Written by: Chris Nguyen | 🕓 4 minute read

Listen to the audio version of the blog:

To all of my 1990’s peeps in the world, have you ever asked your parents to buy you those Yu-Gi-Oh or Pokemon cards at the toy store when you were kids? And when you guys got older, did your parents tell you to get rid of them because they were just useless pieces of paper? 

Well, if you still have your old Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh cards today, then you have made the right decision. Your parents are T O T A L L Y WRONG about the worth of your old cards because right now your cards could fetch a couple hundred or maybe even thousands of dollars! Just one rare card that you might pull from a random booster pack 20 years ago could be worth about 20 times the cost of that booster pack today. 

When Gen, Nick, and I were kids, we would always ask our parents to buy us a ton of Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon cards from Toys-R-Us or KB Toys (For you youngsters out there, these places were the main places for us millennials to buy toys back then. RIP that these places are no longer with us). Eventually, during our elementary school years, we pulled many rare cards from several booster packs that cost about $3.00 at the time. And over the years, the price of each of our rare cards was worth more than the li xi money that we got from Lunar New Years. 

I remembered one time when we went to the CVS my mom worked at as a kid back in Boston. While waiting for my mom to get off of her shift, I saw a random Pokemon booster pack on the floor next to me. Thinking that it might have some legendary pokemon card in it, I begged my mom to buy it for me after work (thanks as always mom, I love you).

If you’re wondering whether I got any legendary Pokemon cards from that pack...well, unfortunately I didn’t 😭. However, something interesting did come out of it! A shiny torchic with a star next to the name (If you don’t know what a torchic is, then go watch the anime! SUBBED!). Because of how interesting that card looked, I held on to it for many years and as of today, that card is worth $500.00. 

WOW!! Right? Can you believe that some piece of thin cardboard that we got for $3.00 is worth so much today?

Well, the reason these cards are sooo expensive today is because they don’t make them anymore, making them valuable collectible items as the years go by.

So for y’all who still have your old trading cards, make sure you keep them because they are like stocks. Their value can change for the worst or for the better over time, but if you keep them in good condition, this will most likely be for the better since you can’t find them in stores anymore. If you have enough of rare, vintage, and collectible ones, you might be able to cover the cost of your college tuition. You never know. 😉 

A holographic PSA 10 first edition charizard can be worth anywhere from $20,000-$50,000 today! 

(Thank you mom and dad for buying us all of those cards back then!) 

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