Found Your Childhood Pokémon Cards? Here’s What to Do

The Pokémon card craze of the late 90s and early 00s is experiencing a boom, and if you have an old stack of cards somewhere, they might well be worth some money. Digital card marketplaces allow easy checking of card value, and a safe place to buy and sell cards as well.

If you grew up in the late 90s or early 00s, the odds are pretty good that you were into Pokémon. The show, the games, the movies and the Pokémon Trading Card Game are all nostalgic pieces of our youth, but those old cards might be more than just a way to get a nostalgia hit; they might actually be worth something. In the last couple of years, the Pokémon Trading Card Game has experienced a significant boom, with die-hard collectors, old fans and new fans all engaging with the hobby. 

As interest in collecting Pokémon cards comes back into vogue, and you see social media posts that remind you of your old collection, it might inspire you to dig out your old cards. After you’ve finished enjoying the nostalgia of looking through your old collection, you might want to check what your cards are worth, as some Pokémon cards are worth more than a pretty penny to the right collector. Digital card marketplaces are the perfect way to quickly check out the value of cards, and can easily tell you if you are holding on to a valuable collection, or just one resplendent with nostalgia.

Let’s look at what we recommend you do with your old Pokémon card collection, should you dig it out of storage.

Keep Them, Don’t Waste Them

First and foremost, don’t throw them away! Unless they are severely damaged in some way, those cards could be worth money, and even if they aren’t now, maybe they will be in the future. It doesn’t take up much room to keep some cards, and they could pay dividends.

Once you check out how much they’re worth, you can make an informed decision about keeping them, but even if you decide you don’t want them, donating them for free to a hobby store or in some other way putting them back into circulation is better than simply chucking them.

Get Organized and Sort Them

Regardless of how big your old collection might be, organizing them and sorting them will make it easier to do anything with them, including checking their value. Some cards might be more obviously valuable-looking, like promo cards or cards with holographic backs, but there are a range of other ways to sort them.

The way you sort them initially doesn’t matter too much, as long as you have some sort of consistent logic to it, and are able to remember what goes where. After you check the value of them, you should, of course, sort them in a way that protects and separates the more valuable cards from the rest.

Check If They Are Well-Preserved

One of the big differentiators in how valuable a Pokémon card is is often the condition it is in. While checking out prices, tempering your expectations for your card’s worth by being realistic about the condition they are in is important. While some signs of wear or damage are obvious, factors such as the following commonly come into play as well:

• Scratches on the card surface.
• Creases.
• If the corners are still sharp.
• How clean the card surface is.
• How white the edges have become.
• If the art is well centered.

Well-preserved and pristine cards, especially cards that are rare, fetch much better prices than the same card in poor condition. Unless your past childhood self spent time sleeving and protecting the cards in some way, it is pretty likely that they’ll be damaged to some extent, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be worthless.

How To Research How Valuable Your Cards Are

Once your cards are organized and you’ve taken time to inspect the condition they are in, you should spend some time figuring out if any of them are particularly valuable. The best way to do this is by visiting a digital card marketplace. These marketplaces offer a whole host of user-friendly features that make looking up the true market value of a card relatively simple. You can not only check sellers’ listings of cards, but also recent sale histories, which are a much better representation of market demand.

When using a digital card market, try to make sure you are comparing your cards correctly; look for:

• Card numbers.
• Set and edition markers.
• Cards of a similar condition.
• Cards that are graded or ungraded (probably ungraded, if you dug it out of your attic a few hours ago).

Once you feel like you have a good handle on what’s valuable and what’s not, then you can make educated decisions about whether to keep your cards, sell them, start building your own collection or whatever else you might want to do with them.

Final Thoughts

If you’ve been tempted by all the social media hype to dig out your old Pokémon cards, you certainly aren’t alone. Hopefully, your cards are worth more than ours! But one thing is certain: having a riffle through those old cards is a fun nostalgia hit, and even doing some research into which cards are more valuable and why was sort of fun. 

Who knows what old craze from the 90s and early 00s will come back next? Anyone still holding on to some Beyblades or Tamagotchis?