23/06/2025
Remember when everyone was playing Pokémon? If you’re older than a teenager, the craze – which started in 1996 when the Pokémon franchise was launched - might have passed you by, but today there are thousands of collectors of Pokémon cards and they’re spending up big. Really big, in some cases.
You’d better be sitting down for this. The world record for a Pokémon card is US$5.275m. That’s the amount paid in July 2021 by US YouTuber and professional wrestler Logan Paul (more on him in a minute) for a 1998 Pokémon Japanese Promo Illustrator – Holo, considered to be the rarest card in the world. On a (much) smaller scale, however, the cards are also making inroads in the world of traditional antiques, as provincial auction houses in the UK are including them in their sales – and getting thousands of pounds for them. At Lay’s Auctions in Penzance, Cornwall, a set of Pokémon cards in their timed online sale of Coins, Railways and Collectables attracted 138 bids and sold for $29,000 (estimate $200-400). Another group of cards in the same sale, with the same estimate, made $17,000. “Given that this is Lay’s first foray into the Pokémon world, we were delighted with the result we achieved,” said a spokesperson for the auction house. “Our vendor had no idea they had such a valuable collection.”
A report in the UK trade newspaper Antiques Trade Gazette says the spike of interest in buying and selling the trading cards can be pinpointed to the lockdown period of 2020, when many people cleared out their lofts and attics and rediscovered forgotten collections. And this is where Logan Paul entered the picture. He spent lockdown creating YouTube shows in which he would buy and unbox a previously unopened set of cards to see if it happened to contain a rare edition – for example, a Charizard, which is from the first generation of Pokémon and is rare, but even more so in the limited edition holographic run (a 1995 example with a scarce blue back has a suggested value of US$493,230 according to the Vaulted Collection website). Paul’s unboxing of his cards – the video is called ‘I bought a $200,000 box of Pokémon cards’ – attracted 12 million viewers. By October 2020, the term ‘Pokémon’ had climbed to 30th spot for the most searched-for term amongst users of thesaleroom.com – up from its previous ranking of around 800.
Which is why they’re now popping up in auction houses across the UK and also here in Australia. The London firm of Stanley Gibbons Baldwin – known for its sales of stamps, coins and medals – has been holding Pokémon and trading cards auctions online for the past two years. “In one case, a gentleman who used to collect cards with his daughters was offered £18,000 from someone who came to his house. We are selling his collection at auction and have so far generated £180,000 for him, with more to come,” said spokesperson Roy Raftery when speaking to the ATG. And it may only get bigger: in 2026 the Pokémon franchise turns 30.
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