Since early October we've been following a Trophy Pikachu at Goldin as it climbed toward $3 million. It closed Sunday night at $3.08 million, and it still wasn't the most expensive card in the sale. That honor went to a Mudkip that a fan drew in a Nintendo 3DS game.

The same week, a dinosaur we listed at $6 million to $9 million sold for $47.3 million, the Brewers won the first World Series in franchise history, and Collectibles.com sat down with a Heritage Auctions expert to explain where a card's value actually comes from.

What we're covering:

💧 A Mudkip tops Goldin's $28 million Pokémon sale
⚾ The Brewers are champions, and their cards are still cheap
🎙️ Collectibles.com and Heritage on where card value comes from
🦖 A $9 million dinosaur sells for $47.3 million
🔥 Heatseekers: Top upcoming releases

Let's get into it

Also, send us feedback and ideas on how to improve by replying to this email!

Sponsored by GearUP Booster

If you game on PC, you already know the pain of high ping and random lag spikes. GearUP Booster is a one-click fix that cuts your ping from 120ms down to 25ms and stabilizes your connection. No complicated setup, no networking degree required. Just download it, click go, and stop blaming your internet.

Try it free here.

Goldin's Pokémon 30th Anniversary auction closed Sunday night with more than $28 million in sales and 18 records. The top lot was a 2015 Japanese Art Academy Mudkip in PSA 10, which sold early Monday for $4.88 million after 73 bids.

The card exists because of a 2015 contest where players drew Pokémon in the Art Academy game on the Nintendo 3DS. Each of the ten winners in Japan had their drawing printed as an official card and received 100 copies. PSA has graded only three of this Mudkip, by a player named Daisuke Ochiai, and all three are 10s. Six of the ten Japanese winners drew Pikachu, which makes the Mudkip the odd one out in an already tiny set.

The Trophy Pikachu we've been tracking closed at $3,080,500 on 32 bids, $122,000 above where it sat a week ago.

It was awarded at the first official Pokémon tournament in 1997, and PSA has graded only eight copies.

Tuesday's Gemmed card was a Venusaur from 1999 Pokemon Game (#15), graded PSA 10, and it sold for $5,000 on Fanatics Vault on October 7. The typical first guess was $8,000, and 90% of players got within 5%. In a week when a Mudkip sold for $4.88 million, a PSA 10 Base Set holo brought a little less than most people expected. How close would your guess have been?

Gemmed is a free 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.

Milwaukee beat Tampa Bay 4-1 in Game 5 on Wednesday to win the first World Series in franchise history, and the parade is this morning.

Catcher William Contreras won MVP after hitting .381 and winning 10 of his 13 robot-umpire challenges. Rookie Cooper Pratt set a World Series rookie record with six straight hits, and Jacob Misiorowski went 2-0 with one run allowed in 10 2/3 innings.

The card market hasn't caught up. On the day of Game 5, a Contreras 2021 Bowman Sterling rookie autograph in PSA 10 sold for $520 on Fanatics Collect, and Pratt's 2024 Bowman Chrome Gold autograph numbered to 50 went for $950 the same day. Misiorowski's 2026 Bowman Chrome Superfractor 1/1 sold for $21,000 on Sunday, less than half of his $52,800 record from last year.

Topps opened its championship set on Wednesday at $69.99 for 15 cards and one guaranteed hit, on sale through November 4. The chase is a Diamond parallel numbered to two, whose matching copies were presented to the players after the final out. Heritage, meanwhile, sold a 1903 World Series Game 1 ticket for $256,200 last weekend, the most ever paid for a World Series ticket.

Collectibles.com Co-founder / Chief Business & Strategy Officer, Dietrich von Behren recently sat down with Jason Simonds, Heritage Auctions' Consignment Director of Sports, to ask the question every collector asks: what is my card actually worth?

His answer comes down to three forces working together, which are condition, rarity, and provenance, with demand from a younger and wealthier crowd lifting the whole market.

Heritage's own fall catalog auction tested two of those points in the same week. A restored T206 Honus Wagner sold for $1,982,500, a record for a restored example, and a 1963 Topps Mantle in PSA 9 set a record for the card at $317,200.

The full breakdown is at Collectibles.com.

Last week our release calendar listed "Jodi," a Nanotyrannus skeleton, at Sotheby's with an estimate of $6 million to $9 million. It sold Tuesday for $47.3 million with fees, on a hammer of $40.5 million.

According to the Associated Press, six bidders pushed it there in about 12 minutes, and the winner has not been named.

Rancher Jodi Pierson found the skeleton on her Montana land in 2019. It is about 70% complete, nearly 20 feet long, and one of only three known Nanotyrannus skeletons. For decades scientists argued over whether Nanotyrannus was its own species or just a young T. rex, and research published last year concluded it was a separate genus. That ruling is why Jodi went to auction as one of three known skeletons of its own kind of dinosaur, rather than as a young T. rex.

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:

Simonds told Collectibles.com that card grading is a game of millimeters, and this week put prices on the idea. The most valuable card in Goldin's sale was a Mudkip with only three graded copies, all of them 10s, and today's trivia question shows how far apart a 9 and a 10 can land on the same Umbreon. Heritage sold a restored Wagner for nearly $2 million because the restoration was disclosed up front and the bidders decided it was still the Wagner.

The same logic explains why the World Series MVP's rookie autograph sold for $520 on the day he won it. Modern cards are printed in large numbers, and a championship doesn't make any one of them scarce. With PSA reopening its cheapest tier this week, a lot more of those cards are about to be graded, and the ones worth watching are the few that come back with low populations, while the rest settle in as ordinary cardboard.

See you next week!