30th Celebration gave Meowth three illustration rares, numbered 144, 141 and 139, and handed all three to one illustrator. OKUBO drew the Kanto, Galarian and Alolan forms on what looks like the same apartment block at three different hours of the day. The trick that makes the set of three work is easy to miss on a single card and impossible to unsee once you have all three in front of you: every cat turns up on every card.
The art
Card 144 is the Kanto Meowth, and it is the daylight one. OKUBO builds the frame out of a pale blue and cream apartment exterior, stacked balconies, window air conditioning units, a laundry line strung across the middle with a shirt and a pair of trousers pegged to it. Meowth is asleep in the center, draped belly down over a balcony railing with all four legs hanging, eyes shut, tail curled up. The linework is thick, black and slightly wobbly, more comic panel than card illustration, and the whole palette runs on two blues and a cream with one orange accent for the tail.
Now look at the top of that card. A lavender grey cat is hanging upside down from the laundry line by its back legs, paws dangling, tail curled into a spiral. That is Alolan Meowth. Look at the bottom edge, mostly buried behind the attack text and the retreat line, and a grey cat with dark tufted ears is asleep across a lower railing. That is Galarian Meowth.
Card 141, Galarian Meowth, is the same architecture at sunset. The sky goes coral and the building turns violet and dusty pink, with white blossoms drifting through the frame and a purple parasol propped over a stack of crates. Galarian Meowth sits up on the middle balcony, front and center, facing you. Alolan Meowth climbs the railing at the lower left. Kanto Meowth pads up the stairs at the lower right.
Card 139, Alolan Meowth, is the night. Deep navy building, black windows and gold lit ones, white four point sparkles scattered through the air. Alolan Meowth prances across the top right of the frame looking thoroughly pleased with itself, Kanto Meowth leaps from a window ledge in the middle, and Galarian Meowth lies flat along the bottom. The staircases and drainpipes are the same shapes as on the day card, just repainted.
The types line up with the hours, which cannot be an accident. Kanto Meowth is Colorless and gets the bright sky. Galarian Meowth is Metal and gets the hard coral light of sunset. Alolan Meowth is Darkness and gets the night. Illustration rares are the full art tier below special illustration rares, the ones where the artwork runs to the card edge and the Pokemon is doing something other than posing for a battle, and this is about as literal a use of that brief as the format allows.
OKUBO is not a household name in this hobby. The English catalog runs to 24 cards starting with a Tympole common in Obsidian Flames, and before this set the illustration rare tier amounted to three cards: Crustle in Paradox Rift, Arbok in Temporal Forces and Amoonguss in Black Bolt, plus a Surfer special illustration rare in Ascended Heroes. 30th Celebration doubled that body of work in one go.
Why it is trending
Be straight about the catalyst, because this is not breaking news. The Pokemon Company previewed the OKUBO Meowth artwork in an official news post on August 8, 2026, and the set has been on shelves since September 16. What is actually happening this week is that 30th Celebration is finishing its run as the current set. Delta Reign prereleases began on October 24 and the main set lands on November 6, so this is the last week the 30th Celebration art gets looked at as new product rather than as last season.
That is usually when the sleeper cards in a set get found, and the Meowth trio is this set's. Nobody put these on a chase list. The headlines went to the Futuristic Rare Mew ex and Mewtwo ex, to the Pikachu illustrations, and to mashu's three legendary birds, which actually do join into one panorama. The Meowths got the quiet corner of the checklist.
The prices say the same thing. Reading PriceCharting on October 28, 2026, the ungraded Kanto Meowth sits at $8.50, Galarian Meowth at $6.50 and Alolan Meowth at $6.44. All three are moving at roughly one recorded sale a day, so these are liquid cards rather than dead listings, and there is no meaningful graded market on any of them yet. The whole set of three costs about $21.44. I am not going to pretend that is a market signal. It is the opposite of one, and it is the entire reason to care: this is one of the few genuinely good art ideas in a modern set that a collector can own complete, in English, for the price of two booster packs.
Build a binder page around it
These three want to be a row, not a spread. Put them left to right in the top row of a nine pocket page in chronological order, day first, then dusk, then night, and the sky runs warm to cold across the page while the architecture stays put underneath. Read along that row and the composition pays off: the lead cat is in a different position on each card, high right on one, dead center on the next, low left on the third, so your eye zigzags down the row instead of marching straight across.
The three pockets beneath them are the interesting problem. Do not fill them with more Meowth. Fill them with the palette each card hands you, so the vertical columns read as a gradient too. Under the day card, pale blue and cream: anything with a flat sky background. Under the dusk card, coral and violet. Under the night card, navy and gold, which in this set means the dark half of the checklist, and it is the same navy that kantaro's Night Pikachu ex runs on. The set keeps circling the same day and night idea, so the material to build with is right there in the same packs.
If you sort by color rather than by number, this row is a ready made transition strip. It is the hinge where a warm section can hand off to a dark one across three cards instead of one abrupt page turn. Build it in the Binder Builders app first, drag the three into place and park candidate neighbors under them, and you will know in two minutes whether the gradient reads. The broader principle is in our guide to organizing Pokemon cards in a binder: a page is a composition, and the cards around a card change how it looks.
One takeaway
Buy all three or buy none. Individually these are pleasant cheap illustration rares and no more than that. Together they are a single illustration told three times, with a joke buried in the corners of each one, for about twenty one dollars. That is a better binder page than most cards ten times the price will give you, and the trio will not stay this quiet forever once people notice that the cats are hiding in each other's cards.
