94 - KING POKEMON đź‘‘đź‘ľ
Hey there, !
Gather round, children, and hear the story of King Pokemon, the man who you could have been if you cared enough about Pokemon in the 90’s when it was a TCG…
Note: This short piece is gonna be excerpts from this wonderful article by Input Magazine, and usually it’s something I put in the links section below, but I thought it was just so good I needed to have a whole post dedicated to it.
Let’s dive in!
1.
Pokemon cards were status symbols in the primary school playground. No-one actually knew how to play the trading card game (TCG) per se, but just owning the physical card was enough. They were super valuable, at least in the minds of us 7 year olds (not unlike NFTs…), and having particular rare cards was an amazing achievement. It didn’t last a super long time (because everyone moved on to Yu-Gi-Oh! and actually learned how to play the card game), but it was still a fun time when it was around.
I actually didn’t own many original Pokemon cards - most of the ones I had were from counterfeit decks that I had bought in Shenzhen or Hong Kong. I loved collecting them - there was power in just the acquisition and ownership of the cards, and I got entire DECKS full of shinies, in a mixture of English, Japanese and Chinese. They were cheap, they were plentiful, and you could get cool ‘other’ version of decks that didn’t exist in Australia.
Unfortunately, the shine wore off when I realised how easy it was to tell they were fake (some of them were literally stickers LOL), and held no status power at all when I tried to play them against friends.
I then proceeded to not learn the lesson at all and buy a bunch of fake Yu-Gi-Oh decks as well.
Ugh.
2.
The King of Pokemon, however, made the most of this obsession…
The King is Gary Haase, a 67-year-old father of three from Las Vegas. His Pokémon TCG collection’s estimated total value is more than $10 million, making it the most expensive in the world.
$10m…for cardboard. How can you top that!?
The story starts at a Collect-a-Con, which already sounds like it’s from minds of the writers from Big Bang Theory, but is actually a legit convention for people to show off the shit they’ve collected (surely they should call it HoarderCon?). The value of these collections comes from how much people pay for them, and Haase is no stranger to big deals:
There have been exceptions, most famously Haase’s October sale of a PSA 10 first-edition Charizard card to controversial YouTuber Logan Paul for $150,000. (Official authentication services like PSA grade card conditions on a scale of 1, “Poor,” to 10, “Gem Mint,” and receiving a perfect 10 is extremely rare.)
Haase owns over 120 Gem Mint–graded Charizard cards, way more than anyone else.
“It just went bonkers,” says Brian Wiedman, a Heritage Auctions grader who facilitated a separate six-figure Pokémon sale to Paul. That same October, the ex-rapper Logic bought a different PSA 10 first-edition Charizard for $220,000 at auction. By December, another PSA 10 first-edition Charizard sold for $350,000 at auction.
They go into all the cool shit this guy has, and it’s just…it’s amazing. Imagine being a person in the world who has nearly 10% of this particular rare good:
Security walks backstage carrying a framed case containing a small fraction of Haase’s most valuable cards, including his famed Charizards and his first-edition sealed Base Set Booster box, which contains the original 150-card set of Pokémon. In January, such a box sold for over $400,000. Only 120 are thought to exist still in the original plastic wrap. Haase has nine of them. [emphasis mine]
Tell me you love Pokemon by telling me you love Pokemon. All you GenWunners who “love” the original 150 - eat your heart out.
His obsession for collecting is bordering on hoarding (Did anyone else know that Sailor Moon and The Addams Family had TCG’s?):
From bottle caps, he graduated to collecting comic books, rock posters, old sci-fi pulp magazines, and his personal favorite, trading cards. He owns (or has owned) complete sets of virtually every trading card game in existence, including television tie-ins for Sailor Moon and The Addams Family.
Today, Haase calls himself a “collectible hoarder,” meaning he hoards nothing but his collectibles. He’s got three storage lockers and three safety deposit boxes dedicated to all his stuff. Haase confesses that 90 percent of the things he collects are completely worthless, but he doesn’t care. [emphasis mine]
But that it’s also kinda sweet:
“Just about everything in my collection, if you were to hold it up in front of me and ask me about it, I can tell you the whole story about it,” Haase says. “I might not remember my wife’s birthday, but I’ll remember those things.”
And so King Pokémon remembers. He remembers first importing promotional Pokémon cards from Japan in 1998, before they were localized to the U.S. market. He remembers attending Frank & Son collectible shows every Wednesday and Saturday with his two sons after they took an interest in Pokémon.
There’s a portion of the article that talks about his relationship with Steve Aoki - an avid collector as well - who struck up a friendship and are now using their platforms to raise charity funds for autism research through the popularisation and sale of Pokemon cards.
And this is where the Netflix special plays the ‘dun dun…’ and changes the whole game in a series of flashbacks…
King Pokémon didn’t accidentally appear on a 2016 episode of Pawn Stars, offering to “sell” his entire Charizard collection for $500,000. Gary Haase doesn’t just sell his damn cards like that. He was using the show for marketing, and not to market his own wares, but Pokémon itself. His appearance is the second most-viewed Pawn Stars segment of all time on YouTube.
It was also the shrewd businessman who greeted Logan Paul last September, recognizing the potential of drawing the influencer into the hobby. He knew Paul’s only tattoos were of Pokémon. He saw the way Devon, a millennial, responded to Paul. He heard how Paul was courting high-end dealers and collectors behind the scenes. When Haase sold that PSA 10 first-edition Charizard to Paul, he told the YouTuber, “I want you to know it’s not because of the money.”
For anything that’s collectible, you have to make it so other people want it, and Haase got really good at exciting people in the hobby, finding the right channels to hype the shit out of Pokemon cards:
See, at a certain point, Haase realized that to truly make Pokémon cards more valuable, to ensure the hobby wouldn’t die, it was about convincing others that it was okay to love something as simple and pure and childlike as Pokémon. If a dad or uncle had permission to cover his basement in sports memorabilia, commemorating his childhood love and fandom, why couldn’t adults have that with Pokémon?
It’s the Ocean’s 11 fountain scene at the end of the movie when they revel in their success, the end part of the heist where you see ‘everything they thought would go wrong was ALL PART OF THEIR PLAN’.
Honestly, it’s a ridiculously fun article to read, and to gain a small bit of perspective into the life of King Pokemon.
Chat soon :)
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