An extremely rare PSA 9 Mint Pikachu Illustrator card sold for $1.4 million on Friday as part of March’s Trading Card Games and Manga Signature Auction.
Of the estimated 39-41 copies of the Pikachu Illustrator cards in existence, PSA has officially certified just 15 copies at a Mint 9 and only one higher — which Logan Paul sold for more than $16M in February.
The Pikachu Illustrator card is often referred to as one of the holy grails of the trading card game world as it was first introduced in 1997 as a promotional prize for the Pokémon Card Game Illustration Artist Contest, hosted by manga magazine CoroCoro Comic. Fans submitted art of Pikachu and winners received this special card with a pen in the lower right corner and the “Illustrator” label at the top of the card instead of the “Trainer” label. The illustration is by Atsuko Nishida, the artist who made the original design of Pikachu.
The bids for this PSA 9 copy spiked at the end of the auction as the bid for the card at the beginning of March sat at $500,000.
According to a list by Dexerto, the PSA 9 Pikachu Illustrator that sold on Friday should land as the third-highest selling Pokémon card in history.
