Illustration rares explained
If your binder pages look like paintings, they're probably full of illustration rares. Here's what the names mean and how to spot each one.
The tiers (Scarlet & Violet era)
- Illustration Rare (IR): the artwork covers the whole card, usually showing the Pokémon in a scene rather than posing. It has one gold star next to the card number.
- Special Illustration Rare (SIR): full-art cards with more ambitious artwork, often of a Pokémon ex or a trainer. Two gold stars.
- Hyper Rare: gold-etched cards. Three gold stars. Striking, but they're all gold, so they're hard to place on a color page.
In Japanese sets the same tiers are called AR (Art Rare), SAR (Special Art Rare) and UR.
Why they suit themed pages
Regular cards put the Pokémon in a small window. Illustration rares give the background the whole card: a forest, a city at night, the bottom of the sea. That's what makes color pages work. When nine cards share a scene and a palette, the page reads like one picture.
They're also the cards that most often break the obvious type colors. A Water type in a warm sunset scene, or a Fire type in a cool forest. That gives you a lot more options for building a page than sorting by type does.
Finding them by look
Binder Lab tags each card's art style, pattern and main colors from the artwork itself. Filter the card search to "Illustration rare" and a color, or open any card and use Similar cards to find others like it.