A retired Woking decorator's Pokémon cards, kept in his attic for 15 years, sold for £1.56m at Ewbank's on 21 October, six times the estimate. One set fetched £100,000.
A retired decorator from Woking has become a millionaire after selling the Pokémon cards he kept in his attic for 15 years. His collection sold for £1.56 million at Ewbank’s auction rooms on Wednesday 21 October.
The auction house had expected around £250,000. It says the total is the highest ever taken at a UK trading card auction, and the biggest for any single sale in Ewbank’s history. The figures are from Ewbank’s own report of the sale, published on Friday.
The seller has asked not to be identified.
Bought for his son, then forgotten
The collector started buying in the late 1990s, when his son began collecting and swapping cards at school. He found a seller in Malaysia on eBay who offered complete “master sets”, one copy of every card in an issue.
“I thought that it would be cheaper to buy the full set rather than keep buying sealed packs of random cards in hope that when you opened them you could complete a set,” he told Ewbank’s. “The first set I bought cost me around £300.”
That first purchase, the Skyridge Charizard set, was estimated at £20,000 to £40,000. It sold for a hammer price of £75,000.
The cards went into Pokémon binders still sealed and in mint condition. When his son lost interest, the binders went up into the roof. “He had his own cards, but he never got to touch these, I’m glad to say,” the collector said.
How the collection was found
He had no idea the cards were worth much until he read a newspaper story about Ewbank’s selling a single card for more than £6,000. That card came from a teacher’s collection, three cards of which Ewbank’s sold for £32,800 in April.
He realised he had several cards of the same type and took a sample to the auction house to be assessed. “When we then discovered that he had 42 such sets, our jaws hit the floor,” said James Spooner, Ewbank’s head of trading cards. Ewbank’s sold 41 of them. The collector kept one.
The top prices
- £100,000 hammer for the Legendary Collection complete master set, with all 110 cards, the 110 reverse holo “Firework” cards and four box toppers. It was estimated at £15,000 to £20,000.
- £75,000 hammer for the Skyridge Charizard set, estimated at £20,000 to £40,000.
- £1.56 million for the 41 sets in total.
Bidding ran far ahead of the estimates before the sale even began. In September, Ewbank’s said the collection could reach around £270,000 at the hammer. By the day before the auction it already held £825,000 in commission bids, Mr Spooner said.
The previous UK record was set at Stanley Gibbons in London in March, at just over £986,000 including buyer’s premium. Ewbank’s believes the Woking sale may also be a European record, but says that is unconfirmed.
Andrew Ewbank, who runs the business his late father Chris founded, took the sale from the rostrum himself. At the end, he told bidders he was “going for a lie down”. He said there were more bidders in the saleroom than at any sale since before the Covid pandemic.
“This is the biggest total Ewbank’s have taken for a single sale ever,” he said. The previous record was just over £1 million, for items from Francis Bacon’s studio in 2007.
What it means for you
If you have cards from the late 1990s and 2000s in a loft, condition is what matters. These sold so well because they were sealed, complete and in mint condition. Ewbank’s offers online valuations and holds dedicated trading card sales.
Ewbank’s is at Burnt Common Auction Rooms on London Road, Send, about four miles south-east of Woking town centre.
There is one thing a hammer price does not show. Buyers pay a premium on top, and sellers pay commission and fees, so the seller’s own take differs from the headline figures. Ewbank’s has not published either.
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