A retired decorator from Woking turned 42 complete Pokémon sets into £1.56m when Ewbank's in Surrey sold them on 21 October. The pre-sale estimate was around £250,000, and the hammer prices alone came to £1.2m before buyer's fees, the Farnham Herald reports.
He started buying in the late 1990s while his son was into the cards, ordering whole sets on eBay from a seller in Malaysia rather than opening packs. The binders then spent roughly 15 years in the attic. One set that cost him about £300 went for £75,000. The top lot, according to the BBC, was a Legendary Collection master set with a near-mint Charizard, estimated at £15,000 to £20,000 and sold for £100,000.
Ewbank's calls it the most valuable trading card auction ever held in the UK and suggests it may be a European record too. The British mark it beat was barely two weeks old: a Stanley Gibbons sale in London on 9 October that made £872,000. The seller has stayed anonymous; Dexerto and Italy's ANSA picked up the story.