A rare Raichu card from the earliest days of the Western Pokémon trading card game sold for $550,000 on Friday, via the auction house Heritage Auctions. The card looks like a promo card given out to players at prerelease events during the early Pokémon League - except that the so-called Prerelease Raichu was never issued as a promo card. This card should not exist.
Like all the rarest and most expensive Pokémon cards, there's a great story about how Prerelease Raichu came into existence, and why there are so few copies of it. Rumors of the card's existence circulated in the Pokémon TCG fandom from 1999, amplified by a few people inside then-publisher Wizards of the Coast who knew the truth, until it was finally confirmed as real in 2006.
Heritage Auctions gives a very abbreviated version of the card's history in its sales listing, but doesn't cite sources. I've turned to the 2006 forum post that first revealed the card for an earlier potted history.
The first report of the card came in 1999, from Pokegym forum member (and Japanese card translator) Edo, who attended the Tropical Mega Battle tournament in Hawaii. Friends with the WotC crew, he noticed that WotC rep Andrew Finch had a "strange error card" in his possession - a base set Raichu with a Prerelease stamp.
There were other in-person sightings of the card, often in the possession of another rep, Mike Boozer. It was Boozer who eventually confirmed the card's existence and provided photographs published in the Pokegym forum post linked above (though those original images are no longer online). He also explained the origins of the mysterious card.
The prerelease promo card for the original Pokémon League was a Clefable, from the Jungle set. The print sheet for this card was supposed to contain nothing but Clefables, but there was an error in the first version - a small number of cards on the sheet were Base Set Raichus, resulting in a handful of Raichus that looked like Prerelease promos.
The error was caught by management when they checked the proof sheets. Since the sheet was otherwise fine it was sliced into cards, but there was no use for the accidental Raichus - so WotC staff members took them home. In Fincher's account there were just eleven of the Prerelease Raichus - and in Boozer's, only eight.
It wasn't until 2023 that any copies of Prerelease Raichu were reviewed by a grading agency, with CGC certifying copies of the card with grades 5.5 and 8. The copy that sold via Heritage Auctions on September 19 has a grade 6 from PSA. It's the only copy of the card that PSA has graded, and there are no registered sales of the card on the PSA record prior to this one.
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If - like us - you really enjoy the stories behind the rarest, most collectible cards, check out our guide to the most expensive Yugioh cards. It's an equally fascinating deep dive into a totally different collector's market with just as many unique stories.