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Rare Pokémon Snap Chansey card auctioned off for over $60,000

This one was snapped up.

A rare Pokémon Trading Card released as part of a competition centered around Pokémon Snap was auctioned off for over $60,000.

Featuring the Pokémon Chansey – a Pokémon known for its healing abilities and cute cry – the card has since taken the record for the most a Chansey card has ever been sold for after being auctioned off for $63,000 (£51,590) by PWCC auctioneers.

The card was originally created as part of a limited release to promote the launch of Pokémon Snap, a video game released in 1999 for the Nintendo 64 that has players taking pictures of various Pokémon in the wild. Two competitions were hosted in order to draw attention to the game’s release, with players being invited to send in photos they had taken within Pokémon Snap to be in with the chance of having them be used as official artwork for the trading card game.

Front and back of a Chansey Pokemon card.
Image credit: PWCC

Players could bring their Pokémon Snap cartridges into a chain of Japanese convivence stores in which they could print out their digital photos into stickers. Using their stickers, players could then affix their photos to a postcard and send them into the companies hosting the competitions. The winners were then asked to send their own Pokémon Snap cartridges into Nintendo to confirm that they were the owners of the photos in order to win.

Owners of the ten best submitted photos were awarded either 15 or 20 copies of official Pokémon cards that used the artwork based on their submission. The recently auctioned-off Chansey card featured artwork based on a photo submitted by contestant Kaori Someya and is only one of 15 cards printed. Depicting the pink Pokémon holding an egg, the card sold in the auction was classified as being Near-Mint+ 8.5 by Beckett Grading Services.

Watch on YouTube
Maddie, Wheels and Liv test the strength of a card protector for a Pokémon Trading Card.

The Pokémon Trading Card Game is a two-player card game that sees competitors attempting to win six prize cards or causing their opponent to have no Pokémon left to play from their bench. During the game, players must have an active Pokémon card out at all times, with the Pokémon needing energy cards in order to perform its various abilities and attacks. Players are able to evolve their Pokémon cards into more powerful versions by playing the appropriate card, with various allies and items also being available to them.

After being auctioned-off for $63,000, the Chansey card has become one of the most rare and expensive Pokémon cards in existence, beating out the likes of the Master’s Key and a signed Venusaur that was included within the 1996 Japanese Base Set that is missing its rarity symbol. However, one of the most expensive Pokémon cards to be auctioned off in recent memory is still the shadowless Charizard Charizard from the original TCG base set, which was sold for $420,000 in March.

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Pokémon Trading Card Game

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About the Author
Alex Meehan avatar

Alex Meehan

Senior Staff Writer

After writing for Kotaku UK, Waypoint and Official Xbox Magazine, Alex became a member of the Dicebreaker editorial family. Having been producing news, features, previews and opinion pieces for Dicebreaker for the past three years, Alex has had plenty of opportunity to indulge in her love of meaty strategy board games and gothic RPGS. Besides writing, Alex appears in Dicebreaker’s D&D actual play series Storybreakers and haunts the occasional stream on the Dicebreaker YouTube channel.

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