We’ve been regularly documenting the crazy bubble in which the Pokémon TCG has found itself for the last two years, but the collectible cardboard still has the capacity to astonish us. Spotted by Men’s Journal (thanks GamesRadar), a so-called “Raincoat Pikachu” card has just sold at auction for a gobsmacking $8.4 million, making it the second highest-priced PTCG card of all time. But it’s odd; something feels off.
Usually these sorts of inexplicable prices are reserved for the oldest and rarest cards, and that’s true of the highest-priced card ever, the infamous PSA 10 Illustrator Pikachu from 1997 that Logan Paul sold for a frankly idiotic $16.5 million in February this year. (The card was valued at less than a third of this when Paul bought it for a stunt four years earlier.) But the Raincoat Pikachu is a comparatively recent card, appearing in 2015 as a result of a competition attached to the 3DS release Pokémon Art Academy.
The competition requested that people create a card illustration using the 3DS game, and winners privately received 100 copies of a printed card featuring their design. None were ever sold publicly, and this makes them some of the rarest Pokémon cards ever made. Y. Fujishima, the winner who designed the super-cute Pikachu in a red raincoat (with fitted tail cover) and an orange umbrella, appears to have made many of his cards available, and Polygon points out that that PSA (the grading company) lists a whopping 57 of them in Gem Mint PSA 10 condition.
Inflation Concerns
This creates an odd contradiction. The extraordinary rarity of the card obviously makes it very desirable, but the large population of PSA 10 slabs certainly should rule it out of Illustrator Pikachu territory. That card, with an initial print of somewhere around 39 to 41 copies, has exactly one example graded a 10. Further adding to the weirdness of this $8.4 million is how recently other PSA 10 slabs of Raincoat Pikachu have sold for a tiny fraction of this price, with Price Charting recording two sales in 2025 at $16,100 and $26,100. This year those prices have dramatically increased, but the previous highest price in June was $156,250. Another sold for $79,999.99 just last month. There’s no meaningful difference between these slabs and the one sold two days ago on auction site Fanatics Collect.
Fanatics Collect is a marketplace and auction house launched by “global sports platform” Fanatics (owners of both Lids and Topps, as well as a sports gambling arm) in 2024 after it bought PWCC Marketplace the year before. The auction for Raincoat Pikachu received 64 bids, and it’s been claimed that it was a legitimate, paid sale. But it’s incredibly hard to explain. Chinese auction site Pokecolor is reported to have sold the same card last week for just under $10,000, although I haven’t been able to find the listing for myself. The card is confirmed to have sold for $156,250 on Heritage Auctions in June this year. So what can explain the sudden 5,340-percent jump in what someone was willing to pay in just three months? It’s very strange indeed.
We’ve reached out to Fanatics to ask if the company has any concerns regarding the sale, or any explanation for the incredible sale price, and will update should the company get back to us.
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