Erika Pokemon Card Value Guide: Best Prints

Who Is Erika? The Celadon City Gym Leader

Erika is the Grass-type Gym Leader of Celadon City in the core Pokemon games, running the Celadon Gym out of the department store’s rooftop garden. She’s one of the more recognisable Kanto Gym Leaders, first introduced in the original Red & Green era and carried through into most subsequent generations’ Kanto-set appearances. That long-running visibility is part of why she keeps getting revisited as a Supporter subject — the Japanese TCG has repeatedly built cards around her likeness across different design eras, from the TAG TEAM GX generation of 2019 through to the Scarlet & Violet era’s “Pokémon Card 151” callback set in 2023.

Both cards covered in this guide are Trainer – Supporter cards, the category of Japanese TCG cards built around named characters rather than Pokemon. Supporter cards featuring popular Gym Leaders and other recurring characters are a well-established chase-card category in their own right — collectors often pursue a specific character across the sets they’ve appeared in, rather than collecting by set alone. Our broader Japanese Trainer card guide covers that category across multiple characters if you want the wider picture beyond Erika specifically.

A quick note on the rarity tiers used throughout this guide: SR (Super Rare) and SAR (Special Art Rare) are both secret-rare-tier designations used in modern Japanese Expansion Packs, printed with card numbers that run above a set’s regular base checklist. Neither consistently outranks the other set to set — the exact naming convention has shifted between design eras — but both categories represent the upper rarity tier a set can produce, which is why both Erika cards in this guide carry premium pricing relative to their sets’ common and uncommon cards.

Erika’s Invitation SAR — Pokémon Card 151 (SV2a), 2023

Erika’s Invitation (エリカの招待) is card 206/165, a SAR printed in the Enhanced Expansion Pack “Pokémon Card 151” (set code SV2a), released June 16, 2023. The base set runs to 165 cards, with secret-rare numbering extending to 210. Illustrator credit: Cona Nitanda.

Pokémon Card 151 revisited the original 151 Kanto Pokemon with an all-new SAR chase tier layered on top, and Erika’s Invitation was part of that secret-rare run. At ¥32,651 for our currently listed PSA 10 copy, it’s a considerably more accessible entry point into Erika’s card lineup than Hospitality. For the wider set context and other SV2a chases, see our Pokémon Card 151 (SV2a) pull rates and best cards guide.

Where Erika Fits in the Supporter Chase-Card Tier

Named-character Supporter cards are one of the most collected categories in the Japanese TCG, and Erika sits alongside other Gym Leaders and recurring characters whose Supporter prints regularly land in the SR/SAR secret-rare tier of their respective sets. Our Japanese Trainer card guide walks through that category more broadly across multiple characters and sets, if Erika’s cards have you curious about what else is out there in the same tier.

What makes Erika’s two cards a useful pair to study side by side is the four-year gap between them — Hospitality from the 2019 TAG TEAM GX era, Invitation from the 2023 Scarlet & Violet era’s 151 callback set. Comparing the two gives a concrete look at how the same character’s card value can differ substantially between sets and eras, without needing to guess at why from external market commentary.

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