Sealed Pokémon Booster Box Sells For $360,000 To Shatter World Record at Heritage Auctions

The sale capped off the thrilling $7.83-million first day of Heritage’s Nov. 19-22 Comics & Comic Art event

DALLAS, Texas (November 19, 2020) — A sealed first edition Pokémon base set booster box set a world record when it sold for $360,000 in Heritage Auctions' Comics & Comic Art Auction Nov. 19-21. Thomas Fish, president of Blowoutcards.com, as the winning bidder of the Pokémon First Edition Base Set Sealed Booster Box (Wizards of the Coast, 1999).

"I am thrilled to purchase this pedigree box as well as the Pokémon Demo Game Sealed Booster Pack (Wizards of the Coast, 1998), PSA GEM MT 10, from the Pokémon Central Collection," Fish said. The single deck of cards booster pack ended at $22,800.

Still sealed in its original shrinkwrap, the Pokémon First Edition Base Set is considered the pinnacle of Pokémon box collecting. The sale broke the previous world record, which was set at Heritage Auctions in September 2020 when a similar set sold for $198,000.

"This set is the pinnacle for all Pokémon collectors, and the back-to-back record-breaking sales show that," Heritage Auctions Assistant Comics & Comic Art Operations Supervisor Jesus Garcia said. "This set comes from a very low print run, and to find one that is still sealed and in such great condition explains why the demand for it was so intense.”

Bidders were exceptionally aggressive in their pursuit of the lot. Online bids exceeded the previous world record before the auction even opened.

The Pokémon booster box wasn’t the only item smashing records at Heritage Auctions Thursday. The first day of Heritage’s four-day Comics & Comic art event also saw the highest price ever realized for a Batman comic book when a Fine/Very Fine 7.0 copy of Detective Comics No. 27 sold for $150,000.The first two sessions in the Comics & Comic Art auction realized a combined $7.83 million – with three days left in what’s shaping up to be a historic event.

Heritage Auctions' Comics & Comic Art Auction continues at 11 a.m. (Central time) Friday with the first session of the world's largest video games auction (the second session will be at 1 p.m. Central time Sunday). Friday's 1 p.m. floor session features nearly 200 lots of original art; Saturday will feature two internet sessions of comics and comic art, starting at 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. Central time.

Heritage Auctions is the largest fine art and collectibles auction house founded in the United States, and the world's largest collectibles auctioneer. Heritage maintains offices in New York, Dallas, Beverly Hills, San Francisco, Chicago, Palm Beach, London, Paris, Geneva, Amsterdam and Hong Kong.

Heritage also enjoys the highest Online traffic and dollar volume of any auction house on earth (source: SimilarWeb and Hiscox Report). The Internet's most popular auction-house website, HA.com, has more than 1,250,000 registered bidder-members and searchable free archives of five million past auction records with prices realized, descriptions and enlargeable photos. Reproduction rights routinely granted to media for photo credit.


Steve Lansdale, Public Relations Specialist
214-409-1699; SteveL@HA.com