Last week we told you about the retired decorator in Woking with 42 Pokémon master sets in his attic and a £250,000 estimate. On Wednesday they sold for £1.56 million.

The same week, thieves drove off with $963,000 in cards that collectors had sent to PSA for grading, Hasbro reported the first $600 million quarter in Magic's history, and an index of Pokémon card prices turned out to have beaten both Bitcoin and gold since 2019. Collectibles.com picked a good week to ask whether cards are starting to work like money.

What we're covering:

🏚️ The Woking attic collection sold for six times its estimate
🚚 $963,000 in cards stolen from a FedEx truck outside PSA
🪙 Collectibles.com on why elite cards already behave like currency
📈 Three numbers from a record week for Pokémon and Magic
⚾ What the Rays and Brewers mean for your card market
🔥 Heatseekers: Top upcoming releases

Let's get into it

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The 42 Pokémon master sets that a retired decorator kept in his loft for 15 years sold Wednesday at Ewbank's in Surrey for £1.56 million, with a hammer total of £1.2 million.

The auction house had estimated the whole collection at £250,000. Andrew Ewbank, who called the sale, said afterward that he was going for a lie down.

The collector bought his first set for about £300 and spent years completing each one in near-mint condition, keeping them out of reach of his own son. That discipline is what the room paid for. A complete Legendary Collection master set, with a near-mint Charizard, was the biggest single result.

Bidding came from collectors and investors around the world, with Ewbank's trading card head James Spooner saying his team's jaws hit the floor when they first saw how many complete sets the man owned.

A master set needs every common, uncommon, and reverse holo alongside the chase cards, which is why so few complete ones survive in this condition.

A fun, free slab game just came out. Gemmed is a daily game where you look at a graded card and guess what it actually sold for, across Pokémon, basketball, baseball, football, soccer, and Magic. You get six guesses, every miss tells you whether to go higher or lower, and landing within 5% wins. A new slab arrives every night at midnight Eastern.

Yesterday’s Gemmed card was an Umbreon from 2007 Pokemon POP Series 5 (#17), graded PSA 9, and it sold for $60,000 in a Fanatics weekly auction on September 6. The typical first guess was $6,000, and about a third of players never got within 5%. How close would your guess have been?

It’s honestly a better test of your market instincts than it sounds, because some cards sell for far more than you would expect and some PSA 10s sell for far less 😅

Santa Ana police disclosed Monday that thieves broke into a parked FedEx truck outside PSA's headquarters on October 13 while the driver was away for 60 to 90 minutes. They took two full pallets of Pokémon and sports cards that collectors had submitted for grading. Police put the loss at about $963,000, a figure that could change once the remaining boxes are scanned, and no arrests have been announced.

PSA deactivated the stolen cards' certificates, alerted marketplace partners, and says customers will be compensated at fair market value. As Sports Collectors Daily pointed out Wednesday, PSA's terms cap that payout at the insured maximum for the service level you chose.

A collector who sent a $40,000 card through a cheaper tier to save on fees could recover a fraction of it. The theft landed in the same week PSA's backlog tracker showed 7.2 million cards waiting, down from 8.2 million on October 6 and closing on the 5 million target that will let PSA start reopening its cheaper tiers.

Collectibles.com CMO Dillan Prince ran the best cards in the hobby through the checklist economists use to define money, and found that the top of the market already passes most of it.

The new piece is framed as an apocalypse thought experiment, but the argument underneath is about how elite cards behave right now.

Prince's filter for which cards would survive is the same one serious collectors use every day: condition, rarity, and provenance. A card that misses any one of the three behaves less like money and more like the base cards nobody can sell.

The full breakdown is at Collectibles.com.

The World Series opens tonight in a matchup the card market did not plan for. Tampa Bay and Milwaukee are two of the smaller markets in baseball, and SI's breakdown on Thursday showed how much room their players' cards have to move.

On the Brewers side, a Jackson Chourio Red autograph numbered to five and graded BGS 9.5 sold for $47,580 on Saturday, and a ring for Jacob Misiorowski could put his Topps debut patch card in range of Paul Skenes' $1.11 million record. The Rays' Drew Rasmussen has already seen his 2021 rookie Superfractor climb from $799 in August to $1,699 last week.

Collectors with Rays cards are rooting for Junior Caminero, whose record is still a $66,000 debut patch from 2024. A title run for either roster would reprice cards that most of the hobby has ignored all season.

The world of collectibles is wide and deep, and there's a constant stream of new releases. Here are some of the big ones that are coming up:

The Collectibles.com piece argues that the best cards already do most of what money does, and this week tested nearly every part of that claim. The Woking sale showed a store of value holding for 15 years and then multiplying. Whatnot's four sales a second showed the liquidity. Even the FedEx theft made the point in its own way, because PSA's first move was to deactivate the stolen cards' certificates, which works a lot like a bank canceling stolen bills.

The other half of the argument showed up too. The Woking cards were worth £1.56 million because one man kept every set complete and untouched while millions of other copies were played with, traded, and lost. Scarcity, condition, and a clean paper trail are what turn cardboard into something people will treat as money, and the cards that have all three are still a small slice of what gets printed.

See you next week!