In the time between school and work: Prague plays Pokémon
The Pokémon scene in Prague is vibrant and active, with a mix of official events, dedicated gaming stores, and a bustling Pokémon GO community. Kaja Novak checked it out.
On a Wednesday afternoon at Najada, a game store near Jiřího z Poděbrad Square in Prague, I walk into the back room where the weekly Pokémon tournament takes place. At one of the tables a teenage boy is teaching a much younger kid how to play. He is calm and patient, explaining each step while the kid tries to follow along.
At that moment, the room is almost empty. Just the two of them at a table and the kid’s dad watching. In my head, I had pictured something very different on the way here. A room full of men in their thirties, crowded tables, maybe a bit of chaos. Instead, the first thing I see is a quiet lesson on prize cards and basic moves.
Over the next two hours, the atmosphere changes. People drift in with backpacks and deckboxes, greet each other and start unpacking binders and playmats. By five in the afternoon, the room is full and lively. Players are talking, laughing, shuffling decks and checking pairings. It finally looks like the tournament I had pictured earlier that day.
For anyone who has only seen the cards in shops, the game itself can be hard to picture. Very roughly, each player brings a deck of exactly 60 cards, a mix of Pokémon, Energy and Trainer cards. Two players take turns playing Pokémon, attaching Energy and using attacks or abilities to knock out each other’s Pokémon. The main goal is to take all of your Prize cards before your opponent, usually by knocking out their team. The details can get very complicated very quickly, but at the tables in Najada, everyone seems to know exactly what they are doing.
Most of the people here come regularly. Some are still in school, others arrive straight from work. On this day, there is only one girl at the tables, 17-year-old Stella, but she looks completely at ease. She tells me she is at Najada more than twice a week, sometimes for casual play, sometimes for the competitive evenings.
“I want to go competitive for real,” she says. “Regionals, then internationals, then worlds. That is the plan.”
She also insists the Czech scene is stronger than people think. “We have a world champion, an international champion and a lot of people who place really high in Europe.”
A Czech player, Daniel Magda, recently appeared at 44th place on the Limitless TCG global leaderboard, a website that tracks results from official tournaments. However, these rankings are not officially confirmed by one single organization and they change depending on the region or country.
25-year-old Daniel shares that he recently found his way back into the community. He collected as a child, stopped and returned to the game in 2024. Since then he has already been to at least one regional tournament and is planning to attend more.
“There are a lot of good players here,” he tells me. “Sometimes people from the world level come to local leagues. It is hard but they are helpful. If you are new, they explain tactics, help you change your deck. You just have to ask.”
17-year-old Tomas discovered Pokémon through the mobile version and only later moved to the physical game. What kept him there, he says, was the way the community treated new players.
“The communities around trading card games here are really friendly,” he says. “If you are new, people lend you cards, explain rules, help you build decks. They do not gatekeep at all.”
Vaclav, 20, sums it up more simply. For him, Najada is “a way to get out of the house after work.” Sitting just down the table is Jack, 31, who moved from the UK to Prague. He says game stores were one of the first places he looked for when he moved.
“Prague has more places to play than Manchester,” he says. “Back home we had maybe two game shops I could name. Here, there are several, and league nights feel much more active.”
Together, their stories paint a picture of a scene that is competitive but open. Stella estimates that there are around fifty to one hundred people across the Czech Republic who are seriously active in organised play at any given time. In 2026, Prague is set to host a regional championship, a major event in the Play Pokémon circuit.
Behind this local routine stands one of the biggest media franchises in the world. Pokémon began in 1996 as a pair of Game Boy games and quickly grew into anime, films, mobile apps and most famously the trading card game (TCG). According to data used by The Pokémon Company and industry analysts, more than seventy five billion Pokémon trading cards have been printed globally by March 2025. They exist in sixteen languages and are officially sold in more than ninety countries and regions. By late 2025 there are about 125 main sets and around seventeen thousand different cards, not counting promotional or alternative versions.
Across its nine generations, the Pokémon video games have appeared in many forms, from classic battle adventures to newer, more open-world styles. Several older titles have been remade so that players can experience them on modern consoles. Games that originally came out on handheld systems are now playable on Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, which keeps the series accessible for new fans.
For players in Prague, the cards remain the main entry point, though. One of the main hubs for collectors is Shadowball, a shop in the city centre that began as a side project. Brothers David and Dan, who own it, watched the Pokémon anime as children and collected cards like many others. Years later, when Pokémon Go brought the brand back into the spotlight, they started buying old collections, sorting them and selling duplicates to fund their own binders.
“We created a Facebook group for buying and trading cards,” they write. “It now has around thirty thousand members. People noticed we could find unique pieces, so they started sourcing cards through us. That is when we created an e-shop, and two years ago we opened our physical store.”
Shadowball is not the only large online space. Several Czech and Slovak Pokémon TCG Facebook groups have thousands of members who use them to buy, sell and trade cards. For people outside Prague, these groups are often the main way to participate in the hobby. Players post binder photos, list prices, request specific cards or arrange local trades. It is a decentralised marketplace that helps keep the community active even in towns without a game store.
Shadowball itself focuses more on collecting and graded cards. The brothers attend the TCG Expo in Prague and showcase rare pieces. They say Czechia has an unusually engaged collector base. Many local sellers use Cardmarket, a European trading platform, and one large Prague shop, Černý Rytíř, ranks among the biggest Pokémon stores there.
Other access points are scattered across the city. Luxor on Wenceslas Square has a dedicated Pokémon section. Relay shops at the airport stock small displays. Online stores such as Gengar cz and Cardstore sell sealed products and singles.
There is even a vending machine. In the Nový Smíchov shopping centre a bright yellow Pokémon machine stands near the escalators. People can buy special singles and individual packs on a touch screen and pay without talking to anyone. When I visited, there were always a few people standing in front of it, looking at prices or deciding if they wanted to buy something.
For some people, the connection to Pokémon is mainly about memory. Jaroslav, 32, began collecting in second grade, put his cards away for years and returned to them when his son was born. He kept part of his childhood collection and now works on completing the old sets he loved.
“Today the cards represent nostalgia and a long-term investment,” he says. “I do not plan to sell them.”
His favourite Pokémon is Gengar. He has a Gengar painting above his desk, a gift from his wife, and also tells the story of losing a holographic Gengar card to a friend in a childhood bet. The friend still has the card, which has now turned into a funny but slightly painful anecdote that he repeats.
Ondřej, a father of two boys, had a similar start as Jaroslav. He first got into Pokémon TCG around 2015/2016, when his sons became interested. “At first I was a bit conservative,” he said, remembering how quickly their savings disappeared into booster packs. Over time he learned more about the game and the market behind it. Today, his sons are no longer active, but he continues to collect, partly for nostalgia and partly as something he calls “a beautiful hobby with a certain investment potential” for the future.
For others, the appeal is visual. Veronika, 20, discovered Pokémon at an anime convention. “It is definitely the art for me,” she says. “Especially the full arts and the trainer cards.” She often opens packs on video calls with her best friend abroad. “When I pull something big she screams before I do.”
She jokes that opening booster packs feels like “soft gambling”. There is always something inside the pack, but the chance of pulling a highly sought after card keeps people buying more. Recently she pulled the main chase card from the set Journey Together from a Korean pack she had picked up. At the time, it was worth around 150 dollars.
“That is my proudest pull so far,” she says. She still wishes she had remembered to bring her binder on the day we met so she could show it.
Stories like hers sit between hobby and market. On the extreme end of the scale are cards such as the Pikachu Illustrator, a Japanese promotional card from the late 1990s. One copy was reportedly sold to YouTuber Logan Paul in a private deal for 5.275 million dollars, which would make it the most expensive Pokémon card ever purchased. Analysts describe the wider trading card market as a multi-billion dollar sector, fuelled by nostalgia, adult collectors and people who see rare cards as an alternative type of investment.
Not everyone engages with the franchise the same way. Martin, 34, enjoyed the anime and the early Game Boy games as a kid, but now sees the brand differently. “I have a complicated relationship with Pokémon,” he says. “There are practices by Nintendo, Game Freak and The Pokémon Company that I do not agree with, especially when the products are aimed at kids.”
He still plays fan-made versions of the older games but avoids the commercial side. “I think people imagine tournaments to be chaotic or extremely serious,” he adds. “It surprised me that events like the ones in Prague are basically friendly hangouts.”
For most players in Prague, though, Pokémon remains a hobby with limits. Teenagers use money from part-time jobs or pocket money to buy boosters and boxes, trade with friends and occasionally sell cards to fund new decks. Adults with full-time jobs may spend more, but many still set clear budgets. The fact that some cards can be very valuable is part of the background, not the main reason they go to league nights.
Digital versions add another layer. Pokémon Go, released in 2016, briefly turned city streets into areas where players hunted creatures with their phones. Some people in Prague still open the app, but many say it was a phase. A more recent development is Pokémon TCG Pocket, a mobile game that adapts the trading card game.
“You collect there too, but the best part is that you do it for free,” Veronika says. She uses it when university schedules are too full for in person events. The app lets her try decks and enjoy the artwork without carrying her physical cards.
Back at Najada, the mood shifts again once the casual games end and the competitive rounds begin. The younger boy packs up his deck and leaves with his father. Older teens take their seats, chatting about school, work, weekend plans and upcoming exams while they wait for pairings. The room feels busy but relaxed. People catch up with friends, shuffle their decks and settle in for the evening.
For a franchise that includes an anime empire, a theme park, mobile games and global tournaments, this ordinary scene might be the most telling. In Prague, Pokémon is not just a nostalgic brand or a headline about record breaking card sales. Instead, it is something that happens on Wednesday afternoons, between classes and jobs, when a group of people gather in the back room of a game store to play, laugh, trade and teach a kid how to win his first prize card.
