Upcoming Tapu Lele-GX To Be “A” Alternate Art Promo, Legality Won’t Reset

We now have another foreign product image of the “Island Guardians-GX Premium Collection,” which will feature Tapu Lele-GX. It’ll release in America on November 2nd.

As revealed in this new image, Tapu Lele-GX is an “A” alternate art promo card. This means she will not be a new Sun & Moon promo, but rather a part of Guardians Rising. Therefore, her legality won’t reset when this box is released; she will only remain in our Standard format for as long as Guardians Rising is legal.

In Japan, Tapu Lele-GX will be released in their GX Ultra Shiny set next month, so the card’s legality will reset overseas — she’ll be usable in their Standard format for years to come.

On a macro level, this means Pokemon does not plan to keep the legality of our cards in sync with Japan. There was an opportunity to make that happen this month because our formats now feature the same sets for the first time ever. But Tapu Lele-GX will be out of our Standard format much sooner than Japan’s, which indicates TPCi and Creatures do not want to keep our formats the same. If they did, Tapu Lele-GX would have been the card to have synchronous legality between Japan and the rest of the world.

As posted before, the “Island Guardians-GX Premium Box” will come with a foil Tapu Lele-GX promo, a jumbo version of the same card, a foil Tapu Fini-GX promo, eight booster packs, a colorful playmat featuring all four Island Guardians, a bright metallic Tapu Lele coin, and a PTCGO code card. It’ll cost $49.99 and release on November 2nd. In some foreign markets it’ll release earlier in October.