24 years ago, Pokemon Snap gave Charmander, Squirtle, and Bulbasaur unique trading cards – and they just sold for more than the price of my house
Nov. 20, 2023Pokemon Snap contest versions of Charmander, Squirtle, and Bulbasaur sold for over $230,000 combined
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Extremely rare Pokemon cards featuring the series' original starter ‘mon – Charmander, Squirtle, and Bulbasaur – recently sold for over $70,000 apiece, beating previous auction records by some distance.
The enormous caveat here is that Goldin charges a fairly exorbitant “buyer’s premium” of 22% which inevitably inflates the final price. The actual winning bids for all three cards were: $65,000 for Charmander, $60,000 for Squirtle, and $66,000 for Bulbasaur. Finally, Bulbasaur gets the win it deserves. Even with the added fee factored in, which brought the final cost of all three cards to $233,000, these auctions are still head-and-shoulders above previous Pokemon TCG starter prices, and there are a few reasons for that.
Firstly, these starter variants are extremely rare. They can all be traced back to Japanese Pokemon Snap photo contests that ran in 1999. Basically, players sent in pictures they’d taken using the Nintendo 64 Pokemon photography sim – which finally got a deserved sequelon the Switch 22 years later– and the winners had their photos printed as actual cards.
To my knowledge, this was also the first time these Pokemon Snap starters have been auctioned since the Pokemon TCG boom a few years back. A handy round-up fromPokumonconcurs, and shows that the prices on the Pokemon Snap variants were already going up.
The hobby’s explosion hiked the price on many cards amid surging fan demand, lavish auction prices, and celebrity collector culture. Coupled with Goldin’s reputation for high-end auctions, with the site’s rarest sports cards regularly selling for upwards of $100,000, this set was perfectly positioned to bring in large bids.
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