Amazing Rare lasted two English sets and produced exactly nine cards, then the Pokemon Company retired it and never used it again. Raikou, card 50 of 185 in Vivid Voltage, illustrated by Hideki Ishikawa, is the one Bulbapedia puts at the top of the page when it needs to show you what the rarity looked like. On September 16 it comes back as a Classic Collection reprint in 30th Celebration, which is the first time most collectors will have thought about it in five years.
The art
Every other rarity in the modern game gives the illustrator a scene. An illustration rare gets a place, a special illustration rare gets a place and a story. Amazing Rare gets none of that. There is no city, no forest, no weather, no ground. What Ishikawa paints instead is light, and the Pokemon is standing in front of it.
Raikou is mid leap, running right to left across the frame with its body stretched flat and all four legs off the ground. The mouth is open, the fangs and red tongue are showing, and the whole pose reads as the middle of a stride rather than a hero shot. Behind it, rays fan out from a white hot core at its shoulder and rotate through the frame in order: yellow across the top left, hot magenta at the top right, violet down the right edge, then cyan and green sweeping along the bottom. It is a color wheel with a Pokemon standing in the middle of it, and the eye reads the animal first because the white core sits directly behind the chest.
The trick that makes it work is in the outlines. Look at where the yellow body meets the background and there is no black line. The body is drawn in gold, the purple cloud mane is drawn in green, the crest and tail bolt are cyan against violet. Every edge is a different color to the thing beside it, which is how the figure stays readable on a background that would swallow a normally inked Pokemon. Nothing about this card is subtle and it is still legible from across a room.
Then there is the part the rarity is actually named for. Bulbapedia defines an Amazing Pokemon as one with a multi colored background that goes beyond the frame, and on this card you can watch it happen. The blue and green strokes leave the illustration window at the bottom, cross straight over the silver Pokedex bar that reads NO. 243 Thunder Pokemon, and streak down across the yellow card body until they stop just above the attack line. The illustration is not contained. It is leaking into the game text, and that single design decision is the whole rarity.
The other rules were just as strange. Amazing Rares only went to Legendary and Mythical Pokemon, every one had an attack with Amazing in the name, and the energy costs deliberately mixed types the Pokemon does not have. Raikou is a Lightning Pokemon whose Amazing Shot costs Grass, Lightning and Metal, and hits for 120 with another 120 to a benched Pokemon. The design brief seems to have been "make it look like a mistake and then commit to it."
Ishikawa has just over a hundred cards to his name and almost none of them look like this. He is a full art Trainer specialist, which puts him in the same lane as kirisAki and the Full Art Trainers she owns. He drew Bea and Leon in this same Vivid Voltage set, plus Jasmine, Janine, Zinnia, Bonnie, Tate and Liza, and the Giovanni's Charisma special illustration rare in 151. Raikou is one of the few times he was handed a Pokemon on its own and told to go loud.
Why it is trending
The catalyst has a date. 30th Celebration releases worldwide on September 16, 2026, and alongside the new cards it carries a Classic Collection of 30 reprints spanning the entire history of the game, from Base Set Pikachu to a Paldea Evolved illustration rare. Raikou is number 27 on that list. The lineup was flashed on screen by the Japanese 30th Celebration website on June 1 and has been reiterated through the reveal wave running now, a week out from launch.
The reprints are not straight copies. Each one gets a "30" Pikachu foil stamp and a new holofoil treatment, and none of them are legal for tournament play. So the September Raikou is a different object to the 2020 Raikou, which is the useful part for anyone who collects art rather than inventory. You are getting the same illustration under different light.
Be honest about what this does and does not change. It does not touch the supply of the original. Vivid Voltage printed what it printed in November 2020 and no reprint retroactively unprints it. What the anniversary set actually does is hand a five year old rarity back to an audience that never opened the set, and remind everyone that Amazing Rare was a closed experiment. Six cards in Vivid Voltage, three in Shining Fates, and that is the entire English run. Nine cards, forever. That kind of scarcity is structural rather than hyped, which is a rarer thing than it sounds. It also puts Raikou on the same reprint list as the Magikarp illustration rare that proved art can beat rarity, which is decent company.
Build a binder page around it
Here is the reason this card belongs on a site about binders. There are nine Amazing Rares. A standard binder page holds nine cards. The set is closed, it will never grow, and it fits a single page exactly.
The full list, in order: Celebi 9, Raikou 50, Zacian 82, Zamazenta 102, Jirachi 119 and Rayquaza 138 from Vivid Voltage, then Reshiram 17, Kyogre 21 and Yveltal 46 from Shining Fates. That fills the top two rows with the Vivid Voltage six and the bottom row with the three Shining Fates cards, which reads correctly left to right and top to bottom without you having to explain it. The Jirachi in that top block was drawn by Sanosuke Sakuma, the illustrator who normally draws the people, so the page quietly doubles as an artist curiosity.
This is also the one case where color sorting works against you. Every card in the run is already a rainbow, so a strict spectrum arrangement has nothing to grip. Open the builder, drop all nine in, and use the color tool the other way round: read the dominant hue of each background and rotate the order so touching cards share an edge color rather than fighting. Raikou belongs in the center pocket, position five, because its yellow is the loudest thing in the group and a nine pocket page wants its anchor in the middle.
When the September reprint lands there is a second page worth building, which is the pairing page. Original on the left, stamped Classic Collection version on the right, one row per card, so the sleeve does the comparison for you. That works better in a binder than it ever does on a screen, because you can hold the page up and tilt it and watch two different foil treatments catch the light at different angles. Our guide to organizing a Pokemon binder covers the layout logic if you want the fundamentals before you commit an order.
The takeaway is that closed sets make the best binder pages. Most collections are open ended, so every page is provisional and you are always leaving a gap for the next print. Amazing Rare cannot grow. Nine cards were made, the rarity was retired, and if you fill that page it is finished in a way almost nothing else in this hobby ever is. Start with the Raikou, because it is the one the encyclopedia reaches for.
