Woman on Antiques Roadshow with Pokémon cards is told Charizard mistake cost her thousands
If you grew up in the 90s you might want to go digging around in the attic for that tin you think your old Pokémon cards got stashed in.
They may just be bits of cardboard with words and pictures on them but classic Pokémon cards are a lucrative market as people want to get their hands on rare originals.
Nobody's breaking the bank for a Trubbish or whatever other ones the new generations of Pokémon have coughed up but there's something about those original Kanto region creatures that's just better.
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Once upon a time Pokémon cards were bought and traded by kids in the playground but as the years went by the original cards became prized for their rarity and status, a bit like original editions of classic comic books.
We've now become so old that Pokémon cards are even making it onto shows like Antiques Roadshow with the US version welcoming a woman who was looking to sell a binder full of classic cards.
There were some pretty impressive cards in the collection, including two Mewtwos, and some of them were 'shadowless' as well which meant they didn't have the raised shadow patterns around the picture on the card.
The highlight of her collection was a Charizard, that one card everybody wanted to get their hands on in the playground because it was very powerful and incredibly cool, which of course made ones going up for sale very rare.
She was told it would be the centrepiece of the collection and that the shadowless Charizard would bring in about $2,000 to $3,000 on the market just by itself.
While that sounds like a really good deal for a bit of cardboard that had a big dinosaur-dragon-thing with the tail on fire, it turns out that she could have earned so much more for the rare card.
She was told that the 'market blossomed through the pandemic' and that had she tried to sell the card a year ago she'd have been looking at getting a price of $5,000 to $8,000.
As if that wasn't bad enough, she was told that if she'd sold the Charizard between November 2020 to April 2021 when the market for rare Pokemon cards was at an all time high she could have made up to $15,000, though some have gone for even more than that.
For the around 150 cards being offered up for auction, many of them rare and classic shadowless cards, she was told she could expect to get people bidding between $5,000 and $10,000 to get their hands on it.
That's nothing to be sniffed at but it is pretty galling that if sold at the right time just one card in the collection could have brought in more money than the entire binder.
You can make a hell of a lot of money on shows like Antiques Roadshow if you bring the right thing along but imagine being told that if you'd sold up just a couple of years ago the thing you were flogging would be worth up to five times as much.
Some people watching the Pokémon cards getting appraised on a show about selling antiques realised that it was making them feel incredibly old, while other 90s kids said it was 'really cool to feel included'.
Others argued that the expert on the show had his numbers wrong in terms of card value and was overvaluing the cards.
Several people claimed that the cards in the collection would likely sell for much lower than Antiques Roadshow was estimating, with multiple Pokémon fans claiming the Charizard would go for $1,200 at the most.
Joe Harker