Back in February, Wargamer covered the most expensive Pokémon card sale of all time, Logan Paul’s PSA 10 Pikachu Illustrator, which sold for $16 million dollars (£12 million pounds). On September 28th, another Pikachu card earned a silver medal, selling for around half as much at $8.4 million dollars (£6.3 million pounds). This time, Pikachu was kitted out in a raincoat, and carrying an umbrella rather than a quill pen.
The card, unofficially known as “raincoat Pikachu”, is a promo from a 2015 contest related to the old 3DS game Pokémon Art Academy. Pokémon fans were invited to upload picture of Pikachu drawn in Art Academy to Miiverse (a Nintendo based social network for the 3DS and the Wii U). Six winners were chosen, and the artists who drew them received 100 copies of the promotional Pikachu bearing their illustration.
While, with only 100 copies out there, “Raincoat Pikachu” is an exceedingly rare Pokémon card this sale breaks with precedent in a number of ways. According to data on the Pokémon TCG price tracking website Price Charting, four PSA ten copies of this card have been sold before for prices ranging from $14,000 (£10,500) to $26,000 (£19,600). While 26 thousand bucks is certainly significantly higher than my typical card gaming budget, it’s only about 3% of the $8.4 million dollars of this particular sale.
Additionally, each of the other most expensive Pokémon Card sales has been for classic cards from the 1990s. We’ve already mentioned Logan Paul’s $16 million dollar Pikachu Illustrator, which originates from a contest held in 1997. Then there’s Trophy Pikachu No. 1 and Trophy Pikachu No.3, which sold for $3 million dollars (£2.2 million pounds) and $1.7 million dollars (£1.29 million pounds) respectively and were tournament prizes distributed in 1997 and 1998. While Raincoat Pikachu is similar to these cards in that it’s a cute picture of the series mascot, it has a much less storied history than its Millennial rivals, given that it’s thoroughly Gen Alpha with a 2015 birthday.
If it’s raining outside, you could grab an umbrella and a raincoat like Pikachu, or you could stay in by the warm fire and browse the Wargamer Discord server.
Source: Wargamer
