Every collector has a box they have not opened in years. For a retired decorator in Woking, England, that box turned out to be forty-two complete Pokémon master sets, sealed and mint, sitting in an attic for fifteen years. On Wednesday they sold at auction for £1.56 million, which Ewbank's called the most valuable trading card sale ever held in Britain (Polygon).
The decorator of Woking
Bespoke binders, every card sleeved in set order, the way the collection sat untouched for fifteen years. Photo: Ewbank's via the-saleroom.
The story starts the way so many collecting stories start: with a kid. In the late nineties, the decorator's son started swapping Pokémon cards at school, and his dad thought the artwork looked nice enough to wonder whether the cards might be a good investment. So he went on eBay, found a seller in Malaysia dealing in complete sets, and started buying. Not packs, not singles: whole sets, finished and done. When the seller offered complete master sets, with every parallel and promo accounted for, he bought those too. The cards went straight into bespoke Pokémon binders, still sealed and in mint condition, and his son never laid a finger on them. “He had his own cards,” the collector told the BBC, “but he never got to touch these, I'm glad to say.” Then his son lost interest, the binders went up into the attic, and the whole thing sat there for fifteen years.
“I know people always talk about finding treasure in the attic, but in my case that is literally true.”
A Decade of Masters
The Legendary Collection Charizard reverse foil, graded PSA 10: the centerpiece of the master set that hammered at £100,000. Card scan via PSA.
The collection had a name at the auction house: Pokémon, A Decade of Masters, covering 1999 to 2009. Forty-two complete sets, and the condition is what made the room lean in. The crown lot was the Legendary Collection Complete Master Set: all 110 cards, every reverse-holo Firework parallel, and the four box toppers, with the Charizard in near-mint condition. It was estimated around £15,000 and hammered at £100,000. Right behind it came the Sky Ridge Charizard set, estimated in the tens of thousands, which took £75,000. That Sky Ridge set is the one that tells the whole story in miniature: the collector bought it on eBay for £300. James Spooner, Ewbank's head of trading cards, put it plainly when the lots came in for assessment: “When we saw what he had, all in mint condition, we couldn't believe it. When we then discovered that he had 42 such sets, our jaws hit the floor.”
Milestone: The Sky Ridge Charizard master set he bought on eBay for £300 hammered at £75,000. Fifteen years in an attic, and a binder came back worth a house deposit.
The Sky Ridge Charizard, up close. Card scan via PSA.
The night the room went quiet
Ewbank's had penciled the collection in around £250,000, and by the day before the sale the commission bids alone had already passed £825,000. When the hammer fell on October 21, the total stood at £1.56 million. YouTubers, collectors, and investors pushed single lots to £100,000, and the sale blew past the previous British record, a Stanley Gibbons sale in March that took just over £986,000. Ewbank's called it the most valuable trading card auction ever held in Britain, and possibly in Europe, and the most successful sale in the firm's thirty-plus years. Andrew Ewbank, who runs the family business and called the sale himself, thanked the room and said he was going for a lie down. The kicker is how it started: the collector only had his cards assessed after reading a local newspaper story about a single Pokémon card selling for more than £6,000. One man's “I had no idea what I had” became the sale of the year. So here is the gentle nudge this story earns: somewhere in this town there is a closet, an attic, or a storage unit with a binder like that in it. Dig it out, check what is actually in there, and if you want a second set of eyes on it, bring it by the counter. We love this part.
Car and Bobby Milton pull apart how a £300 eBay buy became the UK's biggest card auction on today's Trade Post, and what it means for the binders in your own closet.
