Structured guides for serious collectors — researched from primary sources.
Sets, the UK Pokémon card market, and collection management — researched from primary sources, written to the standard the subject demands.
1. Why Pokémon Cards Are Worth Anything (And Why Most Aren’t)
The £300,000 Card That Convinced Everyone They Were Rich In 2021, a PSA 10 1st Edition Shadowless Charizard sold for more than £300,000. The story went everywhere. For a few months it was almost impossible to avoid headlines about six-figure Pokémon cards, and the predictable thing happened: people went up into their lofts and started […]
2. Grading and Condition: What Actually Separates a PSA 9 from a PSA 10
The Single Grade Point That’s Worth More Than A Car I own a Base Set Charizard. It isn’t 1st Edition and it isn’t Shadowless; it’s an ordinary unlimited print from 1999 that millions of people own. As a raw card it’s pleasant but unremarkable. Graded, it’s a different story. As a PSA 9 it might […]
3. Buying and Selling Pokémon Cards Online Without Getting Burned
The £450 Mistake That Taught Me To Read Every Word It arrived. It was a Base Set Blastoise, and it was in a PSA slab. The grade was PSA 6. When I went back and actually read the description (which I should have done first), there it was, buried near the bottom: “Pictured card shown […]
4. Why the Pokémon Card Market Goes in Cycles (And What That Means for Collectors)
The £20,000 Charizard That Became A £5,000 Charizard In early 2021, a PSA 10 Unlimited Base Set Charizard (not even the 1st Edition) was changing hands for somewhere around £18,000 to £22,000. Influencers were opening vintage packs on stream, the coverage was everywhere, and people who’d never owned a card in their lives were talking […]
5. How to Store Pokémon Cards Without Quietly Destroying Them
The £500 Card I Ruined With A Binder I once owned a Near Mint Base Set Blastoise. Good centring, sharp corners, clean surface, worth perhaps £400 to £500 raw, and plausibly more than three times that if it graded well. I kept it in a binder. An ordinary ring binder with side-loading pages (nothing that […]
6. Are Pokémon Cards an Investment? An Honest Look at the Risks
Why Most Pokémon Card “Investors” Lost Money In 2020 and 2021, a great many people bought Pokémon cards as “investments”. They paid two to three times retail for modern sealed product, bought graded vintage at peak prices, and assumed, because everything was going up, that everything would keep going up. Through 2022, a lot of […]
7. How to Spot a Fake Pokémon Card Before You Buy
The £800 Fake Charizard I Nearly Bought I was looking for a Base Set Charizard and found one listed at £750, against a market price of perhaps £900 to £1,000 at the time. Not suspiciously cheap, just a good deal. The seller had strong feedback and a couple of hundred transactions behind them. I asked […]
8. Sealed Products and Promos: What’s Worth Buying and What Isn’t
The £2,000 I Lost Opening Modern Booster Boxes Between 2020 and 2021 I bought modern sealed product as “investments”: Evolving Skies booster boxes, Shining Fates ETBs, Celebrations product, all on the received wisdom that “sealed always goes up”. I held them for a couple of years. By 2023 the same products were available at or […]
9. What I Wish I’d Known Before I Started Collecting
Every Mistake In This Guide, I Made First When I started collecting in 2018, I worked through more or less the entire catalogue of errors this series describes. I bought fakes on eBay. I paid peak prices in the middle of hype cycles. I put a couple of thousand pounds into modern sealed product expecting […]
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