$21,100: Genius or Idiot?

The buyer paid 1.77x the comp median — and set the highest price this card has fetched in 90 days.

A PSA 7 copy of the 1996 Japanese CoroCoro Comic November promo Pikachu, card #025, sold on eBay for $21,100 on Aug. 4 after 28 bids. The matched-comp median for the same card in the same grade is $11,925.

Why it matters

That $21,100 is not just above the median. It is the highest price in the entire comp pool — 12 PSA 7 sales over 90 days, topping out at exactly this sale. The buyer did not pay a premium to the market. The buyer became the market.

By the numbers

• $11,925 — median of 12 PSA 7 sales of the same card, trailing 90 days.
• 1.77x — what the buyer paid against it, a premium of $9,175.
• $10,850 to $13,999 — the 25th-to-75th percentile band. This sale cleared the top of it by more than $7,000.

The intrigue

The genius case is the bidding. 28 bids is not one buyer overreaching — it is a room that kept going past $14,000 and did not stop. The comps back that up: the pool’s interquartile spread is only 1.29x, so this is a tightly priced card that a live auction still pushed to a record. When a narrow, liquid market breaks its own ceiling by that much, the ceiling is usually what was wrong.

Reality check

The idiot case is $9,175. That is what separates this sale from the median, and the pool’s floor is $7,600 — the same card, the same grade, at roughly a third of what was paid here. The market was also not moving: the 30-day median sits just 1.0% above the 90-day figure across 10 recent sales. This buyer paid a record into a flat tape, not a rising one.

What's next

• RazMania Buy Score: 44/100 — comp deviation 14/40, price discovery 15/15, trend 9/15, liquidity 6/15, scarcity 0/15.
• Verdict: FAIR BUY, at the low end of the band. A 1.77x multiple guts the deviation score, and a 28-bid auction is the only reason this is not an IDIOT.
• Watch the next PSA 7 to cross the block. At 12 sales a quarter this card trades often enough to test the new ceiling quickly. If the next one clears $15,000, this was early.

Between the lines

Two things our score cannot see. The scarcity component reads serial numbers, autographs and gem grades off the listing title, and this card has none — it scored 0/15 despite being a 1996 Japanese promo, which is a limit of the model, not a judgment on the card. We also have no population report. The day’s biggest confirmed sale was not this one either: a 2001 Japanese promo Birthday Pikachu went for $38,100, and a Bowman Chrome Kon Knueppel Red Lava auto numbered 1/5 went for $23,999. Both returned fewer than 3 comparable sales in 90 days, and there is no honest way to score a card with nothing to measure it against.

How we track this

RazMania monitors completed eBay sales daily, filtering out multi-card lots, reprints, and cross-listed items to isolate genuine single-card sales. Prices are final sold prices. Comparable-sale medians are calculated from 12 verified sales over the trailing 90 days. eBay reports sold date, not sold time.