In the late 1990s, when I was in first grade, a boy in the playground took my Charizard Pokémon card. I remember crying while a teacher told me to relax, it was just a cartoon. Wrong. A 1999 first edition holographic Charizard card has just sold for $1.38 million. What was once a children’s game has become an investment opportunity. A Hong Kong fund called MemeStrategy recently announced that it is seeking to acquire a quarter of the world’s highest graded “Pikachu with Grey Felt Hat” cards, currently selling for about $2,500 a piece.
The value of all graded Pokémon cards is thought to be around $9 billion, but those are just the ones sent off for assessment. No one knows what’s hiding in unopened packs and forgotten drawers. On October 21, a retired decorator in England sold his old Pokémon cards for $2.08 million. “I know people always talk about finding treasure in the attic, but in my case that is literally true,” he said.
In the same week, cards valued at an estimated $963,000 were stolen from a FedEx truck in California. And in January, $110,000 worth of cards were taken from Poké Court in Lower Manhattan in a smash and grab. In Oxfordshire, burglars managed to steal $340,000 in Pokémon cards from a YouTuber. And in Tokyo, members of the Yakuza use cards as currency.
The value of all graded Pokémon cards is about $9 billion, but that’s just the ones sent for assessment
You might think that collectors and players would be happy that their hobby has become so lucrative. But for true fans, the Poké-rush is dispiriting. “There are people who do it purely for profit,” explains Dean, a 23-year-old bartender from Manchester. “It’s made the hobby seriously difficult.”
Dean and I met at a Pokémon trading card convention in Stoke-on-Trent, held at the King’s Hall. Men with thinning hair stood in the parking lot, vaping. Inside, vendors laid out their best cards in sealed plastic boxes, known as slabs. Cheaper cards were arranged in what looked suspiciously like church announcement boards, the kind backed with blue felt and protected by perspex. There were at least five incredibly large security guards in black polo shirts, with sleeve tattoos and beards, scanning the room for thieves. “A lot of people aren’t doing it for the love of the cards. They’re doing it for money,” said Lee, a stuntman who works at Black Label Grading as a weekend job. “There’s a lot of crypto people because Pokémon now has better returns than crypto.” Lee is a middleman, helping collectors package up cards to send to the US for condition grading. “There are four things that graders look for: the corners, the edges, the surface and the centering,” which is how evenly the image is printed on the card.
Grading has fundamentally altered the world of Pokémon. Since 2020, there has been a tenfold increase in the number of cards handled by the leading company, Professional Sports Authenticator. So far this year, PSA has graded 21 million cards and still has a backlog of ten million. These appraisals are as good as a guaranteed price. And a grade ten, otherwise known as “gem mint,” can be worth many multiples of its lesser siblings. Take the 1999 base set Charizard. A grade eight sold in September for $1,321. A grade ten of exactly the same card sold for $40,401. An untrained eye would struggle to tell the difference. The problem for collectors is that grading is expensive and can take months. PSA starts at $55 a card, while a competitor, Beckett, charges $100. Dean sold a Darkrai Special Illustration Rare on the floor of the convention. If he’d been able to get it graded, the card might have been worth £700. Instead, he sold it “raw” for £130.
Outside the hall, I spoke to Jack, a ginger guy in cargo shorts who works for Radiant Chain Collectibles. He knew exactly who was to blame. “The sneaker bros, they’re the worst.” These are the guys who, until recently, were selling second hand Nike and Adidas trainers until the bottom fell out of the market. Then they went hunting for easy margins elsewhere, which often means snapping up cards at retail price, then getting them graded and sold on for serious profits. They’re ruining the culture of gaming, Jack said, often using bots to scalp new releases online or paying patsies to line up outside stores.
This wild world of financialized trading cards has given rise to a whole new economy: the rip and ship stream. “It’s straight-up gambling,” Dean said. He explained that rip and ship is where livestream viewers bid on what might be inside an unopened pack. When the bidding ends, the streamer rips open the pack live on air and sends you whatever is inside. “I have a friend who has got very lucky. He’s pulled two cards worth upwards of £3,000,” Dean explained. One of them was an RGB Mew. There is apparently a one in 30,000 chance of finding an RGB Mew in a pack.
In the pub behind the King’s Hall, I decided to try my hand at a rip and ship. I joined an eBay livestream and asked Charlie, the vendor, what was going on. “Gus, mate, we’re doing the break when these are all sold. Probably in about 20 minutes.” It still didn’t really make sense – what was being sold? Apparently the 70-odd viewers could bid on what might appear when Charlie opened a box of 30th anniversary edition cards. Win the Charizard offering and whatever variant of Charizard might be found in the box would be yours.
Charlie was joined by his boss in what looked like a home office. They alternated between reading the chatroom contributions and discussing how much they liked the Pokémon cards that might soon be ripped from the pack. Charlie and his boss enjoyed revving up the virtual crowd. I texted that I’d just been to the card convention in Stoke. “Ah, love that, Gus. How was it? Pick up anything nice?” I said I hadn’t. “Gus it’s so risky though isn’t it, going there?” I wasn’t really sure what he meant. Then came the lot for Mew, of which there are several varieties. Dean’s friend, I remembered, had pulled an RGB Mew, the rarest, and had made £3,000. I started hammering the bid button repeatedly. If it’s an RGB, Charlie’s boss said, I’d be winning “minimum nine grand.” I kept smacking the bid button as Charlie and his boss hollered and whooped.
A crown suddenly appeared on my phone and the word WINNER flashed excitedly. “Gus well done. Banging stuff. Minimum nine grand,” Charlie, the eBay vendor said. “Absolutely sniped that.” I’d won the lot with a top bid of £29. About half an hour later, walking back to the train station, I watched my phone as Charlie pulled the cards from the packs. Then a Mew appeared. This was it, I thought. The big bucks. A chance to make up for that stolen Charizard all those years ago. But Charlie seemed underwhelmed. It was just a bog standard, common-or-garden Mew, worth about two dollars.
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