A retired decorator from Woking kept 42 Pokémon master sets in his attic for 15 years. On Oct. 21, 41 of them sold at Ewbank's in Surrey for a total of £1.56 million, which the auction house calls the UK's best ever trading card auction. The set he says cost him about £300 hammered at £75,000. Two things about the £1.56 million are worth knowing before repeating it: it includes what buyers paid on top of the hammer, and the record it is measured against has been reported two different ways.

The Sale

The single-owner sale was titled "Pokémon: A Decade of Masters (1999-2009)." Wealth of Geeks, in a report carried by Yahoo, counts 160 lots in the catalogue. Ewbank's says it was the house's most successful sale in more than 30 years of business.

The seller, who does not want to be named, told Ewbank's that his son started trading cards at school in the late 1990s. He thought they "looked nice" and might be a good investment, so he bought complete master sets on eBay from a seller in Malaysia rather than chase them pack by pack. The sets went into bespoke Pokémon binders, still sealed, and up to the attic once his son lost interest. "He had his own cards, but he never got to touch these," the seller said.

What sent him back to the attic was a local newspaper story about Ewbank's selling a single card for more than £6,000. That card came from teacher Andrew Braund's collection, three cards of which sold at Ewbank's in April for £32,800 and helped pay for his wedding. The decorator found he owned several cards of the same type and took a sample in. "When we then discovered that he had 42 such sets, our jaws hit the floor," said James Spooner, Ewbank's head of trading cards. "We got to sell 41 of them, and he kept one."

Hammer and Total

Ewbank's published terms charge buyers a 25% premium on the hammer price, plus VAT on that premium. Yahoo puts the combined charge at 30% on top of the hammer, and reports that the £1.56 million includes those fees. The sale's combined hammer prices came to about £1.2 million.

The lot figures Ewbank's gives in its own release are hammer prices, so they sit on a different basis from the total:

  • Legendary Collection Complete Master Set — all 110 cards, the 110 reverse holos and the four box toppers, with a near-mint Charizard. Estimate £15,000-£20,000. Hammer £100,000; £130,000 with fees, per the official result Yahoo cites.
  • Skyridge Complete Master Set — the first set the seller bought, for "around £300," he said. Estimate £20,000-£40,000. Hammer £75,000; £97,500 with fees.
  • EX-era sets — Yahoo lists an EX Holon Phantoms master set at £91,000 with fees, and EX Deoxys and EX Team Rocket Returns sets at £84,500 each.

Analysis: None of these figures is wrong. They measure different things. The top lot's winning bid was £100,000, and its buyer paid £130,000. A headline total read beside lot hammers mixes the two bases.

Which Record?

Ewbank's release says the £1.56 million "beat the previous best, set in March this year in London, when a sale at Stanley Gibbons took a total of just over £986,000 including buyer's premium." Yahoo repeats that benchmark.

The BBC's Oct. 22 report, also attributing the comparison to Ewbank's, gives a different one: a previous best "set only on 9 October in London, when a sale at Stanley Gibbons declared a sale total of £872,000."

On the European question, Ewbank's own words are careful: "Although unconfirmed, Ewbank's believe it may also be a European record."

Analysis: The UK record is Ewbank's claim. As its release frames it, the claim compares a fee-inclusive total with a fee-inclusive total, and it clears either Stanley Gibbons figure by more than £570,000. The two benchmarks do not change the outcome. They do mean the size of the margin depends on which report you read.

The Estimate

The sale outran its own house. "We thought it might go as high as £270,000," Spooner said, "then the pre-sale bids started coming in and we realised we were on to something much bigger. The day before the sale we already had £825,000 in commission bids." Yahoo puts the early estimate at £250,000 to £270,000 and notes the commission bids alone were more than three times its top end.

Andrew Ewbank, who conducted the sale himself and told the room afterwards he was "going for a lie down," said the result beat the house's previous single-sale record: the Robertson Collection of material from Francis Bacon's studio, which grossed over £1 million in 2007. He told the BBC that Pokémon is "booming," driven by buyers who were children when it launched and are now in their 30s and 40s with "a bit of disposable income."

Ewbank's £1.56 million is a fee-inclusive total, and it is a record by the house's own claim. Measured against either Stanley Gibbons figure, the claim holds. The cleaner number is the hammer: a set its owner says he bought for about £300 drew a winning bid of £75,000, and its buyer paid £97,500.

Confidence note: The sale date, total, lot estimates and hammer prices, the Stanley Gibbons March benchmark, the quotations from James Spooner, Andrew Ewbank and the seller, and the Francis Bacon comparison are from Ewbank's own results release. The Oct. 9 Stanley Gibbons benchmark and Andrew Ewbank's remarks on buyers are from BBC News (Joshua Askew, Oct. 22, 2026). The buyer's premium terms, the fee-inclusive lot prices, the approximate £1.2 million hammer total, the 160-lot count, the April 16 Braund sale date and the early estimate range are from Yahoo News via Wealth of Geeks (Milos Komnenovic, Oct. 25, 2026). Passages labeled Analysis are the blog's interpretation.