71 Undervalued & Underrated Pokémon Cards to Collect

September 23, 2026
|In Pokémon
|By woahpoke

Every set has cards that get skipped. Not because they’re bad, but because they landed next to a Charizard, or the Pokémon on them isn’t one people go looking for, or a card with great art that you don’t see as often just cause they’re not an SIR.

Here’s our running list of the cards we think are slept on, lesser seen, or still sitting lower than they should be, grouped by what makes each one worth a second look!

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Cameo Cards

Some of the best details in the modern TCG belong to the Pokémon who aren’t the subject. Chansey’s Pokémon Center has a Snorlax asleep in the corner, Glaceon VMAX brings the whole crew, and Clive packs in more trainers than most set illustrations manage. The oddity here is the Japanese Influencer’s Introduction, a card about YouTuber Hikakin filming Pokémon content in his bedroom, which is about as meta as the TCG gets.

We went further down this rabbit hole in our cameo Pokémon cards post.

Our Picks:

Underrated Pokemon Cameo Cards

Scenic Backgrounds

These are the cards where the Pokémon is almost incidental and the setting is doing the work. Waterfalls, mountains, a garden fence, or whatever the illustrator decided to build around a 50 HP basic that didn’t ask for any of it. Hisuian Samurott V is the one we’d put on a wall, it reads like a landscape scroll that happens to have a Pokémon in it.

Our Picks:

Scenic Pokemon Backgrounds

Nature

Close cousins to the scenic cards, except here the Pokémon is properly in its habitat instead of posed in front of it. Fields, cliffs, flowers, the whole thing drawn like the Pokémon was there before the card was. Ditto’s Crown Zenith card is the clever one, filling a meadow with Ditto shaped versions of everything grazing in it.

If this is your corner, we have a lot more of it in our Studio Ghibli Pokémon cards and flower Pokémon cards posts!

Our Picks:

Underrated Nature Pokemon Cards

Akira Egawa

Egawa has a look you can spot across a room. Sometimes it’s a Pokémon fractured into shards of refracted light, and sometimes it’s the painterly side with heavy textures and Pokémon caught mid attack. Either way, the card is doing the absolute most and she’s one of our favorite artists in the hobby.

Check out more great illustrators in the TCG in our best Pokémon card artists post!

Our Picks:

Underrated Akira Egawa Cards

N’s Zekrom & Reshiram

N is the most interesting antagonist the series has, a kid raised by Pokémon who believes trainers are the problem, and the cards that carry his name put him in the frame rather than just in the title. Zekrom and Reshiram are the two halves of the Unova creation myth, ideals against truth, which makes them a proper pair to hunt across sets!

Our Picks:

N’s Zekrom & Reshiram

Trainer Cards

Full art trainers are where the TCG does its actual character work. No Pokémon on the front, just a person in a room, and somehow that ends up carrying more story than the legendary in the same pack. Giovanni’s Charisma is the best argument for the whole category: a crime boss in a private lounge doing nothing threatening at all, but still the most menacing card here.

Our Picks:

Underrated Pokémon Trainer Cards

Night Cards

Night art runs on one source of light and a lot of black, which is harder than it sounds because there’s nowhere to hide a weak composition. The ones that pull it off are the calmest cards in the game, and Cleffa under a shooting star is one of the best of the bunch!

Our Picks:

Underrated Pokemon Night Cards

Derpy & Silly Cards

Illustrators can have their fun too. With less riding on the card and more room to be stupid, you end up with cards like a Slakoth starfished in a field like he’s been there for days.

Our funny Pokémon cards round-up is full of more like these!

Our Picks:

Derpy & Silly Underrated Pokemon Cards

Vibrant

Some cards are built to be seen from across the room. Psychedelic jungles, neon lightning, vibrant sunsets, all of it turned up past where the set’s art usually sits.

Our Picks:

Vibrant Pokemon Cards Underrated

Deoxys

Deoxys is an alien with four different forms, which should make it one of the most illustrated Pokémon in the game. It isn’t, and that’s the whole reason it gets a section. The Crown Zenith VMAX and VSTAR were designed to sit next to each other, so that’s the obvious place to start!

Our Picks:

Underrated Deoxys Cards

Winter

Snow gives an illustrator permission to empty out the frame, and that restraint is why winter cards read so differently from everything around them in a set.

Magmortar is the surprise of the bunch, a Fire type warming its hands over a campfire in a snowfield, which is better storytelling than most cards with ten times the rarity.

Our Picks:

Underrated Winter Pokemon Cards

Home & Cozy

Pokémon indoors being domestic. The whole appeal is that nothing is happening and that these cards are just a slice of daily life. Fisheye Litten is one of our favorite underrated cards!

Our Picks:

Underrated Home Pokémon Cards

Water

Underwater is the easiest setting in the TCG and we’ll defend that. The light does half the illustrator’s work, everything picks up soft edges, and a 60 HP Horsea ends up looking like it cost money.

If you like these, our beach Pokémon cards post is the next stop!

Our Picks:

Underrated Water Pokemon Cards

Color-Themed

Cards built around one dominant color are the easiest thing in the world to build a binder page from. Pick a color, pull four or five, and the page does the work for you!

We put together full pages by color in our Pokémon binder page ideas post if you want even more inspo.

Our Picks:

Underrated Color Pokemon Cards

Sleeping

Sleeping cards are a whole category of their own and we went deep on them separately, but a few belong on a list like this on their own merits. There’s something about a card where the Pokémon has completely checked out and the world keeps going around it.

See the full run in our sleeping Pokémon cards post.

Our Picks:

Sleeping Underrated Pokemon Cards

Pikachu

Pikachu has so many cards that individual ones vanish into the pile, which is how you end up with really good art that nobody discusses. Surfing Pikachu is the one with the best story behind it, a Pikachu that could only learn Surf through an event, and the Celebrations printing draws it as round as it deserves.

Our Picks:

Pikachu Underrated Pokémon Cards

Forest

Trees give a card depth in a way an open background never can. Arbok is the one we’d put in the binder first, which isn’t something we expected to ever write about Arbok.

Our Picks:

Undervalued Pokemon Cards

Unique

Whether it’s the art style or the joke behind it, there’s something about each of these that doesn’t look like the rest of the set it came from. Comic strips, flat graphic shapes, straight pop art, none of it the usual style.

We have tons more of these in our unique Pokémon cards post!

Our Picks:

Unique Underrated Pokemon Cards

Trainer Gallery

The Sword & Shield era ran a subset called the Trainer Gallery, where every card had to fit a Pokémon and its trainer into the same frame. That gave the art a job beyond the Pokémon and what you get out of it is more great slice of life scenes, like Eevee at a desk while its trainer works through paperwork.

Our Picks:

Underrated Trainer Gallery Pokemon Cards

Skies

Open sky gives a card a sense of scale that a close crop can’t, and it’s the one background that works just as well for a legendary as it does for a bird.

Our sky Pokémon cards post has lots more!

Our Picks:

Underrated Skies Pokémon Cards

Which underrated card are you adding to your binder? Any we missed? Let us know in the comments below!

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