One set of cards bought on eBay for £300 has just fetched £75,000, and it was only a small slice of the sale.
A retired house painter from Woking, Surrey, is now a millionaire. He sold a Pokemon card collection that had been sitting untouched in his attic for close to 15 years, and the Ewbank auction earned him £1.5 million (roughly €1.8 million).
According to Ewbank, no auction of collectible Pokemon cards in the United Kingdom has ever made more money.
A forgotten box with an unknown price tag
The BBC reports that the man owned a large collection and “had no idea if they had any value.” He started to wonder after reading a newspaper story about one card selling for £6,000.
He climbed back into the attic to check. The cards were all still in purpose-made sleeves, right where he’d put them after his son lost interest in collecting.
By his account, the collection goes back to 1990, when his son started buying cards and swapping them with classmates. A few years after that, he paid £300 for a set on eBay. That’s the set that has now sold for £75,000.
Off limits to his son
He tells the story himself, and he’s well aware it sounds like a cliché.
“I know everyone talks about treasures they find in the attic, but in my case that’s literally true… When my son was little, in the late ’90s, he started collecting cards and trading them at school. I thought they were beautiful and wondered whether they could be a good investment. He had his own cards, but I never let him touch these ones, thankfully.”
He had good reason to be thankful. Anyone who carried a binder of holos to school as a kid remembers how quickly playground trades wrecked the corners.
Ewbank staff were just as surprised
The BBC says the team at Ewbank was amazed when he brought the collection in.
“When we saw the cards (they were all in excellent condition) we couldn’t believe it,” Ewbank’s James Spooner told the BBC.
Card value depends heavily on condition. Because this father kept the best cards out of his son’s hands for decades, those plastic sleeves ended up holding £1.5 million.