Anish Moonka@anishmoonka
Logan Paul bought a Pikachu card in 2021 for $5.27 million. He sold it last February for $16.49 million. That's an $11 million profit on a piece of cardboard smaller than your phone.
Only 39 copies of that specific Pikachu were ever made, handed out at a 1998 Japanese drawing contest. Out of those 39, exactly one is in perfect condition. Logan Paul owned it. Now a venture capitalist named AJ Scaramucci does.
The pandemic explains a lot of this. Before 2019, the Pokemon Company was printing about 1.5 to 2 billion cards a year. In the year ending March 2024, they printed 11.9 billion. Of every Pokemon card ever made since 1996 (75 billion in total), almost 60% have been printed just since 2020. Adults stuck at home dug up their childhood binders and started buying again.
The classic example is the holographic Charizard from the original 1999 set. In 2019 a perfect copy was worth around $20,000. The pandemic hit, the price went vertical, and by late 2020 the same card was changing hands at $295,000. One sold for almost $400,000 in March 2021. Today they trade around $550,000. Only 124 perfect copies exist on the planet. Stack them up and that's $68 million worth of cardboard, more than the entire annual GDP of Tuvalu.
The reason this market works is grading. A company called PSA scores cards from 1 to 10 based on condition, and the 10s are what get the crazy money. PSA scored 15.34 million cards in 2024 alone. Once every card has a trusted condition score and a public sale history, the whole hobby starts working like a stock market. Buyers know what each card has sold for. Sellers know exactly how many copies exist at every grade.
Pokemon is also the highest-grossing entertainment franchise in human history, ahead of Star Wars, Hello Kitty, and Mickey Mouse in lifetime revenue. Last year alone, the Pokemon Company brought in $12 billion. Lifetime retail sales sit around $103 billion.
The demand keeps climbing. Walmart's trading card sales tripled between 2024 and 2025, and Pokemon specifically grew tenfold. Target was up almost 70%.
So a $140,000 Pokemon card stash for an Audi R8 sounds wild on the surface. Then you remember that one card just sold for $16.49 million, 124 perfect Charizards are worth more than a small country, and Pokemon now prints more cards every year than there are humans on Earth.