With every new day that passes, the world of Pokémon collectables veers off towards the path of the strange.
Over the past couple of days, the second-hand auction house, Goldin, had been running an auction for a Pokémon collectible that wasn’t even purposefully-made by the Pokémon Company International (TPCi).
It turns out people were spending thousands of dollars on a single piece of corn puff. Specifically, it is a Flamin’ Hot-flavored Cheeto that remarkably took on the shape of an actual Pokémon in the franchise, Charizard.
Preserved, affixed to a custom-made card backing reminiscent of the Trading Card Game (TCG), and then encapsulated in a storage box, this random piece of snack item started out its bidding history at $250 last February 11th. For those involved in the Pokémon TCG this is almost akin to the price of a booster box or trainer box -depending on the expansion set-.
By the 20th of February, the bidding had been going strong and had breached the $1,000 mark. From there, the auction took off at a breakneck pace, as each bid afterwards ranged from about a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars.
Finally, the bidding war for this preserved Cheeto finally concluded at a sum total of $87,840.
Ungraded, some of the more inexpensive of Charizard cards for the TCG over at the second-hand market don’t even command such a hefty sum. Coming in at a market price of about $1,500 in more recent times, there are the occasional outlier sales going for as much as $5,000.
But suppose you were to search around for graded versions of the Charizard card from the first set of the TCG. In that case, you can find yourself looking at astronomically high values of over $300,000 for just a single PSA 10 graded 1st Edition Charizard in online auction houses like eBay. That doesn't really take away from the sheer absurdity of a Charizard-shaped Cheeto selling for more than a lot of people make in a year.
It can be difficult to fathom the thought process behind these transactions, but if there’s one thing to say about the fanbase and collectors, they are dedicated to the intellectual property. Pokémon TCG Announces Rival Battle Decks