Pokemonis one of the franchises with the greatest variety of products on the market, and its cards, which have had a long history of editions, which eventually increase in cost over the years, and which for some could being a simple piece of cardboard, it can have a high value.
Something like this happened recently, when the auction team Goldin announced that a holographic card of Pokemon Pikachu Illustrator from 1998which was sold for $900,000 dollarsbreaking a world record for the most expensive card ever sold, far surpassing the previous winning bid of $375,000 for which a similar card was sold exactly one year ago.
The uniqueness of this card is not only based on its holographic appearance, or just because of the passage of time, but also because it was recently discovered that this is one of the 40 extant copies currently, according to the grading firm PSA, and only one other copy has been graded in the same near mint condition.
The auction began with a bid of $75,000 on February 10, but an apparent bidding war pushed the price up in the following weeks, making it so that by February 23, after 13 days of being up for auction, it will hit cost. For $900,000, an Illustrator Pikachu in slightly better condition “Mint 9” sold in 2019 for $195,000, then a “Near Mint 7” copy sold for $375,000 in February 2021. Before that, the oldest Pokémon card valuable was a Charizard First Edition Shadowless Holographic.
In recent years, the prices of all kinds of collectibles have skyrocketed, but the speculation surrounding trading cards Pokemon has been extreme, but specifically talking about this card, three times increase in just one year is really crazy, although it is because the Pikachu Illustrator, is really something unique even in the world of cards Pokemonsince it was drawn by the creator of Pikachu, Atsuko Nishidaand only a few dozen copies were produced as prizes for promotional contests in a Japanese magazine.