru Koike illustrated this 150 HP Stage 2, and it is the card that brought Rain Dance back under a new name.
The Energy Rain Poké-POWER lets you attach a Water Energy from hand to one of your Pokémon as often as you like, at the cost of a damage counter on the recipient. Hyper Whirlpool hits for 80 and strips Energy on every heads.
Raw copies sit around $250, but the grading curve is where this card earns its place. Graded 9 copies trade near $1,900 and graded 10 examples reach roughly $9,000.
This is the EX era Blastoise worth owning.
Blastoise 2/102 – Base Set Shadowless, Holo Rare
Base Set ran through multiple print runs, and the first two skipped the drop shadow behind the artwork window entirely.
The second of those is what collectors call Shadowless. There’s no 1st Edition stamp, but the same plain window and thinner HP and attack text that mark the earliest printings.
Ken Sugimori’s artwork is the one every collector of a certain age can draw from memory.
Ungraded copies sit near $225, which is the most accessible way to own a genuinely scarce Base Set holo. The leap from there is severe. Graded 9 copies trade around $2,600 and graded 10 copies sell for around $20,250, with one example reaching $30,000 in March.
The holofoil scratches easily and the borders rarely center cleanly, so top grades stay thin.
Blastoise 2/102 – Base Set 1st Edition, Holo Rare
The 1st Edition stamp sits on the left side of the card just below the artwork window, and it is the single most valuable marking in the English TCG hobby.
The numbers do the talking. Ungraded copies trade around $1,355, meaning even a played example is a four-figure card. Graded 9 copies sit near $10,100 and graded 10 examples command roughly $44,332.
One graded 10 from a well-publicized break cleared $138,880 in February, which is an outlier rather than a benchmark, but it shows where the ceiling lives when the right copy meets the right two bidders.
Watch for the thick stamp and thin stamp variants, which collectors track separately and which can move the price meaningfully at the same grade.
*Buy Blastoise 2/102 1st Edition cards on eBay and TCGPlayer
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