Logan Paul Sells A Single Pokémon Card For Over $16 Million

Given the current extended wave of Pokémon card lunacy began with Logan Paul in 2020, perhaps this weekend’s sale of the YouTuber’s Illustrator Pikachu card for a completely deranged $16.49 million could be the end of it? Bookend this nonsense with the same awful man.

Logan Paul’s Illustrator Pikachu is without doubt one of the rarest Pokémon cards in existence. The special card, created in 1997 as part of an illustration contest in Japan, has a unique image of Pikachu with a paintbrush and saw only 41 printed. Of those, only one has ever been graded by PSA (a company that grades all sorts of memorabilia by incredible high standards) to be a 10—a card in perfect condition—and this is the one Paul bought as a stunt in 2022. He paid, in total, $5.275 million, of which $4m was in cash, and the rest in the form of a PSA 9 version of the same card. He then, infamously, wore the card around his neck for his appearance at Wrestlemania in 2022.

This was not the first time Logan Paul had pulled this stunt. In 2020, as the world collectively lost its mind during covid, Paul began spending millions on Pokémon packs for attention-seeking streams. At one point he bought a Gem Mint 10 1999 first edition holo Charizard (one of the most sought-after cards) for $150,000, then wore it around his neck to one of his pretend boxing matches against Floyd Mayweather, claiming at the time that this act had caused it to become worth a million dollars. Thankfully that wasn’t true, and despite the massive hike in prices across the rest of the hobby, you can still pick up the same card in the same quality for not much more.

Illustrator Pikachu’s peculiar path

Since 2022, the fate of the Illustrator Pikachu has been bizarrely mixed. In 2022 an Las Vegas Raiders linebacker sold a CGC (rival grading company to PSA) 9.5 for $672,000 and celebrated by resigning from the NFL. He’s likely kicking himself still, given in the same year someone bought a poorer quality PSA 7 version for $900,000, which at the time made it the most expensive Pokémon card sale ever, before Logan Paul got one later that year. However, a year later in 2023 a PSA 8 went up for auction at $480,000 and didn’t receive a single bid. Then last year, all sense was lost as a PSA 9 Illustrator Pikachu sold for a ludicrous $4,000,000. Why was this card suddenly worth nearly four times more than Paul had sold his for three years earlier? Or six times more than the CGC 9.5? Because these small pieces of floppy cardboard are only ever worth what someone is willing to pay for them.

But forget all of that now, because as Polygon reported this weekend, Logan Paul just sold his one-of-a-kind PSA 10 Pikachu for $16,492,000.

Auctioned by Goldin, alongside Paul’s PSA 10 1999 Charizard, a matching Blastoise, and a factory sealed box of Base Set 1st Edition cards, and a whole bunch of others, they all sold for wildly inflated prices. The headline is obviously the Pikapainter which went for that $16.5 million, but everything else is equally ridiculous. The Charizard, as described above usually worth $150,000, went for $954,800; the Blastoise sold for $138,880 despite another identical card selling for $2000 on eBay yesterday; the matching Venusaur fetched $75,640; and that box of Base Set went for nearly half a million, $496,000. So why did the Base Set starters fetch so much higher? Because for some reason PSA agreed to mark the labels on these gradings with “1ST ED—LOGAN PAUL BREAK,” thus in the eyes of collectors making them unique. As for the Pikachu, there’s no rational explanation.

Obviously this $16.5 million sale smashes all previous records to pieces, and surely—surely—will never be beaten. There has to come a point where humanity recognizes that shiny cardboard is of limited value. At approximately 1.85 grams, this card is worth 55,370 times the price of gold. Which is silly. It’s all incredibly silly.