TPCi's printing arm leased 1.27 million square feet in North Carolina — and it won't help you until 2028
Millennium Print Group, the Pokémon Company subsidiary that handles English-language printing, committed to a major new manufacturing campus in Morrisville in December 2025. Full-scale operations are not expected until late 2028 — which means every Mega era set you are chasing right now will be unaffected.
The Pokémon Company International has been visibly expanding its US printing footprint throughout 2025, and the largest single commitment to date was confirmed on 16 December. PokéBeach reported the story alongside the Morrisville-based broadcaster WRAL: TPCi's subsidiary Millennium Print Group has leased 1.27 million square feet at the Spark LS industrial campus in Morrisville, North Carolina.
The numbers are large. The timeline is long. And the relief, if it comes, will not reach UK retail shelves for at least three years.
What was confirmed
The Morrisville campus is already MPG's operational base, so this is technically an expansion rather than a relocation. The 1.27 million square foot figure breaks down as approximately 400,000 sq ft of existing buildings plus a planned 866,000 sq ft of new advanced manufacturing space. Starwood Capital Group and Trinity Capital Advisors — the real estate firms that jointly own and operate Spark LS — announced the lease in a joint statement on 16 December that kept the tenant anonymous. PokéBeach, WRAL and trade publications then independently identified MPG as the leasing company within hours.
Construction on the new manufacturing facility is reported to begin in 2026, with completion targeted for 2027. Full-scale operations are not expected until late 2028.
Why MPG matters
Millennium Print Group has been a TPCi subsidiary since 2022, when TPCi acquired the Morrisville-based printer outright. MPG produces cards for several trading card games — it is not exclusively a Pokémon facility — but it has been the primary North American print partner for English-language Pokémon TCG product since the acquisition closed.
A major capacity expansion at MPG is therefore the most concrete signal yet that TPCi is committed to materially increasing Pokémon TCG production capacity in the West. The current 2024-2026 supply crisis is unambiguously a printing capacity problem rather than a demand problem: demand has been at record levels since the Pokémon TCG Pocket launch in late 2024, and TPCi has been publicly clear that the strategic response is to scale production rather than to throttle demand. The Morrisville expansion is the most visible commitment to that posture so far.
The timeline problem
Here is where the news lands harder for UK collectors than the headline number suggests. Pitch Black (ME5), Storm Emeralda (M6), the 30th Anniversary set, and the next eighteen months of releases will all be subject to the current supply allocation regime. None of those products will be printed at the expanded Morrisville facility.
Even when capacity does come online in late 2028, UK retail allocation lags US retail allocation by a measurable margin. Product printed at MPG flows first into TPCi's US distribution network, then to TPCi's European distribution centre, then to UK retailers. The end-to-end lag between increased US production and increased UK retail availability is realistically 30-90 days in steady-state operations, and will be longer during the initial production ramp.
What this does not mean
Some collector forums are reading the news as a forward-looking justification for either holding sealed product (if reprints flatten future scarcity) or selling now (if reprints flatten future appreciation). Both readings misjudge the timeline.
The expanded Morrisville capacity will not affect any product printed in 2026 or 2027. Pitch Black, Storm Emeralda, and the 30th Anniversary set will be subject to the same allocation dynamics that defined Chaos Rising, Black Bolt, White Flare, Destined Rivals, and Journey Together — constrained at launch, gradually restocked over 12-18 months, with chase pull singles softening on a predictable curve as supply rebalances.
The expanded capacity does begin to matter for 2028 and 2029 releases. Sets that hit retail when the Morrisville expansion is at full operational capacity will be printed at meaningfully higher volumes than the current cohort. Whether that translates into permanently lower secondary-market pricing depends on parallel growth in demand, which has not slowed in any measurable way through 2026.
The harder signal
The genuinely interesting question is what TPCi is communicating about its longer-term strategic posture. Constructing 866,000 sq ft of new manufacturing space in the US is not a "ride out the current hype cycle" move. It is a structural commitment to Pokémon TCG as an industrial-scale product line for the next decade — and the financial commitment alone (the lease, the construction, the equipment fit-out) implies a multi-year revenue projection that justifies that fixed-cost base.
What this means for the UK
For UK collectors deciding what to do this winter: nothing about this news changes the calculation for any product launching in the next 24-30 months. The current allocation game continues. Chaos Cards lotteries, Pokémon Center UK Thursday drops, and Smyths Toys in-store walk-ins remain the routes to MSRP product through at least the end of 2027.
For collectors thinking about their 2028+ position: this is the first concrete reason to expect a structurally different supply environment than the one we are operating in today. Whether that environment compresses chase-card pricing meaningfully will depend on how demand evolves through the same period. The capacity is one variable; demand is the other.