In the winter of 2014, The Pokémon Company ran a drawing contest in Japan. You played a 3DS game called Pokémon Art Academy, painted something in Free Paint mode, and posted it to Miiverse, a social network that no longer exists. A panel that included Mitsuhiro Arita, who drew the original Charizard, picked ten winners, announced that March. Each one got 100 copies of a real, official Pokémon card with their drawing on it. The cards were never sold anywhere. They went home with the winners, and for most of the next decade nobody paid much attention to them.
On Sunday night, one of those cards, a Mudkip by a contestant named Daisuke Ochiai, sold at Goldin for $4,880,000 after 73 bids. The same week, a Pikachu Illustrator, the most famous card in Pokémon, sold at Alt for $3.24 million. On the week's leaderboard the Illustrator finished second, behind a Mudkip that a contest entrant painted on a 3DS.
It's a strange result and also, once you look at the grades, a fairly rational one. There are about a hundred of that Mudkip in the world, more than twice as many as there are Illustrators. But only three have ever graded a PSA 10, and the Illustrator that sold this week was a PSA 9, one of fifteen at that grade. So the comparison that matters is three perfect copies against fifteen very good ones, and on that math a Mudkip at $4.88 million is a lot less crazy than the headline makes it sound. Seventy-three people bid on it. The Mudkip isn't the number we keep coming back to.
The number we keep coming back to is from a different auction house, and it's fourteen.
On October 18, Fanatics Collect closed a weekly auction with $29.7 million in winning bids across 15,000 lots. By the following Thursday, according to TCGCharts, which has been checking payment status lot by lot, buyers had paid for about $4.2 million of it. Fourteen percent. Of the 39 lots that cleared $100,000, the number paid was zero. The week before that, $30.6 million bid, 21% paid. Three different PSA 10 Legendary Collection Charizards got bid above $575,000 in eight days. None of them, at last check, had been paid for.
Then there's the $8.4 million Raincoat Pikachu from September, another Art Academy card, which was the second-most-expensive Pokémon card ever sold for about three weeks. Its lot page went from unpaid, to cancelled, to "paid" in the sales feed, while the page itself still read cancelled and listed the card's value at about $1 million. A different PSA 10 of the same card sold at Goldin on October 11 for $1,037,000. That one appears to have been paid. Nobody outside Fanatics has been able to say whether the $8.4 million ever moved.
The fix Fanatics announced doesn't quite fix it. Fanatics Collect started requiring a credit card on file to bid on October 14, which sounds like a fix. But the card only gets charged automatically on unpaid invoices of $10,000 or less. Above that, a non-payer gets a restricted account and the card gets relisted. So the rule works hardest on the $500 slabs and does nothing to the $600,000 ones, which is exactly backwards from where the problem is.
Paying used to be the boring part. You won on Sunday, the invoice came Monday, you wired it sometime that week, and nobody wrote a word about any of it. What's changed is that the Sunday number now travels on its own. It's in Card Ladder, in PSA's cert lookup, and in the collection apps within days, while the invoice sits for two weeks. If the money never comes, there's no mechanism for pulling the number back out of all the places it already went, and the next copy gets bid against it anyway. Sometimes literally the same copy: Fanatics relisted eight slabs from unpaid lots on Sunday, and seven closed lower, including a Neo Revelation Ho-Oh that had been bid to $156,000 three weeks earlier and came back at $48,000.
We'll say the obvious thing: we care about this more than most, because tash's whole premise is that card prices can be measured, and a bid that never settles isn't a price. It's the reason we read the paid flag before we read the number. To Fanatics' credit, that flag exists. Its sales history page says plainly that unpaid results get removed, and back when the platform was still PWCC it published payment rates for every auction, which ran 94 to 98 percent in 2022. The problem isn't the policy. It's the lag: a number lives in the hobby for a week or three before the removal catches up to it, and as far as we can find, Goldin and Heritage don't show payment status on their public results at all.
The other side of this deserves its own paragraph. Goldin's Pokémon night did $29.5 million across 546 lots with a median sale of $5,490, and Goldin starts new bidders at a $10,000 limit and screens them before letting them go higher, which Fanatics' weekly auctions don't. Heritage set Mantle records on Saturday that nobody is contesting. And on that same Sunday night, six Gold Star cards in PSA 10 closed at both Goldin and Fanatics, and Goldin's copy went higher on four of the six, which is not what you'd see if Goldin were the one printing inflated numbers. So this isn't a story about a fake market. It's a story about two venues selling identical cards, where one venue's results have mostly cleared and the other's mostly haven't, and the headlines don't tell you which is which.
The Art Academy cards are a good story and we expect to keep writing about them. A fan drawing beating the Illustrator says something true about how much an origin story is worth in this hobby. But we'd trade the whole $4.88 million headline for one column in one spreadsheet: the one that says paid or unpaid next to each lot. Somebody is going to publish that eventually, probably because they're made to. The prices will look different afterward, and we'd rather find out how different now than in six months.
