My best friend from high school has been looking for his childhood Pokemon card collection for years, since I got back into collecting. He always claimed that it was somewhere in the crawl space storage area at his parents' house, but he spent the past few years living in various parts of the country and never really had a chance to go looking.

Recently, he moved back in with his parents. Before I moved to Florida, he and I went into the crawl space together to look for his cards, but had no luck. A few months ago, he was finally able to find them. He sent me pictures, and I was blown away by what I saw, especially by one card in particular:





That Mew Gold Star card in the top-right spot is extremely valuable. Even a damaged one would have been worth a few hundred dollars, but his is surprisingly in really good shape. I say "surprising" for a couple of reasons: generally speaking, most people's childhood cards are beat up due to playing with them, it was in the binder with no sleeve, and it was stored in a non-climate-controlled area for 15+ years. Kinda miraculous it's still in good condition.

I sent it to PSA for him last week, and we should hopefully get it back soon. My guess is it will likely get a 7, which would make it worth $800-$850. If it gets an 8 he's looking at $900-$950, a 9 would fetch around $2,000, and a 10 (which he definitely will not get due to minor scratching on the back) would be over $5,500.

That's actually a really cool find. I still have all of the pokémon cards I collected throughout elementary and middle school tucked away in my closet in a binder. I don't really collect cards anymore, but I've always wondered if I have anything of decent value in my collection. Anything remotely close to $1,000 is completely out of the question, but it's something I've never looked into before. Who knows, it might be worth it to crack open the ol' binder again just to see what some of my older cards go for these days, if only to satisfy my curiosity. I don't think I'd ever sell any of my cards unless I had a real gem in my possession somehow.

I almost didn't notice your friend has two Heracross cards. The fire type slipped under my radar because the artwork is a bit dark, plus I'd never expect Heracross to be a fire type lol. Very cool collection though! Now I'm really tempted to flip through my collection haha.

SacredShadow: The fire type Heracross is a "Delta Species" card. During the Ruby & Sapphire era they had Delta Species cards, which were essentially just Pokemon with different types than usual.

If you do dig out your collection and you have any questions about value or anything, send some pictures my way and I can help you out. I've been active in the hobby since 2019, and I'm pretty knowledgeable about cards from all eras.

Sorry for the double post, but I have an update.

The card has been graded by PSA, and it came back as a 9! Including his card, there are only 455 PSA 9 Gold Star Mews in existence. According to the PSA website, the most recent one to sell sold for $2,025 in October 2024, but eBay sold listings shows one selling for $1,800 on January 5th of this year.

There's nothing better than finding cards from years ago that go up in value. It's even more true with Pokemon when back in the day they were just cards for fun that you could forget about until they became super valuable. Now if you pull a $500 card, you know it's a $500 card and get excited but none of us cared or knew when we were kids

I don't think I had anything close to valuable for Pokemon cards but I know I had the three original Egyptian god cards for Yu-Gi-Oh and probably should have put them in some box or binder to forget about.

If anyone was interested in how this story ended, I helped him sell it for $1,800. I posted it for sale in a Facebook group and immediately got several offers. $1,800 was actually the first offer I got, and no one else was willing to beat it. It was a pretty great deal, because selling on Facebook saves about $200 in eBay fees. I had the buyer send the money to my friend and I shipped the card to the buyer. I had the card in my possession for maybe 12 hours.