A collection of 42 complete Pokemon card master sets that sat in a Surrey attic for 15 years sold at Ewbank’s on October 21 for a premium-inclusive total of 1.56 million pounds, roughly 2.1 million dollars. The auction house says it is the most valuable trading card sale ever held in the United Kingdom.
The seller is a retired painter and decorator from Woking who bought the sets on eBay in the late 1990s after his son started trading Pokemon cards at school. He asked not to be named. Before the sale, Ewbank’s had estimated the collection at around 250,000 pounds. The hammer total came in at 1.2 million pounds before the buyer’s premium was added.
The top lot was a Legendary Collection Complete Master Set with a near-mint Charizard. It hammered at 100,000 pounds against an estimate of 15,000 to 20,000 pounds, a result that fits the pattern of Legendary Collection prices PokeForecast has been following since Logan Paul announced his Legendary Collection box opening.
What Sold at Ewbank’s and for How Much
The sale took place at Ewbank’s Burnt Common Auction Rooms in Send, just outside Woking, on Wednesday, October 21. The Alton Herald reported a hammer total of 1.2 million pounds and a final total of 1.56 million pounds once the buyer’s premium was added. Ewbank’s described the result as the most valuable Pokemon trading card auction in UK history and said it may be a European record, which the auction house has not been able to confirm.
The collection consisted of 42 complete master sets. According to James Spooner, Ewbank’s head of trading cards, 41 of them were sold and the owner kept one. Spooner told IBTimes UK that commission bids had already reached 825,000 pounds by the day before the auction, more than three times the pre-sale estimate for the whole collection.
The Legendary Collection Complete Master Set was the headline lot. IBTimes UK reported that it contained all 110 cards from the set, another 110 reverse holo “Firework” cards and four box toppers, with the Charizard in near-mint condition. It hammered at 100,000 pounds against a 15,000 to 20,000 pound estimate. Dexerto put the figure at approximately 134,000 dollars.
A second set, which the owner originally bought for around 300 pounds, sold for 75,000 pounds. The Alton Herald also reported that his first purchase was a Sky Ridge set with a Charizard that Ewbank’s valued before the sale at 20,000 to 40,000 pounds. Full lot-by-lot results for the remaining sets have not been widely reported.
The previous UK record for a trading card auction, according to Ewbank’s, was set only twelve days earlier. A Stanley Gibbons sale in London on October 9 declared a total of 872,000 pounds.
How a Decorator Ended Up With 42 Master Sets
The owner did not build the collection by opening packs. He told the auction house that he bought complete sets from an eBay seller in Malaysia who had two or three copies of each issue and offered him full master sets. In his words: “I thought that it would be cheaper to buy the full set rather than keep buying sealed packs of random cards in hope that when you opened them you could complete a set.”
The cards went straight into bespoke Pokemon binders while still sealed and never made it into his son’s hands. “He had his own cards, but he never got to touch these, I’m glad to say,” he said. When the son lost interest, the binders went into the attic and stayed there for about 15 years.
He only sought a valuation after reading in his local paper that a single Pokemon card had sold for more than 6,000 pounds. He took a sample to Ewbank’s, which has run dedicated trading card auctions for about five years. Until this sale, the firm’s total trading card sales across that whole period came to a little over 1.1 million pounds.
Spooner described the moment the scale became clear: “When we then discovered that he had 42 such sets, our jaws hit the floor. We got to sell 41 of them, and he kept one.”
Andrew Ewbank, who conducted the sale himself, said saleroom attendance was the highest at any Ewbank’s auction since before the pandemic, with YouTubers, collectors and investors among the bidders. “The build-up to this sale has been phenomenal, and on the day it did not disappoint,” he said.
Why Complete Master Sets Drew These Prices
The lots that drove this result were complete sets, not graded singles. That matters because most of the record prices PokeForecast has covered this year have been for individual PSA 10 cards. The UltraBall study of six-figure sales found that 406 of 525 transactions over 100,000 dollars this year involved PSA 10 cards.
A complete master set is a different kind of purchase. The buyer gets every card in the set in one transaction, and the value of the lot depends on the condition of the whole run rather than one slabbed card. Ewbank’s described the collection as mint and untouched, which is the condition a set collector has to pay for because assembling the same run card by card from the open market takes years and usually produces a set with mixed condition.
Legendary Collection is the clearest case. The set’s reverse holo cards carry a fireworks foil pattern that is hard to find without surface wear, and the recent auction results for single PSA 10 reverse holos have been extraordinary. A complete reverse holo run in strong condition, sitting untouched in a binder since the early 2000s, is the raw material for a lot of potential grading submissions. Bidders know that, and the 100,000 pound hammer price reflects it.
The 300 pound set that sold for 75,000 pounds tells the same story from the other direction. Complete sets from the early 2000s were cheap when nobody expected them to appreciate, and sealed storage preserved exactly the condition the market now pays for.
Where This Sits in the Wider Market
The Ewbank’s result arrives during a stretch of unusually strong vintage activity. PokeForecast’s own tracking showed vintage cards from 1999 to 2007 gaining 12.1 percent over 30 days while modern cards fell, and the UltraBall study counted 360 six-figure sales between September 1 and October 16.
The UK has not been the center of that activity. Most of the headline sales have come through Goldin, Fanatics Collect, Heritage and Alt in the United States. A 1.56 million pound total at a regional Surrey auction house, with a 872,000 pound London sale as the previous record set less than two weeks earlier, shows that the demand is reaching venues well outside the usual American auction calendar.
It is also worth being clear about what the total does and does not say. The 1.56 million pound figure includes the buyer’s premium, and auction houses report totals this way. The hammer total of 1.2 million pounds is the amount bidders actually bid. Neither figure says anything about whether individual sets would bring the same money again next month, because 41 complete master sets in this condition from one owner is not a sale that repeats.
Ewbank’s has not published whether every lot has been paid for. PokeForecast noted in its coverage of the UltraBall study that some reported auction results at other houses were still awaiting payment, and the same caution applies to any auction total until the house confirms settlement.
What the Ewbank’s Sale Means for Pokemon Card Collectors
For a collector sitting on older complete sets, this sale is a data point rather than a price guide. Here is what it does tell you:
- Condition is the whole story for sets. These sets sold for what they did because they were filed sealed and never handled. A played set from the same era is a different product with a different buyer pool.
- Complete sets can beat the sum of their singles. Collectors paid a premium to acquire entire runs at once rather than assembling them. If you own a complete set in strong condition, breaking it up is not automatically the better route.
- Legendary Collection is being priced on its reverse holos. The 100,000 pound hammer for the master set is consistent with the single-card results for PSA 10 reverse holos this autumn. Check the set page on PokeForecast for current sale prices before deciding what to do with a copy.
- Regional auction houses are now a real venue. A seller in the UK no longer has to ship to an American house to reach serious bidders. The international bidding Ewbank’s described is the reason the estimate was exceeded six times over.
- Get a valuation before you assume. The owner had no idea what he had until he asked. Ewbank’s advice after the sale was to get stored collections down and looked at, and that applies whether the answer turns out to be six figures or sixty pounds.
If you are weighing whether to grade cards out of a set like this, the Card Grader gives a grade and return estimate as guidance, and the condition guide explains what graders actually look for on vintage reverse holos.
My Read: The Estimate Was Wrong Because the Comps Were Old
My read is that the gap between the 250,000 pound estimate and the 1.56 million pound result is the most useful number in this story. Ewbank’s is not a careless house. Its specialists had the sets in hand for weeks and still landed six times low. That tells me the comparable sales they had to work from were already out of date by the time the catalogue went out, because Legendary Collection and other early 2000s material repriced sharply in September and October.
I would not read this as a sign that every attic binder is worth a fortune. The sets were complete, sealed into binders from day one and untouched for 15 years, which is a combination most collections do not have. What I take from it is narrower: in a market moving this quickly, a pre-sale estimate based on last spring’s results can be badly behind, and that cuts both ways for buyers and sellers.
Disclaimer: Not investment advice. Pokemon card values are speculative and can decline.