List artists

All 399 credited illustrators with a card count, searchable by name.

GET/v1/artists1 creditfree plan

Cache-Control: public, max-age=60, s-maxage=300, stale-while-revalidate=600

Objects returned

card_count is maintained by the importers rather than counted per request: recomputing it on read would be a GROUP BY over the whole catalogue for a number that changes once a day.

This response carries meta.total_count, like sets and unlike cards — a few hundred rows are cheap to count exactly.

Query parameters

Query parameters
Name	Type	Default	Description
`q`	string	—	Accent-insensitive substring match on the name, so `arita` finds `Mitsuhiro Arita`.
`orderBy`	string	-card_count	`slug`, `name` or `card_count`. Tiebreaker is `slug`.
`limit`	integer	50	Rows per page, 1 to 250. Above 250 you get `LIMIT_EXCEEDED` — follow `links.next` instead of raising it.
`cursor`	string	—	Opaque keyset cursor from `links.next`. Never construct one; it carries the sort order it was issued for and is rejected if `orderBy` changes mid-run.

Headers

Headers
Name	Type	Default	Description
`X-Api-Key` required	string	—	Your API key. `Authorization: Bearer <key>` is accepted as an alias.
`If-None-Match`	string	—	Send back the `ETag` you stored. The API returns a strong ETag on every catalogue response, and a 304 is a header exchange: no body, no database row read.

Example request

curl -s -G "https://api.pokemontcgapi.com/v1/artists" \
  --data-urlencode "q=arita" \
  --data-urlencode "limit=3" \
  -H "X-Api-Key: $PTCG_API_KEY"

Example response

200 OK · Cache-Control: public, max-age=60, s-maxage=300, stale-while-revalidate=600

response.json

{
  "data": [
    { "slug": "mitsuhiro-arita", "name": "Mitsuhiro Arita", "card_count": 760 }
  ],
  "meta": { "limit": 3, "count": 1, "total_count": 1, "has_more": false }
}

Errors

Every error body carries error.code, error.message and error.request_id. Switch on the code, never on the message.

Errors returned by this endpoint
Status	Code	When
401	`MISSING_API_KEY`	No `X-Api-Key` header and no bearer token on a route that requires one.
401	`INVALID_API_KEY`	The key does not match any account.
400	`INVALID_CURSOR`	The cursor is malformed, or was issued for a different `orderBy` than the one on this request.
400	`INVALID_PARAMETER`	A query parameter has the wrong type or an unsupported value — a non-integer `limit`, an unknown `lang`, an unknown `region`, a sort key that is not sortable.
400	`LIMIT_EXCEEDED`	`limit` is above 250, or a batch request carries more than 100 ids.

The full taxonomy, with what to do about each code, is on the errors page.

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