Pokémon cards break records again. 2021 was already plagued by card sales at astronomical prices. Also more than one scammer took advantage of the madness to sneak in the occasional batch of unopened Pokémon cards that turned out not to be real. Everything indicates that 2022 will follow the same path, especially with rare Pokémon cards like Pikachu Illustrator , one of the rarest cards in existence, which has tripled in price in just twelve months.
Exclusive Pikachu card breaks new record
This isn’t the first time we’ve talked about the 1998 Pikachu Illustrator Holo card. It is one of the strangest collector’s items that exist within the world of Pokémon. Like most exclusive Pokémon cards, they didn’t come out of packs, but from Pokémon face-to-face events in Japan, organized by the legendary CoroCoro magazine. Pikachu Illustrator was the card that the finalists of the 1998 drawing tournament in Japan were awarded. The participants had to design their own Pokémon card. There was free reign for creativity and even writing the powers and abilities of the card. The winners took home a real copy of their creations, which was pretty cool.
However, the finalists got an extra prize: the Pikachu Illustrator card. A playing card designed by Atsuko Nishida , who was the original artist and designer of Pikachu. At the time, the letter had symbolic value , but little else. After all, all the weight of the first generation of Pokémon was carried by Ken Sugimori.
Final Sale Price: $900,000
An all-time record public sale for any Pokémon card. pic.twitter.com/BgO9yPA42I
— Goldin (@GoldinCo) February 24, 2022
What makes Pikachu Illustrator special?
However, it is estimated that only 40 or 41 Pikachu Illustrator cards ever existed. Knowing that they were given to children, it is very likely that there are less than a dozen left in good condition. In February 2021 , a record was already broken, when a unit was sold for $375,000 . Since then, this piece has been on everyone’s lips. It was obvious that the moment another appeared on the market, its price would break a new record.
And so it has been. Unlike other times, this new sale of Pikachu Illustrator corresponds to a different card from 2021. The qualification was carried out by PSA, as in the previous case, and obtained the same score. However, on this occasion, the cartoonist Pikachu has been sold for a whopping $900,000 , a complete savagery, almost bordering on a million dollars.
However, it must be made clear that we continue to think that this type of buying and selling does not make any sense. The Pokémon card market is inflated in a way never seen before. However, we would not be surprised to see a sale that exceeds a million dollars before we see the bubble burst . Unless we discover a new rare card, that sale could only be for three different cards: a tared first-gen Charizard Holo, a new Pikachu Illustrator being released, or one of the two backless Blastoise cards from the one unit was already sold last year for more than a third of a million dollars.