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“I want to get this card graded,” my kid said to me yesterday about a full-art Furret he particularly loves. I looked at it closely, and pointing to a white fleck about half a millimeter in diameter on the top border I said, “It’s probably not worth it.” Such is the ridiculous standard required for grading Pokémon cards to a level that makes them valuable. Which makes it all the more surprising that someone just paid $550 for a Gold Star Charizard (thanks WarGamer!) in such bad condition that it looks like it spent most of its last 19 years lying in a puddle.
The Gold Star Charizard is a legendary card that appeared in 2006’s EX Dragon Frontiers set, and one of the reasons that buying a sealed pack from that set will cost you around $1,000. A sealed booster box containing 36 packs could set you back $135,000. (Even the empty cardboard box that once contained the cards goes for over $200!) And the reason why is that a Gold Star Charizard in perfect condition, such that it receives a PSA grading of 10, is currently valued at over $58,000. Just loose out of the pack it will fetch you nearly $2k, and cards graded with the second-worst possible PSA rating, a 1, are priced at around $1,700. And that’s just the Zard. The Gold Star Mew in the same set fetches $7,500 in a PSA 10, and the Rayquaza ex gets as high as $3,700. There’s a lot of value to be found in those packs…if you’re fantastically lucky.
Or, if you’ve been collecting for a while, you could go through your own collection and discover you pulled the card in 2006 without even knowing what it was, maybe played a few games with it, used it to practice flicking cards at your sister, then eventually dropped it in a pile on the floor which your mom picked up and put in a shoe box and then stored in a damp corner at the back of the attic. If so, you could have a cool $550 on your hands!
It’s impossible to overstate just how terrible the card sold by eBay seller roye_richa is. It looks like it was somehow set on fire and drowned at the same time. Listed as the “WORLDS WORST CHARIZARD GOLD STAR EX Dragon Frontiers 100/101,” and originally priced at a somewhat optimistic $911, the entry made no bones about the state of it.
“Ladies and Gentleman up for grabs is the worlds WORST Charizard Good Star,” begins the item description on eBay. “This is a card I have had since my childhood—technically. I found it on the playground after a rainy day—short to say this card is TRASHED. It barely constitutes as a card anymore it’s in such poor shape. The back of the card is ruined. The front is intact albeit again—severely worn.”
And then again for emphasis:
“Again you are NOT purchasing a card of decent condition in any sense of the word. This is for the collector that needs this legendary card in hilariously awful condition—it’s truly one of a kind.”
It’s not clear where WarGamer got the detail of the card’s $550 sale price from, but the card definitely did sell to one bold collector. And, admittedly, this is the cheapest possible way to become the owner of such a card, even if it’s the most bedraggled one imaginable.
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John Walker
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