The price of a well-preserved Pokémon card is higher than ever. At the US PWCC Premier Auction, a Charizard card – the holy grail for Pokémon fans – was auctioned for $420,000, a new record for this card.
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The Pokémon business is booming. Tickets are sold at extortionate prices in American stores and it is often difficult to get a package. At the PWCC Premiere Auctiona Pokémon card featuring the character Charizard sold for a record $420,000, the most ever for that card and the third-highest price ever for a Pokémon card. In a few years, the innocent children’s game grew into a valuable collector’s item that can be used to earn a lot of money.
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What makes a Pokémon card so pricey? The chance that you own a card worth a house is not non-existent, but very small. The card has to meet a lot of conditions in order to yield that much. The Charizard card in question is a 1999 version, and it was given a special label for its perfect condition. If your stack has already passed through children’s hands before, such a label is still difficult to obtain. There are only 121 perfect scoring Charizard cards in the world, most of which are in the hands of collectors or superstars. The demand is therefore very high, which also causes the price to skyrocket.
– The Charizard card with a PSA label, indicating ‘perfect condition’.
Pokémania
The hype around Pokémon was especially great in the 1990s. The cards could be found in any newsagent or toy store, and were mostly traded on the playground. In 2016, with the advent of the Pokémon GO app, which sent players out of the house to hunt figures, also introduced a new generation to the Pokémon world.
It was the corona pandemic that exploded the card’s popularity.People started looking for new hobbies while collectors dusted off their old collections. They found a market for their old cards online, after which prices quickly skyrocketed. In 2019, the asking price for a Charizard Pokemon card was around $16,000, according to Joe Maddalena of Heritage Auctions auction house in Texas, while it is now around $400,000.
In the meantime, the production of the card remains very limited, so that loan sharks also smell a lucrative business in ticket sales. They resell cheap tickets from the store at high prices. Last year, Target had to temporarily stop selling the cards because too many riots broke out between loan sharks in their stores, and they could no longer guarantee the safety of their employees.
The record for the most expensive Pokémon card sold is even higher. At the beginning of this month, a Pickachu card was sold for $ 900,000, about 819,000 euros.
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