In a blur of tiny hands, the deadlock of an illicit deal brokered over a nail-biting one-hour lunch period is finally broken. As one party hurriedly caches his acquisition underneath the sandwich in his lunchbox, the other broker tucks away his loot in his shorts.
For the remainder of the school day, he dips repeatedly into his pocket to make sure it’s still there. Because while for his teachers it is merely a distracting piece of sparkly cardboard, for this eight-year-old boy, it’s the fire-spitting monster that he’s been chasing since the start of term.
More than two decades on, my beloved Charizard, the Pokémon trading card I swapped for a Blastoise in my junior school playground, rests against my laptop as I clack away at the keyboard.
Imagine my shock upon finding out that, had I taken better care of the now-battered card, it could be worth almost $25,000 and rising.
Trading cards are a key pillar to making Pokémon reportedly the world’s highest-grossing media franchise, and on the 30th anniversary of its launch, the cards continue making collectors of kids and adults alike. Their rising value is also drawing in a crop of speculators.
Earlier this month, influencer and wrestler Logan Paul sold a single card for a record-crushing $16.5 million. Line up the more than 75 billion Pokémon cards produced until March 2025 end to end and they would reach the moon and back around eight times over.
What began as the brainchild of a Japanese video game designer who loved collecting bugs as a child has — like so many of its iconic creatures — evolved, transforming into a hobby that has spawned its own quasi-stock market: one so potentially lucrative that multimillion-dollar auctions and armed robberies of shops selling the cards are parts of its news cycle.
A portmanteau of the Japanese name “Poketto Monsuta,” Pokémon was born with the release of Game Boy titles “Pocket Monsters: Red” and “Pocket Monsters: Green” in Japan on February 27, 1996.
Within three years, Satoshi Tajiri’s 151 creatures, brought to life by illustrator Ken Sugimori, had become a global phenomenon. “Pokémania” rocketed through the world’s playgrounds riding the wave of a hugely popular anime series and an accompanying trading card game. The first card set released in the US hit shelves in January 1999.
But while new media and merchandise releases continued to expand the Pokédex (currently up to 1,025 species), the franchise could not sustain its popularity — partly because of competition from fellow evolving monster franchise Digimon and trading card game Magic: The Gathering.
That all changed with the launch of a mobile app in July 2016.
Within two months, Pokémon Go surged to 500 million global downloads. If Pokémania’s spiritual home was the playground, the augmented reality craze, by its very essence of real-world exploration, had no limits on area or age.
“That summer I was still a practicing attorney and even my 70-year-old boss was sitting there on a break playing,” Lee Steinfeld, better known as Leonhart to the 1.97 million subscribers to his YouTube Pokémon channel, told CNN. “It was a magical time.”
Though still the top-grossing mobile game during the summer of 2019, Pokémon Go’s player base steadily declined, as did interest in the card game.
Then the pandemic hit.
While the appetite for many collectibles rose during lockdowns, the demand for Pokémon cards surged, explained Joshua Johnson, co-founder of trading card analytics website Card Ladder.
The value of the Pokémon market, after spiking in 2020, went “insane” in 2021, Johnson said. The ascent has only continued.
Since March last year, the value has risen by over 145%, with buyers spending $450 million on cards this January alone, Card Ladder data showed.
The Card Ladder index tracks the value of a basket of the most popular Pokémon cards. As of this month, those cards are worth roughly 6,208% more than they were in May 2004. That’s a better return on investment than even the broad S&P 500, which has climbed 521% across the same period.
“What usually ends up happening is the bubble bursts and then we come right back down where we were,” Johnson told CNN, referencing other trading card markets like baseball or basketball.
“That hasn’t happened in Pokémon … It just keeps going up and up.”
In 2004, around $100 would be enough for you to catch a first edition base set Charizard on the secondhand market. Last week one was sold at auction in a Grade 10, the highest level of condition awarded by third party authentication agency PSA, for $528,000. Only 125 copies of the card in that supreme condition are in circulation, Card Ladder estimates.
Steinfeld owns a special one. In 2017, he purchased a PSA 10 version signed by the card’s illustrator, Mitsuhiro Arita, for $18,500.
While an exact valuation is tricky, recent precedent suggests the former lawyer is sitting on a monstrous payout.
The same day that Paul flipped his PSA 10 Pikachu Illustrator card for $16.492 million, he auctioned a first edition PSA 10 Charizard for $954,800, a new record for any Charizard card. Steinfeld believes he could best that — if he ever decides to cash in.
How do you explain such a dramatic resurgence?
For Ross Cooper, the collector behind the 1-million-subscriber-strong YouTube channel Coop’s Collection, the psychological and logistical strains of the pandemic lit the fuse.
“Everyone was stuck at home, dealing with a mental state of ‘What is going on?’ and wanting to find a safe nostalgic space,” Cooper, who rejoined the hobby in 2018 having collected as a kid, told CNN.
“Coupled with the supply chain issues that so many industries came across, you just saw this crazy spike in value … (and) the massive influx of new collectors who then stuck around is driving a continual demand.”
Sentimental value is integral to understanding the influx of those looking to capitalize on the investment potential of Pokémon cards.
“For people my age and younger, the stock market is kind of boring. You’re just putting your money on a screen, and you’re not really doing anything,” he added.
“Whereas cards, you can kind of get two usages out of it. You can enjoy the space, collect things that you enjoy … and it’s a dual investment as well. It keeps people more engaged long term.”
While the oldest produced cards tend to command the highest sums due to their scarcity and sentimental value, new versions of the most beloved Pokémon — each with their own unique artwork — means the nostalgia train never stops.
In September 2023, for example, the 151 expansion was released, a set that exclusively focused on the roster from the original 1996 game.
“It’s that word, nostalgia, it really is,” Steinfeld said. “It makes you feel like a kid again, and people will essentially pay whatever to have those feelings again.”
Unfortunately, that has caused significant issues.
At the heart of many problems is a basic economic discrepancy: supply is not meeting demand. Even as 10.2 billion cards were printed in the 12 months preceding March 2025, many buyers face an uphill battle just to get their hands on a few 10-card packs.
The franchise’s online shop, Pokémon Center, operates a queue system when new card releases go live, while on Amazon, prospective buyers for currently printing sets typically have to request an invitation to buy the product and then hope they are selected to purchase.
Exacerbating supply issues are scalpers seeking to profit from the hobby’s popularity by purchasing new releases at retail price before selling them for higher prices via online marketplaces.
Like with tickets for live sports and music events, the flipping is often instantaneous. Thousands of listings for unopened products are already live on eBay for Ascended Heroes, the latest expansion released less than a month ago.
Others, though, choose to sit on their sealed stock to maximize profits, sometimes for years after the set has finished its last printing run.
For Cooper, the rise of scalpers is a “sad” situation that prompts a kind of crisis around what he sees as, at its core, a junior hobby, even if there is ample room in the community for adults too.
“When there’s money to be made, there’s going to be bad actors in the space. I don’t know that it’s fair for people who are in it for different reasons to judge, to say, ‘Oh, you’re not allowed to come over and make money on Pokémon.’ It’s not illegal, it’s not necessarily immoral, but I think there are people who are like, ‘That’s not right. It’s not the reason that these products exist, necessarily.’”
Like his fellow content creator, Steinfeld is far more concerned with collecting than investing and laments the influx of “bad eggs” purely chasing profits.
While The Pokémon Company has continually reaffirmed its commitment to improving the availability of product, Steinfeld and Johnson believe it is fully cognizant of the strategic benefit to demand outrunning supply.
The well-documented crash of baseball cards in the 1980s, brought on by overzealous producers, is a cautionary tale.
“At the end of the day, they’re a business. They don’t want products sitting on a shelf,” Steinfeld said.
Other consequences have been more troubling.
In 2021, Target announced it was temporarily stopping sales of Pokémon cards following a violent dispute at one of its Wisconsin stores.
Two years later, The Van Gogh Museum abruptly scrapped its decision to give out a promotional Pikachu card, citing safety and security reasons. Crowds had flocked to the Amsterdam venue in pursuit of the special edition item, with “Gray Felt Hat” Pikachu soon popping up on resale sites.
Last August, McDonald’s Japan ended its promotional tie-in just hours after launch after scalpers bulk bought Happy Meals on release to re-list exclusive cards online, many discarding untouched food and packaging onto the nearby streets.
In January, robbers drew guns on customers before smashing cases to steal more than $100,000 worth of cards from a New York City card shop, while four high-profile thefts involving Pokémon cards have taken place in just one UK county across recent weeks, according to the BBC. Major thefts have also been reported in Australia, Japan and other countries.
Yet, for all the scalping and stealing, the positive heart of the Pokémon community continues to beat strongly.
To celebrate the franchise’s 30th birthday, Steinfeld has spent roughly $40,000 to accumulate one pack of every expansion released since that inaugural base set in 1999. After a huge opening on his channel, all cards will be given away in a bid to raise funds for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, with Steinfeld targeting $100,000 in donations.
Cooper has built his seven-figure online following on the back of giving away cards at conventions across the Mid-Atlantic.
Filming his interactions with giddily excited young collectors is a source of endless personal fulfilment and, he hopes, wider change.
“Over the last two years, I’ve seen a very positive shift at card shows and online … I think people’s generosity and wholesomeness within Pokémon has started to break through the negativity,” he explained.
“I couldn’t have asked for a better reason to have gone viral and to have gotten a following online.”
It’s a spirit personified in Rocky, an eight-year-old Pikachu superfan who lost his entire collection when the Palisades Fire destroyed his family home in January 2025.
Promised by his father, once a young collector himself, that they would rebuild his Pokédex together, the kindness of strangers was embodied by a good Samaritan who helped source a pack of the elusive Prismatic Evolutions set two months later.
Incredibly, it turned out to be what is known in the community as a “God Pack” — an ultra-rare type of pack where every card inside is among the rarest in the entire expansion.
Rocky’s enraptured reaction tugged on the heartstrings of collectors and parents alike across social media, amassing 4 million views to date and sparking a flurry of card donations from some of the scene’s biggest influencers.
“The way that everybody’s been so generous and the outpouring of love that everybody’s given to him — I didn’t realize that this community was so big, for starters, but also just full of so many kind people,” Rocky’s mother, Natasha Perez, told CNN.
“Now he’s got his own little Instagram thing going on and it’s amazing to see. I think it’s really special.”
Speaking on a video call while dressed in the same Pikachu-dotted pajamas he wore during his viral breakout, Rocky adds: “It was just too much excitement. I don’t know how to explain it.”
I cast my mind back to a playground deal more than 20 years ago, and nod my head in understanding.
