The collection of 42 sealed sets sold at Ewbank's on Wednesday, 21 October, for £1.56 million, with 41 sets sold and one kept by the owner.
A Legendary Collection Complete Master Set with a near-mint Charizard card, estimated at £15,000 to £20,000, sold for £100,000.
Ewbank's said the sale was the most valuable trading card auction in UK history, ahead of a £872,000 sale at Stanley Gibbons in London on 9 October.
A retired decorator from Woking, who asked not to be named, kept a collection of Pokémon cards in his attic for 15 years. He had bought complete sets on eBay from a seller in Malaysia after his son began collecting and swapping the cards at school in the late 1990s. The cards were still sealed in bespoke Pokémon binders when they were stored away after the son lost interest. He said he had no idea what they were worth until he read in a local newspaper that a single card had sold for more than £6,000.
He took a sample to Ewbank's, an auction house in Surrey, which then found he owned 42 sets in total. The auction house had expected the collection to make more than £250,000, but Andrew Ewbank said it had thought the price could reach £270,000 until pre-sale bids arrived. The day before the sale, commission bids already stood at £825,000. The collection went under the hammer on Wednesday, 21 October, and sold for £1.56 million, with 41 of the sets sold and the man keeping one. Bidders included YouTubers, collectors and investors, who bid up to £100,000 for a single lot. The top lot, the Legendary Collection Complete Master Set with a near-mint Charizard card, had been estimated at £15,000 to £20,000 and sold for £100,000. A set the man had bought for £300 went for £75,000.
James Spooner, head of trading cards at Ewbank's, described the moment the collection was counted:
“When we then discovered that he had 42 such sets, our jaws hit the floor.”
Ewbank's said the sale was the most valuable trading card auction ever held in the UK and suggested it could be a European record. The house said it was the biggest total it had taken for a single sale and its most successful in more than 30 years. The previous high was a sale at Stanley Gibbons in London on 9 October, which totalled £872,000 according to Ewbank's. Andrew Ewbank, who runs the business set up by his late father Chris, conducted the sale from the rostrum himself. He later said:
“The buzz was incredible, especially because the collectors could not believe how good this collection was.”
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The man kept one of the 42 sets.
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A retired decorator from Woking sold 41 of his 42 sealed Pokémon card sets at Ewbank's on Wednesday, 21 October, after finding them in his attic.
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