The most expensive Pokemon card in history has sold for $16,492,000 — the highest-ever price of a trading card.
The card is a rare Pikachu Illustrator originally given away as part of a series of contests by manga magazine CoroCoro in 1998 and features art by Atsuko Nishida, Pikachu’s original designer. It was auctioned off Feb. 16 by New Jersey-based Goldin Auctions. Only 39 of the cards were awarded to winners of the original contest, with a further two sold in the early 2020s by a former employee of The Pokemon Company.
With just 41 cards ever produced (for comparison, more than 75 billion Pokemon cards were printed in 2025 alone), the Pikachu Illustrator is by far one of the rarest in existence. And according to memorabilia grading house Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA), this most recently sold version is the lone card graded “GEM MT 10” — PSA’s highest possible condition rating.
The card originally went up for auction on Jan. 6 at a starting price of $500,000. The price gradually rose to around $6 million as the auction’s deadline neared at 12 p.m. on Feb. 16 before a rush of bids resulted in the winning tender of $13.3 million (plus a 24% fee paid by the buyer to Goldin Auctions).
The card was previously owned by American influencer Logan Paul, who purchased it in 2021 from a United Arab Emirates-based collector for $4 million in cash and a PSA 9-graded version of a Pikachu Illustrator card then valued at nearly $1.3 million — a total price that set the previous record for the most expensive Pokemon card ever sold.
On a livestream accompanying the end of the auction, Paul handed the card over to its new owner: A.J. Scaramucci, a venture capitalist and son of former White House press secretary Anthony Scaramucci.
While the Pokemon video game franchise has struggled to produce critically acclaimed games over the past decade, the record-setting sale symbolizes the continuing popularity of physical Pokemon cards as both a collector’s hobby and a speculative market.
However, the relative scarcity of cards at retail stores has often led to altercations between shoppers in countries such as the United States. There was also an incident in August 2025 at a McDonald’s in Tokyo’s Shibuya Ward, where consumers bulk-purchased Happy Meals in the hope of obtaining limited-edition Pokemon cards — only to discard the food and then list the cards at inflated prices for resale online.
