Catch ’em all! How Pokémon cards came to fetch millions

“This is the most iconic Pokémon card of all time,” says Roy Raftery, holding up a small, brightly coloured trading card depicting a golden, fire-breathing dragon. He is standing in a meeting room of London auction house Stanley Gibbons Baldwin’s. “Charizard,” it reads. “Evolves from Charmelon; Pokémon Power: Energy Burn.”

It’s part of the Pokémon Trading Card Game, first launched in Japan in 1996 and across the globe three years later. “Charizard was the Pokémon that had the most HP [hit points] and did the most damage,” says Raftery, a trading-card and video-game specialist. 

Today, if the card is a mint-condition, first-edition Charizard, it could fetch six figures. In 2022, one sold for $420,000 at trading-card marketplace PWCC (now Fanatics Collect). “In the past year, they’ve been going for around $200,000,” says Peter Petipas, a pop-culture specialist at New Jersey-based auction house Goldin. 

A Charizard sold at Goldin Auctions for $195,200 in 2024

A Pikachu Illustrator card sold for $672,000 in 2022 at Goldin Auctions

An Umbreon Vmax card sold for $3,782 at Goldin Auctions

A French Espeon card, sold for £2,800 at Stanley Gibbons Baldwin

The Pokémon universe was first conceived by Japanese video-game designer Satoshi Tajiri, who based the game on the idea of collecting bugs, his childhood hobby. Working alongside illustrator Ken Sugimori, he produced a pair of video games (Pokémon Red and Blue) in which the player must collect all 151 species of the “Pocket Monsters”, from the yellow mouse-like Pikachu, who has the power to create lightning storms, to the blue, frog-like Bulbasaur. Released on the Nintendo Game Boy in 1996, the games were a surprise hit that sparked a wave of “Pokémania”. 

“In 1999, it was the thing to do,” recalls Raftery. London-based collector Daniel Quinn, 32, says: “I remember my mum taking me to HMV in Birmingham to buy me and my brother Pokémon Red and Blue; I used to buy Pokémon cards with my lunch money.” 

Three decades on, Pokémon holds the top spot as the world’s highest-grossing media franchise. “You can’t go anywhere without seeing Pikachu or Charizard,” says Petipas. The empire spans everything from plushies and T-shirts from Target and H&M to Tiffany necklaces and Baccarat crystal ornaments. David Zwirner showed paintings of Pokémon by Katherine Bernhardt in his Hong Kong gallery, and there was a furore at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 2023 when a new range of merchandise was offered with a special-edition card of Pikachu, done in the style of the Dutch artist’s Self Portrait with Grey Felt Hat. 

Tiffany x Arsham Studio x Pokémon gold and diamond Pikachu pendant, POA

The Pokémon x Van Gogh Museum card

Both Raftery and Petipas attribute the new surge in interest to the launch of the augmented reality mobile game Pokémon Go in 2016. “Pretty much everyone on the planet decided they wanted to be a Pokémon Master and prices shot up,” says Petipas, citing another “giant spike” during the early Covid lockdowns. 

You can’t go anywhere without seeing Pikachu or Charizard

But what really “sent it to the moon”, says Petipas, was the American wrestler and influencer Logan Paul doing a “box break” (or opening a sealed box of cards) live on YouTube in October 2020. Paul has 23.6mn subscribers on YouTube, is the former WWE United States Champion and co-founder of the energy drink Prime. He is also the owner of the “most expensive Pokémon trading card sold in a private sale”, as classified by Guinness World Records in 2022, the Pikachu “Illustrator”. “The rarest card of all”, confirms Raftery, it was sent to just 39 children who had won a competition to design their own card in 1998. Paul’s version is the only one with a perfect 10 grading from authenticating body PSA (Professional Sports Authenticator). In an Instagram post, Paul wore the card in a custom diamond pendant, complete with a gem-studded Poké Ball, writing, “My 1/1 PSA 10 Pikachu Illustrator that I purchased for $5,275,000.” 

“Influencers like Logan Paul have glorified buying really expensive graded cards like they’re a stock option,” says Quinn. “It just puts nostalgia goggles on for everyone and sends the demand crazy.” 

A crystal lugia sold at Goldin Auctions for $5,795 in 2024

A Rayquaza card sold for £5,800 at Stanley Gibbons Baldwin

A winning collection, however, can be far more humble. Quinn buys new sets, which are typically released by The Pokémon Company six times a year. Sold in sealed packs of 10 for around £3.99, the cards inside vary from “common” (marked with a circle) to “rare” (a star), depending on the number printed. “Even modern sets have cards in them that are worth £2,000,” explains Raftery. 

Quinn also seeks out second-hand cards, mostly from specialist site Troll and Toad but sometimes from eBay. “The most valuable card I have is probably a Crystal Lugia that I picked up as a kid, which goes for anywhere from £800 to thousands, but my favourites are Marshtomp and Meowth,” he adds of the mud fish and Persian-cat characters. 

Japanese cards have their own cachet. They are released more frequently and “a lot of people consider the ‘quality’ to be much better”, says Ryan Brayshaw, who runs Kado Collectables, a site that streamlines buying Japanese cards. “A lot of exclusive cards are printed in Japan only,” he adds, pointing to the Masked Royal SR, given to winners of the “Japan sealed games” tournament in 2017 and limited to 100 copies. He sold his for £39,000 in 2023.

But prices can be volatile. “It really is a rollercoaster,” says Raftery. Since 2021, card production has increased, causing the value of some cards to drop, he notes. Fakes (easily identified by thinner card) abound too. It’s wise to be wary when rifling through collections. I recently read that an ungraded “Secret Rare” Umbreon VMax had sold for more than $1,000, and I was sure I’d seen the bunny-like black Pokémon among the cards strewn about my house by my 11-year-old son. “Yep, but it’s a fake,” he tells me. “Freddie in my class traded it to me.”