Some people attend auction houses with no intention of losing. One of them seems to be Thomas Fish, president of Blowoutcards.com. Fish won a record-breaking $360,000 for a Pokémon First Edition Base Set Sealed Booster Box, a 1999 Wizards of the Coast production still in its original shrinkwrap, at Heritage Auctions’ Comics and Comic Art sale, which took place over three days in late November. Just two months prior, in September 2020, at Heritage Auctions, the previous world record was set at $198,000. Fish didn’t simply outperform it. He almost doubled it.
This is especially noteworthy because, even before the live auction began, online bids had already broken the previous world record. The bidders were not exercising caution. They appeared to know exactly what they were looking at and didn’t want anyone else to have it, as they were acting aggressively and almost impatiently.
You need to know what a first edition base booster box is in order to comprehend why. A notoriously small print run produced the Pokémon First Edition Base Set. It is extremely uncommon to find one that has been sealed in factory shrinkwrap for more than 20 years without having been opened or played with. It was simply called “the pinnacle of Pokémon box collecting” by Heritage Auctions.It’s not marketing jargon. It’s a widely acknowledged fact among serious collectors.
Here, too, the larger market context is important. The Pokémon card market has only been going in one direction since the pandemic began in early 2020. People who were confined to their homes returned to their childhood pastimes, and Pokémon, which was already popular among a generation of people in their twenties and thirties who had extra money, took center stage. There was an influx of new collectors. The supply did not change. Prices increased. Then, a series of celebrity appearances near the end of 2020 added fuel. In December 2020, internet sensation Logan Paul set a record of $200,000 for a first edition booster box. A similar box sold for $400,000 a month later. The market wasn’t simply growing. It was speeding up.
Some of this might be speculative enthusiasm, the kind that eventually corrects itself. Beneath all of this, however, is a practical argument. There are genuinely limited quantities of these sealed first-edition boxes. No one is producing more of them, in contrast to stocks or real estate. Anyone in the collecting community will tell you that practically everything depends on the condition. A box that has been handled or damaged commands an entirely different conversation than one that has been carefully stored, unopened, and still in shrink wrap. Here, condition is not a detail. It’s the whole tale.
Observing all of this gives one the impression that the bidders at these auctions are more than just sentimental. They are making a deliberate assessment of cultural durability and scarcity. The popularity of Pokémon is enduring. The franchise celebrates its 25th anniversary, releases significant anniversary collections, collaborates with musicians like Katy Perry, and continues to draw in new fans. These valuations have a solid foundation. It took decades to build.
It’s really unclear if prices at this level can be sustained. However, Thomas Fish left that auction with something that most collectors will never own: a sealed, undamaged piece from 1999 that is still in its original shrinkwrap and is valued at $360,000 and up. It’s likely that someone in an attic has one of these and is unaware of it. The entire story seems a little incomplete just because of that thought.
