The Pokémon card craze isn’t slowing down anytime soon, it appears. Case in point: Someone recently spent $US125,000 (if you do the maths, that’s around $170,000 in Aussie money) at auction on a single, extremely rare Magikarp card that was part of a Japanese Pokémon Snap promotion back in the 90s.
As spotted by NintendoLife and first reported by Ludkins Media, a very rare Magikarp Pokémon card resurfaced via an auction listing in Japan on Yahoo a few months ago. The card hadn’t been seen for more than two decades prior to the listing, leading some to question whether it ever existed or if any copies were still out there. The verified and PSA-graded card ended up selling for, approximately, an astounding 15 million yen, which works out to more than $US125,000, as of today.
Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) is a company that specialises in verifying the authenticity of trading cards and other memorabilia. The company is one of the most trusted among collectors and buyers.
What makes this particular Magikarp so damn rare is that out of the 20 copies made, they were all given to one person as part of a larger Pokémon Snap contest held in Japan. The contest asked kids to send in images taken in the N64 game. The 10 winning images were picked and all turned into custom cards. Each winner received 20 copies of their custom card. The winners could have easily boxed them up, forgotten about them, and never sold them or traded them with others, making them even rarer on the public market than if 20 copies were distributed separately.
This is reportedly the first time a Magikarp Snap card has been sold publicly at auction. It’s also the first of its kind to have been verified by the PSA grading company.
In a video uploaded this week, YouTuber Smpratte showed off the rare Magikarp card, discussing its history, rarity, and value, though it’s unclear who bought the card and how Smpratte was allowed to handle it. In the video, he says it was sent to him by a “longtime good friend and business partner.”
According to him, he considers this one of the rarest Pokémon cards ever made. Considering it took over 20 years before we were able to get a video of it or have it verified by a grading company, I’m inclined to agree.
This is far from the most expensive Pokémon card sold in the last few years. In fact, we have a whole list dedicated to the priciest and rarest cards ever sold at auction, which you can check out here. Alternatively, if you want to see an example of someone getting screwed by all this Pokémon speculative buying and selling, you can always read about how Logan Paul spent more than $US3 million on what he thought were Pokémon cards but instead were worthless G.I. Joe cards. Try not to laugh too much.