Pitch Black is a Mega Evolution set. Six Mega ex, a cosmic horror Darkrai on the cover, and a whole marketing push built on power. The card people keep posting is a two foot electric hamster having the worst day of its life. Morpeko ex, number 117 of 84, illustrated by NC Empire, is the only non Mega Pokemon in the set's special illustration rare run, and it is winning the art conversation on pure comedy.
The art
A special illustration rare, or SIR, is the top art tier in a modern set. The illustration bleeds to every edge, the rules text shrinks to a strip along the bottom, and the artist gets the whole card as canvas. Pitch Black has only six of them: three Mega ex, two Supporters, and this. Morpeko is the outlier by a mile, and NC Empire used the space to do something almost no SIR does, which is make you laugh.
The composition is a starburst. Morpeko is dead center in Hangry Mode, the dark purple form it flips into when its cheeks run empty, mouth cranked open in a full scream, arms flung out to either side, eyes narrowed to two red crescents under the black lightning bolt marking on its head. Everything in the frame radiates outward from that open mouth. Jagged shards of hot magenta tear away from the body like a shockwave, lime green splinters cut across them at hard angles, and pale ice blue slivers fill the gaps. The background is flat black, which is the whole trick. There is no environment, no horizon, no context. Just a tiny furious animal detonating against a void.
Look at how little is actually rendered. The magenta shards are torn paper shapes, not brush strokes. The teeth are four blunt yellow wedges. The pink cheek patches are two soft ovals with no shading at all. NC Empire built the entire card out of flat graphic marks, which is why it reads instantly from across a room and why it holds up shrunk to a thumbnail on a phone. Most SIRs reward a slow look. This one lands in half a second and then keeps being funny.
There is a nice bit of design symmetry underneath it. The card's own attack is called Hangry Blaster, and it does 40 more damage for every damage counter sitting on Morpeko. The angrier and more beaten up it gets, the harder it hits. The illustration is a picture of that mechanic.
NC Empire has been quietly working since a 2017 Mismagius promo and has a real back catalog: the Agatha full art from Chilling Reign, the Boss's Orders in the Lost Origin Trainer Gallery, the Loudred illustration rare in Paradox Rift, and more recently Team Rocket's Spidops in Destined Rivals and an Emboar illustration rare in White Flare. The detail collectors have enjoyed most is that NC Empire already drew a Morpeko once, a small uncommon back in Battle Styles in 2021. Five years later the same illustrator gets the same Pokemon at the biggest size the game offers, and turns in a scream.
Why it is trending
Pitch Black landed on July 17, 2026, so this is a card people are physically pulling right now, and the surprise is what created the buzz. Nobody sleeved a Morpeko expecting it to matter. The set was sold on Mega Darkrai ex, and Akira Egawa's Darkrai SIR is genuinely excellent and genuinely the chase. Morpeko was supposed to be the throwaway ex.
Instead it became the card that gets shared. Market trackers in the first week after release had the Morpeko SIR running ahead of two of the set's own Mega ex special illustration rares, which is not how the pricing hierarchy in a Mega set is supposed to work. When a non Mega, non legendary, gag tier Pokemon out earns the Megas it was printed alongside, the only thing carrying it is the illustration.
Be honest about what that means before you chase it. Prices on a set less than two weeks old are noise, and a card riding a joke has a different demand curve than a card riding a beloved character. What is real is the reason people are looking: this is one of the very few modern SIRs built for humor rather than drama, and the collectors who buy on art rather than on rarity noticed immediately. It sits in the same tradition as the Magikarp illustration rare, a bulk Pokemon that became a chase card because somebody drew it beautifully.
Build a binder page around it
Morpeko is loud, and loud cards fight with their neighbors. The safe move is to give it a single pocket feature slot with nothing competing beside it, the way you would treat any full bleed card with a black background. Black borders read as negative space in a binder, so a Morpeko surrounded by white or pastel cards looks like a hole punched in the page.
The better move is to lean into it and build a black page. Sketch it in the builder and run color sort to pull every card in your collection with a dark, near black illustration into one spread. Pitch Black gives you plenty to work with, and Morpeko's magenta and lime accents give the page its only real color, which makes it the natural center pocket of a nine card grid. Put the Gwynn special illustration rare from the same set on the page and you get cool violet against hot magenta on the same black field.
There is also a Morpeko page waiting in this, and it is a good one. The Pokemon has been drawn in wildly different registers: Yuu Nishida's soft, sunlit Paradox Rift illustration rare is the exact emotional opposite of this card, and her whole catalog is built on the warmth that NC Empire just threw out the window. Cona Nitanda and Teeziro have both drawn Morpeko too. Nine pockets of the same little hamster interpreted nine different ways is one of the most satisfying single Pokemon pages you can build, and the guide to organizing a Pokemon binder covers how to plan a feature page like that before you buy anything.
The lesson Morpeko ex keeps proving is that a binder is not a price list. A set can tell you which card is supposed to matter, print it at the highest rarity, and put it on the box, and collectors will still stop the page on a hamster screaming into a void because it made them smile. Build for the cards you actually want to look at. That is the only sort order that survives.
