If you traded your Pokémon cards for a fruit roll-up at primary school, then I have some bad news for you: you’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake. Turns out those little cards are worth a whole lot of moolah.
According to TMZ Sports, a set of 103 Pokémon cards in mint condition have sold for over $150,000 at Goldin Auctions. That’s the most anyone has ever paid for the trading cards.
There were twelve bidders keen on the card set, which included a super fancy, highly sought after holographic Charizard. With the minimum bid set at over $35K, auction attendees weren’t messing around.
If you’ve just had an epiphany and realised you could also make big money with the dusty old Pokémon cards lying around in your mum’s storage unit, don’t get ahead of yourself. According to Dave Amerman, Goldin Auctions’ consignment director, the key to winning big is making sure your cards are in MINT CONDISH only.
The cards that sold for over $150K were originally released in 1999, so whoever owned them had kept them ~pristine~ for over 20 years, which is no small feat.
Amerman told Kotaku that the Gem Mint Condition, a metric which assesses the cards’ corners, colour consistency and gloss is required to achieve such a high selling price. TMZ have reported that there are reportedly less than 50 cards of this quality in the world, so sadly, your scabby Pokémon collection from the ‘90s probably won’t cut it.
If you traded all of yours at school, don’t be sad. At least you got a fruit roll-up and major playground cred out of it.
