Like everyone else who was a kid in the 90s, I collected Pokemon cards. My friends and I enjoyed collecting them and playing with them whilst very loosely using the rules, and they were a fun way to waste our tiny allowances. Today though, Pokemon cards are a gold mine, as long as you have the right ones. A recent Pokemon card sale, for just the right card, managed to earn a ridiculous amount of money for the owner, so naturally we need to talk about it.
The card in question is called ‘No. 1 Trainer” Trainer Promo Hologram’, and sold for $90,000 a couple of weeks ago. Why did this card sell for so much? Well for a few different reasons. First and foremost, there are only seven copies of the card in all of existence, making it one of the rarest you can get. The card was also only given out to seven winners of regional tournaments, and entitles those winners to preferential access to a secret tournament. To top it off, the card’s art comes from Japanese artist Hideki Kazama, who only worked on three other cards.
For someone to spend that much money on a single card, they must have a lot more money for everything else you need in life, like a house, food, and probably a few cards too. Apparently $90,000 is now the highest that any of these cards has sold for, and that’s down to the fact that this one in particular was at the highest possible condition a card can sell for, Gem Mint 10.
For those of you looking to make a quick bit of cash from your card collection, not all of the older Pokemon cards are worth quite this much. Having had a look around, it seems as though the rarest cards are those with defects, unopened packs, and sometimes even cards that you’d probably have traded away for something much more interesting.
As time goes on, these cards are only going to become more valuable, the question is which one will be next to score headlines with a ridiculous selling price? My money’s on Charizard.