A bit of a specific post today: I wanted to see the most expensive trading card game cards I could find in card shops. This was an unexpectedly difficult exercise because most shops don’t sort out the pricey cards and just leave them in mysterious order in glass cases that look like this:
So it’s very likely I missed some.
Before I begin some simple rules. First I’m only doing game cards, so the above $3700 Dragonball Z card that came with a restaurant meal doesn’t count.
And neither does the above $12,500 set of trading cards that were lottery prizes, also for Dragonball Z.
Secondly, I’m only (obviously) including ones I personally saw and could photograph. There may have been more expensive YuGiOh cards in a case, but it had some sort of film on the glass making photography difficult!
So let’s begin, in (roughly) price order:
The Hololive card game hasn’t generated much excitement in the west, and even here in Japan I saw cards in few stores. The above was the most expensive I could find, at only about $50.
An even less common game as far as cards sold by secondary market stores goes is Wixoss, but this card at about $160 is apparently desirable to someone.
I’m fascinated by Duel Masters since to me it had the prettiest card and fanciest card treatments of any game but the cards have almost no value. Amazingly flashy holographic, etched foil cards go for under $1, and despite a good search the most expensive I could find was the above at $280!
One Piece was super popular here a year ago, but very much seems to have cooled off and it’s in fewer than half the stores, and even then the displays are small. I’m sure there’s cards out there selling for more than $560, but I didn’t see them.
Lorcana seems much more popular here than in the west, and I see it in about half the stores. Even so, $1600 is a pretty penny for a card from such a game. The store I saw this at had four of them, all at the same price. Even serialized Magic cards rarely fetch this amount!
I’ll put these two Cardfight Vanguard examples here although they somewhat break the rules since they’re not true game cards, but prizes that were awarded to tournament winners. At $1100 and $2000, that store had better hope a Vanguard player with very deep pockets – if they even exist – hears about these.
The most expensive YuGiOh card I saw was this one at about $1700, but this was in a case with dozens of other cards very close in price. I was surprised, since I had read YuGiOh didn’t have a strong secondary market.
Here’s one from the Dragonball card game. $820 for a single card for a game few play anymore. Who’s going to pay that?
Before I get to the two big ones – and you can predict the games – here’s a surprise. This is for the Kamen Rider Ganba Legends arcade game I played yesterday. Each time you play – which costs ¥100 – you get a card. Imagine one of them being ‘worth’ over $300!
Incidentally cards are big here now. I mean they’ve always been a popular hobby, but even small rinkydink shops are busy, and packs for recent expansions are sold out everywhere. You also rarely find booster packs in convenience shops anymore, probably because they sell out immediately.
So on to the two priciest examples:
A graded autographed alpha Black Lotus from Magic The Gathering can be yours for about $100,000 if you’re interested. If the gesde or autograph doesn’t interest you, the same shop had four other Lotuses from $40,000 and up.
Some of you will say graded cards don’t count (since they artificially add value in many peoples eyes) and that’s a fair point, so here’s a $6,000+ Mox Sapphire also from Magic. In fact this store had the complete ‘power nine’ which could be yours for about $28,000!
Here’s a $50,000 Pokemon card, although again it’s graded so some may call foul. Graded cards are rare here – many stores won’t touch them – but I saw this at a shop that only deals in graded cards and had many Pokemon examples for not much less than this.
At $9300, this was the highest ungraded Pokemon card I saw. There’s lots of pricey ($5000+) Pokemon cards right now, which probably befits the worlds most popular TCG.
Some crazy prices here wouldn’t you agree? Even crazier is many of these will sell, and the shops (like Big Magic, Haruheya and Mandarake) largely had different stock than when I was here in a January. And as I said, there’s probably even pricier ones in cases I just missed. Actually there’s so many card shops in Akiba alone I didn’t even go into all of them!
But I’ll end with this:
That’s a sign in Mandarake offering to pay $53,000 for a certain extremely rare Pokemon card. This means they have a buyer lined up, to which im sure they’ll sell for even more…