About Kirava

What Kirava does differently

Every other catalogue treats "Pokémon International" and "Pokémon Japan" as two separate databases that coexist but never speak to each other. Kirava links the same card across languages: search for a card and you see every printing that exists, in every language, with its set and its number — including the ones that only ever came out in one language and never crossed over.

Three consequences run through the whole project. Language is part of a card's identity, not a display preference. Language exclusives are first-class content, not an edge case. And a vault always stores the language, because it changes the value.

Honesty about what we know

Matching a Japanese card to its Western counterpart is a hard data problem, not a hard code problem. Japanese and Western sets do not map one to one, so it cannot be done with a join on set and number.

Where we are certain — same National Pokédex number, which is identical in every language — we say so plainly. Where we are inferring, we say that too, and we would rather show two cards separately than claim wrongly that they are the same one. A collector spots that kind of error instantly and stops trusting everything else.

Data and images

Card data and images come from TCGdex, an open-source project, under an open licence. Images are cached locally and served from our own domain — never hotlinked — and only ever at catalogue resolution.

Sealed product data (boxes, elite trainer boxes, tins, decks) is not in TCGdex and is curated by hand by Kirava.

Kirava works even without images. Name, set and number are the skeleton: if the pictures ever had to come down, the catalogue would still be useful.