There Are How Many Pokémon Now?! Getting Back In After Gen 2

We are about half a year back into Pokémon now, and the hobby in general, after Collector Dad last really touched any of it back in Gen 2. On one hand it has been a blast, because it genuinely feels like a brand new world with all the Pokémon, sets, and ideas that showed up while I was gone. On the other hand, it can get a little overwhelming.

Turns out a lot happened

When you step away after Gen 2 and come back this far down the line, you do not just miss a few Pokémon. You miss the games, the shows, the mechanics, and something like two dozen sets that would have kept you current if you had been around for them. There was no gentle on-ramp for us. It was more like, here are several hundred Pokémon you have never seen, a stack of new card types, good luck.

And that is before you even get to the cards themselves. The rarities alone have changed a ton since the old days, to the point where we had to relearn what half the tiers even meant. "Holo rare" used to be the top of the mountain. Now it is somewhere near the bottom of a very tall ladder.

The kids are carrying me a little

The good news is I am not doing this alone. Collector R has had the show on quite a bit lately, and he is honestly starting to know the Pokédex better than I do at this point. He will rattle off a name and a type for some Pokémon I have never heard of, and most of the time he is right. We will still butcher a name on video here and there, and I will fumble any trivia that is not Gen 1 or Gen 2 specific, but we have made our peace with that.

We are putting the stress aside and letting ourselves learn as we go. The Pokémon community has always been a friendly, welcoming one in our experience, so a mispronounced name is not the end of the world.

We do not have the time to watch every show and movie or play every game that came out while we were away, so we are just taking it as it comes. It is part of what makes this fun to do together instead of turning it into homework.

So, how many Pokémon are there now?

When Collector Dad left off, the count sat at 251. These days it is north of a thousand. That number alone still makes us laugh a little every time it comes up, because it really does reframe just how much of this world is new to us.

The names are half the fun. We will pull a card, look at each other, and just go "...what is a Bellibolt?" Then we look it up, learn something, and move on to the next one we have never heard of. It happens constantly, and weirdly it has become one of our favorite parts of coming back. Just about every pack has a decent chance of introducing us to a Pokémon that is completely new to us.

And there is a new generation on the way

What has us most excited is that the world is still growing. On Pokémon's 30th anniversary earlier this year, the next generation of games was announced: Pokémon Winds and Pokémon Waves, the first Generation 10 titles. They are slated for 2027 on the Switch 2, set in a tropical archipelago region full of islands and underwater areas to explore, and they introduce a new trio of starters called Browt, Pombon, and Gecqua.

We are the kind of collectors who care more about how the cards will look than the finer game details, so a whole new generation means a whole new wave of Pokémon and art to eventually chase. A fresh set of starters usually turns into some of the most popular cards of an entire era, and we will be there for it. It also pairs nicely with everything happening around the 30th anniversary celebration we are already chasing.

Why we are not stressing the gap

Here is the thing we keep coming back to. We were never going to catch up on a decade-plus of Pokémon overnight, and trying to would probably suck the joy right out of it. So instead of treating the gap like a problem to solve, we are treating it like a map with a lot of unexplored corners. We get to discover Pokémon that everyone else has known for years, which is its own kind of fun, and Collector R gets to be the resident expert for once, which he absolutely loves.

So whether it is a brand new Pokémon set on the horizon, or one that came out over the last decade that is somehow new to us, we are excited to keep learning and collecting our way through all of it.

Did you take a long break from Pokémon too? What is a Pokémon you had to quietly look up when you came back? Come tell us over on YouTube, we would love to hear we are not the only ones.