Extremely rare Pokemon cards featuring the series' original starter 'mon – Charmander, Squirtle, and Bulbasaur – recently sold for over $70,000 apiece, beating previous auction records by some distance.
The Collectibles Guru flagged the auctions on Twitter (X) over the weekend, and I only learned this in the first place because the post was shared by the official account for the PSA, which graded the cards in question: a 7 for Charmander, 8 for Squirtle, and a near-perfect 9 for Bulbasaur. All three auctions were conducted via Goldin, which is widely known for trading in sports cards and paraphernalia, and closed on November 18, 2023 after some eye-watering bidding wars.
The enormous caveat here is that Goldin charges a fairly exorbitant "buyer's premium" of 22% which inevitably inflates the final price. The actual winning bids for all three cards were: $65,000 for Charmander, $60,000 for Squirtle, and $66,000 for Bulbasaur. Finally, Bulbasaur gets the win it deserves. Even with the added fee factored in, which brought the final cost of all three cards to $233,000, these auctions are still head-and-shoulders above previous Pokemon TCG starter prices, and there are a few reasons for that.
Firstly, these starter variants are extremely rare. They can all be traced back to Japanese Pokemon Snap photo contests that ran in 1999. Basically, players sent in pictures they'd taken using the Nintendo 64 Pokemon photography sim – which finally got a deserved sequel on the Switch 22 years later – and the winners had their photos printed as actual cards.
🏆 RECORD SALES 🏆All three starter Pokémon just set ALL-TIME record trading card prices…Charmander: $79,300Squirtle: $73,200Bulbasaur: $80,520These incredibly rare cards were only available to people who won the 1999 Pokémon Snap competition: a contest where gamers had… pic.twitter.com/dIr2x6DS7hNovember 19, 2023
Only a few of these now-ancient cards were ever made – 15 or 20 depending on the contest batch – which is why they're some of the most valuable variants out there. In 2021, a Pokemon Snap Articuno sold for roughly $43,000 (¥6,400,000) via Mandarake. Perhaps most famously, a Pokemon Snap Magikarp sold for over $130,000 last year. The starter versions recently sold via Goldin were all graded fairly highly, which naturally affects their value as well.
To my knowledge, this was also the first time these Pokemon Snap starters have been auctioned since the Pokemon TCG boom a few years back. A handy round-up from Pokumon concurs, and shows that the prices on the Pokemon Snap variants were already going up.
The hobby's explosion hiked the price on many cards amid surging fan demand, lavish auction prices, and celebrity collector culture. Coupled with Goldin's reputation for high-end auctions, with the site's rarest sports cards regularly selling for upwards of $100,000, this set was perfectly positioned to bring in large bids.
Earlier this year, a Pokemon collector was left stunned after US customs shredded a Pokemon Yellow copy he'd spent thousands on.
