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A person who expected to get $50 for a binder of 1999 Pokemon cards got a pleasant surprise when she brought it to Antiques Roadshow.
By Steven T. Wright on
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Pokemon cards are a big deal these days, and while the market has come down to Earth a bit in the past two years, they're still worth quite a bit of money. Case in point: One person who took a binder of original cards to Antiques Roadshow for appraisal was told that they're likely worth in the $5,000 to $10,000 range.
As shown in the above video, the owner says that their mother bought the cards on the internet sometime in the late 1990s. Appraiser Travis Landry explains that the continued popularity of Pokemon as a media franchise led to an explosion of card values during the pandemic. Landry further states that the binder of cards is the 1999 base set, which is the first 102 cards. The set also includes the 16 original holographic cards, which are among the most valuable.
Landry also explains that there was a brief period of time where cards were printed without shadows, which resulted in "shadowless" cards that are highly prized by collectors. The appraiser estimates that the shadowless Mewtwo card is in the $800 to $1,200 range, and that the shadowless Charizard is $2,000 to $3,000. However, Landry notes that the market for Pokemon cards is "extremely volatile," and that shadowless Charizards sold for up to $15,000 in early 2021. As a whole, though, it's likely that the owner will have to get the cards graded by a third party like CGC in order to get their full value.
In other Pokemon news, Scarlet and Violet recently received a patch that fixed several bugs, including one that prevented players from catching Paradox Pokemon.
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