Pokémon Card Collection Found in Attic Sells for £1.56m at Ewbank's

A collection of 42 sealed Pokémon card sets, stored in an attic for 15 years, fetched £1.56m at Ewbank's in Surrey on Wednesday, 22 October 2026. The seller, an unnamed retired decorator from Woking, learned the cards might be valuable only after reading in his local paper that a single card had sold for over £6,000. Ewbank's called it the UK's most valuable trading-card auction and suggested it could be a European record, surpassing the £872,000 total declared at Stanley Gibbons in London on 9 October. The top lot, a Legendary Collection Complete Master Set with a near-mint Charizard, was estimated at £15,000–£20,000 and brought £100,000. One set bought for £300 from a seller in Malaysia on eBay went for £75,000. James Spooner, Ewbank's head of trading cards, said staff were stunned by the mint-condition material, and auctioneer Andrew Ewbank, who ran the sale from the rostrum, reported bidders worldwide and described the atmosphere as a "hell of a ride." The seller, who began buying cards when his son collected them in the late 1990s, said the cards stayed untouched by the boy. Ewbank attributed current Pokémon demand to nostalgia among collectors now in their 30s and 40s with disposable income.