Retired Woking decorator's Pokémon cards fetch £1.56 million at Surrey auction

The sale at Ewbank's

A Pokémon card collection that sat in the attic of a retired decorator from Woking for 15 years sold for £1.56 million at Ewbank's, an auction house in Surrey, on Wednesday, 21 October. The seller, a man who asked to remain anonymous, only realised the cards might be valuable after reading in his local newspaper about a single card fetching more than £6,000. The total is about €1.86 million, and Ewbank's says it is the most valuable trading card auction ever held in the United Kingdom, possibly a European record as well. The most prominent lot was a Legendary Collection Complete Master Set that included a Charizard card in near-perfect condition. It had been estimated at £15,000 to £20,000 and sold for £100,000.

From attic to auction

The collection began in the late 1990s, when the seller's son started collecting and swapping Pokémon cards at school, and his father bought complete sets for him. Some were bought on eBay from a seller in Malaysia, and the father later said he had wondered whether they might be a good investment. Pokémon is a Japanese franchise best known for its trading cards, video games and animated series. One set bought for £300 was sold at the auction for £75,000. When the son lost interest, the cards, still sealed in Pokémon binders, went into the attic.

A buyer with a childhood favourite

Joshua Nero, 29, from Ealing in west London, bought a set of 196 cards from the Woking collection for £18,000, which he described as a master set that includes every variant of every card in it. Nero, who has collected cards for about 20 years, said he would have been willing to spend more. He described the purchase as a way of rewarding his childhood self:

I had to make my eight-year-old self happy. These cards are from what I remember most growing up and they are quite hard to get hold of.

Nero said he intended to have some cards graded, a standardised assessment of condition that could raise their value above the £18,000 he paid. He also said he had travelled as far as the United States and Japan to trade cards, and that friends who once lived paycheck to paycheck had become multi-millionaires through the hobby.

Records and the auction house's view

Ewbank's said the total surpassed the earlier benchmark for a Pokémon collection, a Stanley Gibbons auction in London on 9 October that totalled £872,000. Andrew Ewbank, who runs the house, called the sale its most successful in 30 years of business and said bidders came from 'all over the world'. James Spooner, who heads the collectibles department, said the team could not believe the condition of the collection when they first saw it. Ewbank urged anyone who thought they had something valuable in the attic to have it examined.