A Pikachu card with 56 identical twins just sold for $8.4 million
A PSA 10 Raincoat Pikachu promo went for $8.4 million on Fanatics Collect after 64 bids - the second-highest price ever paid for a Pokémon card, despite 57 copies existing in the same grade.
A 2015 Japanese Raincoat Pikachu promo card, graded PSA 10, has sold for $8.4 million on the auction platform Fanatics Collect. That makes it the second most expensive Pokémon card ever sold. The number that makes it strange is 57 - the number of copies PSA has graded at that same perfect 10.
The sale
The card is an Art Academy promo from the XY era, illustrated by Y. Fujishima, showing Pikachu in a raincoat. Kotaku reports the auction closed around September 28 after 64 bids, and credits Men's Journal with spotting it.
Only the 1997 Illustrator Pikachu has gone for more: $16.5 million, sold by Logan Paul in February. That card has a genuine claim to scarcity, with a single copy in PSA 10.
The price is the story
What makes this remarkable is the trajectory. Kotaku's figures put earlier Raincoat Pikachu sales at roughly $16,000 to $26,000 through 2025, then $156,250 in June this year, then about $80,000 in August. Going from five figures to eight in eighteen months, for a card with dozens of equally perfect siblings, is not a collectibles market behaving like a collectibles market.
It is worth saying plainly that none of this is about Pokémon games, or even really about Pokémon. Graded cards have become a speculative asset class, and the numbers attached to the top end have detached from anything a player would recognise as scarcity or sentiment.
Why it matters
The graded-card market keeps setting records that have less and less to do with how rare a card actually is, and Pokémon is the franchise absorbing most of that money.