The last few years has had anyone who owned Pokemon cards 20 years ago frantically searching the attics of their childhood homes in the hope that some of them weren't thrown away or left behind. That's because the going rate for some of TCG's rarest cards has sky-rocketed. Shiny first edition cards in good condition are quite literally selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. In fact, the record for the world's most expensive Pokemon card has just been well and truly shattered.
As first reported by Kotaku, an incredibly rare Pikachu Illustrator gold was sold through auctioneers Goldin last week for an eye-watering $900,000. An indicator that before we know it, the world will have been introduced to its very first $1 million Pokemon card. The previous record was also held by a Pikachu Illustrator card which sold for $375,000 almost exactly one year ago.
The kicker here, especially for the anonymous buyer of the latest card, is that last year's Pikachu Illustrator was deemed to be in better condition than last week's record-breaker. Last week's card was given a rating of near mint seven, whereas the previous record-holder was mint nine. Suffice to say, if you think you have a Pikachu Illustrator knocking around somewhere - you can see what it looks like below - then it's probably worth getting it valued no matter what state it's in.
Unlike shiny Charizard, and shiny Blastoise which also sells for a lot of money if you have the right one, the odds of you happening to have a Pikachu Illustrator in your old TCG folder are very unlikely.
Less than 40 of them were ever printed more than two decades ago, and none of them ever went on sale. They were created specifically for winners of a competition that ran in a Japanese comic in 1998.
The design for the card was created by Atsuko Nishida, one of the minds behind the creators of Pikachu which only ups the value of it. As for whether any single Pokemon card could possibly be worth just shy of $1 million, well, that's ultimately up to whoever is willing to pay that much for it, something we don't currently know when it comes to this latest purchase. Perhaps Logan Paul should have spent his money on this one very real and very rare card as opposed to almost four times as much on a box of fake ones.