Another rare Charizard Pokémon card just smashed its sales record at auction
First-edition holo crystal Charizard from 2002's Mysterious Mountains expansion almost quadrupled its previous record.
Another day, another valuable Pokémon card sold at auction for eye-watering amounts; a 20-year-old Charizard card has just set a new record by selling for almost four times its previous top price.
This time around, it was a first-edition Japanese holographic crystal Charizard from 2002’s Mysterious Mountains expansion that went under the hammer.
Illustrated by veteran Pokémon artist Kouki Saitou, the shiny Charizard was one of three crystal-type cards to appear in Mysterious Mountains, alongside Crobat and Celebi.
Crystal cards were able to change their energy type to match an attached energy card, and only appeared in the Pokémon TCG’s ‘e-Card’ expansions from 2002 and 2003 - named for their compatibility with the e-Reader peripheral for the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo GameCube. In total, nine crystal cards were released across the e-Card sets.
Mysterious Mountains was the fifth and final e-Card expansion released in Japan, and was combined with earlier Japanese expansion Split Earth to form a single English-language set: Skyridge. A sealed Skyridge booster box - notable for marking the last appearance of beleaguered Pokémon Kadabra in the TCG - appeared at auction last month, selling for $40,800.
The first-edition crystal Charizard card from Mysterious Mountains was determined to be in perfect Gem Mint 10 condition by grading specialist PSA, which rates cards on its 10-point scale based on factors such as scuffs, marks and bending.
The Japanese holographic Charizard card sold for $40,800 on October 16th via auction house PWCC. According to the auction house, the sale price marks the most ever paid for a copy of the card, almost quadrupling the previous record of $10,300 paid in July 2021.
Despite the impressive price, the crystal Charizard is far from the most expensive Charizard to go under the hammer - that record continues to be held by the shadowless Charizard from the Pokémon TCG’s original Base Set, which sold for $420,000 in March 2022.