Do collectors pay for the artist? Mostly they pay for the era.
By the person who runs Giraffe Trendz · October 2, 2026 · 4 min read
Collecting by artist is a real thing now. People chase a Yuka Morii clay model card or a Tomokazu Komiya because of who made it. I wanted to know if that shows up in prices, so I matched cards to their illustrators and measured each artist with at least 25 Near Mint cards worth $2 or more.
That's 90 artists. Over nine weeks, the typical card rose for 78 of them and fell for 9.
Who rose the most
| Artist | Typical change | Cards measured | Share that rose | Top card |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sachiko Adachi | +18.8% | 49 | 78% | Voltorb, $73 |
| Hironobu Yoshida | +14.7% | 53 | 85% | Shining Mewtwo, $3,000 |
| Masako Yamashita | +14.0% | 34 | 85% | Growlithe, $150 |
| Tomokazu Komiya | +11.6% | 279 | 80% | Gengar (Master Ball Pattern), $695 |
| Yuka Morii | +11.2% | 236 | 80% | Ditto (Squirtle), $426 |
| Miki Tanaka | +10.4% | 157 | 75% | Slowpoke & Psyduck GX, $347 |
| Aya Kusube | +10.4% | 114 | 79% | Dark Gengar, $1,102 |
| Hisao Nakamura | +10.3% | 101 | 82% | Tyranitar ex, $336 |
Komiya and Morii are the two I trust most on that list, because the sample is big. 279 cards and 236 cards. When 80% of that many cards go up, it isn't one lucky sale.
Who fell
Studio Bora Inc. fell 9.3%, takuyoa 7.2%, GIDORA 5.7% and Teeziro 3.4%. If those names are newer to you, that's the point. They mostly illustrate current sets.
So is it the artist or the era?
Here's the honest answer. Mostly the era. The artists at the top did a lot of their work in the Neo, e-Card and EX years. The artists at the bottom are working right now. And old sets went up while new sets went down. An artist's number is partly just a measure of when they were drawing.
I can't fully separate the two with nine weeks of data. To do it properly I'd compare artists inside the same set, and most sets don't have enough cards per artist for that to mean anything yet.
Where the artist does seem to matter
Price level is a different question from price change. Hikaru Koike has 56 cards in the data and the typical one is $98. The next artist down, Hisao Nakamura, is at $23. Nothing else is close. I don't fully trust a gap that big from 56 cards, so I'm flagging it as worth a closer look, not as a finding.
And Morii is at $18 for the typical card across 269 cards, which is high for an artist with that much work in common and uncommon slots. People pay extra for the clay.
The weekly report on the home page lists which artists are rising right now. Treat it the way I do: a starting point for a closer look, not a reason to buy.
Keep Reading
- Old sets went up. New sets went down. Here is how lopsided it was.Nine weeks of nightly prices across 184 sets: 119 rose, 34 fell, and almost every faller was printed in the last two years.
- Japanese or English? The same Pokémon is not the same price.For 130 of 153 Pokémon, the typical English card costs more than the typical Japanese one. Umbreon is the widest gap. Pikachu is one of the few exceptions.
- One in five cards moved 20% in nine weeks. At every price.I expected cheap cards to be jumpy and expensive cards to be steady. The data says the jumpiness is about the same from $1 to $100 and up, and the reason is how few times a card actually sells.
Market reporting, not financial advice. See how the numbers are gathered.