The 10 Best-Looking Cards in Chaos Rising, Chosen on Artwork Alone

Chaos Rising is a Mega-era set, which means the top of it is loud by design: big ex frames, big diagonals, a lot of surface. That is fine. It is also not where the interesting drawing is.

So this is ten cards chosen on the illustration and nothing else. Some of them are the most expensive things in the set and some of them cost less than the postage to send them to you, and the ordering has nothing to do with which is which.

Where an illustrator is doing something specific — a technique, a compositional choice, a habit you can recognise from their other work — I have said so and named them. Where a card is simply well made, I have left it at that.

10. Tauros (Illustration Rare)

Tauros

Chaos Rising · #096/086 · Illustration Rare

Illustrated by Tsuyoshi Nagano

$3.12

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Tsuyoshi Nagano is a painter first and a card artist a distant second, and it shows in every centimetre of this one. He built his name on oil-styled illustration work outside the TCG, and the technique he brings across is unmistakable: weight in the shoulders, light modelled rather than drawn, edges that soften where the form turns away from you. A Tauros is a good subject for that. It is a bulk of muscle and hide, and Nagano paints bulk better than almost anyone the game employs.

What I like most is the restraint. There is no dramatic sky trick, no rim-light halo doing the work. It is an animal, rendered honestly, and it holds the eye longer than most of the flashier cards around it. If you only take one Illustration Rare out of this set for the wall, take this.

9. Froakie (Illustration Rare)

Froakie

Chaos Rising · #088/086 · Illustration Rare

Illustrated by Susumu Maeya

$5.68

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Susumu Maeya has two cards in the Froakie line here and they read as a single piece of thinking split in two. The Froakie is the quieter half, and the better one. Maeya works with a very clean, slightly graphic hand — shapes stated confidently, water handled as pattern as much as as substance — and a small blue frog is exactly the right amount of subject for that approach. Nothing is overcrowded.

There is a real pleasure in seeing an illustrator get a Stage-0 slot and treat it as seriously as a headline card. Most of the set's attention goes elsewhere. This is the card I keep coming back to when I lay the Illustration Rares out.

8. Mega Greninja ex (Special Illustration Rare)

Mega Greninja ex

Chaos Rising · #116/086 · Special Illustration Rare

Illustrated by Susumu Maeya

$166.23

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The same illustrator, now with the full width of a Special Illustration Rare to fill, and he fills it with movement rather than detail. Maeya is doing the thing I value most in these big-frame cards: composing for the shape of the card, not just drawing a large Pokémon and letting the border crop it. The diagonal carries your eye corner to corner and the background stays subordinate.

It is also the most expensive card in the set, which is not why it is here, but it does mean a lot of people will see it. Worth looking at the Froakie alongside it to see how one hand scales from small to large.

7. Claydol (Illustration Rare)

Claydol

Chaos Rising · #092/086 · Illustration Rare

Illustrated by matazo

$2.03

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matazo is one of the more idiosyncratic names on the roster and Claydol is a gift of a subject for that sensibility — a stack of floating clay with too many eyes and no face to read. The illustration leans into the strangeness rather than sanding it off. Symmetry is used as a compositional device, which is rarer than it sounds; most artists avoid dead-centre framing because it kills movement, and here the stillness is the point.

matazo also has the Octillery common in this set, and the two together make a decent argument that they should be handed odder Pokémon more often.

6. Xerneas (Illustration Rare)

Xerneas

Chaos Rising · #091/086 · Illustration Rare

Illustrated by YASHIRO Nanaco

$5.81

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YASHIRO Nanaco handles colour in a way that is closer to illustration for print than to the airbrushed house style, and Xerneas — all antler geometry and prismatic colour — gives that approach something to push against. The risk with this Pokémon is always that the rainbow does the work and the drawing underneath goes slack. It does not here; the antlers are constructed, they have direction and taper, and the colour sits on the form rather than replacing it.

Set it next to the Rare Xerneas by KEIICHIRO ITO in the same set if you want a lesson in how differently two illustrators read the same creature.

5. Delphox (Rare)

Delphox

Chaos Rising · #013/086 · Rare

Illustrated by Gemi

$2.30

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Gemi draws with a soft, warm line and a slightly storybook sense of light, and Delphox — a fire fox with a stick and a robe — is about as on-the-nose a match as the assignment system ever produces. The fur is handled in long strokes that follow the body rather than fussy little tufts, which keeps the silhouette readable.

It is a plain Rare. It sits in the middle of the set where nobody is looking. That is usually where the good drawing is.

4. Cinccino ex (Special Illustration Rare)

Cinccino ex

Chaos Rising · #119/086 · Special Illustration Rare

Illustrated by Keisin

$53.37

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Keisin gets a Pokémon whose entire design is texture — scarf-like fur, that ludicrous white boa — and treats the card as a texture study. Fluff is genuinely hard to render without it turning into a grey smudge or a mass of individually drawn hairs, and the solution here is edge control: sharp where the light catches, dissolved where it does not.

Among the Special Illustration Rares this is the one with the lightest touch. The Greninja cards are louder. This one is better made.

3. Beldum (Common)

Beldum

Chaos Rising · #059/086 · Common

Illustrated by toi8

$0.24

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toi8 is a serious illustrator with a substantial body of work outside the card game, and finding that name on a common Beldum is the sort of thing that makes flipping through a set worthwhile. Beldum is a lump of metal with one eye. There is almost nothing to characterise. What toi8 does instead is atmosphere — the creature placed in a space that has air in it, depth suggested with value rather than detail.

This is the card I would point to if someone asked me why I bother reading the credit line on commons.

2. AZ's Tranquility (Special Illustration Rare)

AZ's Tranquility

Chaos Rising · #120/086 · Special Illustration Rare

Illustrated by OKACHEKE

$22.93

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Trainer cards give an illustrator a composition problem rather than a creature problem, and OKACHEKE handles AZ well. He is an unusually tall, still figure, and the illustration is built around that verticality instead of fighting it. The palette is held down — no shouting — which suits a card called Tranquility more than the full-bleed treatment usually allows.

Compare it with the GIDORA version of the same Trainer elsewhere in the set. Two entirely different readings of the same man, and the set is richer for carrying both.

1. Carnivine (Common)

Carnivine

Chaos Rising · #004/086 · Common

Illustrated by Heisuke Kitazawa

$0.03

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The cheapest card in the set, illustrated by Heisuke Kitazawa, whose line has a looseness and a sense of play that the polished end of the roster does not go near. Carnivine is a plant with a mouth and two floating tendrils, which is an absurd thing to have to draw convincingly, and the answer here is to commit to the absurdity — big shape, big grin, no attempt to make it dignified.

I have said before that a good common beats a mediocre chase card, and this is the example from this set. Nobody will chase it. It is still the most purely enjoyable drawing in the boxes.

If you pull this set, sort it by illustrator once before you sleeve anything. The credit line is the most useful piece of information printed on a Pokémon card and almost nobody reads it. Chaos Rising rewards the ten minutes.