On the night of August 9-10, 2026, a 1999 Japanese promo card carrying a photograph a kid took inside a Nintendo 64 game sold for $809,943. The card was a CoroCoro Best Photo Contest #1 Snap Bulbasaur. The grade was PSA NM-MT 8. Thirteen months earlier, a PSA 9 of the identical card had traded at Fanatics Collect for $200,000, per RetroDodo's reporting. The lower-graded copy beat the higher-graded copy's own record by $609,943 - about 4.05x.
That is the whole story in one paragraph, and it is genuinely strange. It is also one auction, on one night, with at least four cards from the same promo family crossing in the same session. Both of those things are true at once, and the second one matters more than most of the coverage has allowed.
What the card actually is
In 1999, Pokémon Snap let players print photos taken in-game at Blockbuster kiosks. Two separate contests then turned a handful of those photos into physical Pokémon cards, and the distinction between them is load-bearing for everything below.
Per Pokumon's documentation of both contests and Bulbapedia's illustration-contest records:
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The CoroCoro Comic Best Photo Contest - announced in the June 1999 issue (released May 15, 1999), winners announced August 1999, cards mailed that November. Five winning designs: Bulbasaur, Poliwag, Magikarp, Gyarados, Pikachu. 20 copies of each design, all sent to that design's single winner.
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The TV Tokyo "64 Mario Stadium" Best Photo Contest - announced June 10, 1999. Five winning designs: Charmander, Squirtle, Koffing, Articuno, Chansey. 15 copies of each design, again to one winner apiece.
The Bulbasaur is a CoroCoro card - that is the pop-20 design. The Charmander, Squirtle, and Chansey that also set records at Goldin are 64 Mario Stadium cards, printed in 15s. Conflating the two produces a supply figure that is wrong by 25% on three of the four headline lots.
One more piece of housekeeping: the numbers in the lot titles - #1 Bulbasaur, #4 Charmander, #7 Squirtle, #113 Chansey - are National Pokédex numbers, not rarity ranks or scarcity tiers. "#1" reads like a claim. It isn't one.
The population arithmetic, done carefully
Sports Illustrated reports roughly 20 copies of the Snap Bulbasaur worldwide, 7 graded by PSA, and 2 of those at PSA 9. Those are SI's figures, and they're worth attributing that way rather than quoting as PSA's own.
The number that has been getting mangled is the gap. Twenty printed minus seven in the PSA census leaves 13 copies unaccounted for, not two - the "2" is the count of PSA 9s. That is a materially larger raw overhang than the shorthand suggests.
It is also not 13 cards waiting to be found. Some are in CGC, BGS, or TAG holders and simply outside PSA's report. Some are damaged. Some no longer exist. The 13 is a ceiling on hidden supply, not an inventory.
There's also live drift in the pop data worth checking before anyone prices off it. A Goldin lot description for a PSA MINT 9 example of this card describes it as one of only three graded at that tier with none higher - three, against SI's two. Pull the current PSA population report at the moment you're transacting and attribute whichever figure you use.
Why the grade ladder stopped existing
With seven graded examples total, there is no PSA 8 tier and no PSA 9 tier. There are individual cards. A "tier" requires enough copies for the market to price the difference between them repeatedly; seven slabs spread across a grade range doesn't get you there.
The contrast is instructive. At Goldin's February 2026 auction, a 1999 Base Set 1st Edition Holo Charizard in PSA GEM MT 10 sold for $954,800, per Auction Report's results roundup. Published estimates put 1st Ed Charizard at roughly 120-124 PSA 10s out of about 4,993 graded copies (figures vary by report date - verify before relying on them). That is a card where grade is a real, continuously-priced variable, because thousands of comparisons exist.
And the pop-7 Snap Bulbasaur in PSA 8 cleared roughly 85% of that price. The blue-chip PSA 10 was only about 18% more expensive than a mid-grade card from a promo run of twenty.
The three-point tape
What makes this more than a single anomalous print is that the same card has a genuine, if short, trading history:
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Nov 18, 2023 - $80,520 at Goldin ($66,000 hammer plus a 22% buyer's premium). Contemporaneous coverage identifies that example as a PSA 9.
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July 2025 - $200,000, PSA 9, at Fanatics Collect.
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Aug 2026 - $809,943, PSA 8, at Goldin.
Three marks in 33 months, and the last one arrives a full grade tier lower than the two before it. The cleanest condition-agnostic data point in the whole family is the Squirtle: a PSA 8 brought $73,200 at Goldin in November 2023, and a PSA 6 - a different physical copy, two tiers down - brought $555,100 in August 2026. Down two grades, up roughly 7.6x.
Run the 2023 trio against the 2026 trio at the same auction house and the pattern holds at the aggregate: Bulbasaur PSA 9 $80,520 + Charmander PSA 7 $79,300 + Squirtle PSA 8 $73,200 = $233,000 in November 2023, per GamesRadar+'s report on that sale. In August 2026: $809,943 + $640,500 + $555,100 = $2,005,543. About 8.6x in under three years.
Character beat condition, on the same night
Goldin's Summer TCG Auction totaled more than $18 million, per the auction house's release and independent confirmation from The Beat. Inside it, three more Snap Best Photo promos set character records:
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64 Mario Stadium #4 Charmander, PSA NM-MT 8 - $640,500
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64 Mario Stadium #7 Squirtle, PSA EX-MT 6 - $555,100
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64 Mario Stadium #113 Chansey, PSA NM 7 - $488,500
Read that ladder in order: an 8, then a 6, then a 7. The PSA 6 Squirtle outsold the PSA 7 Chansey by $66,600. Within this session, character demand ranked above condition tier, and the ranking wasn't subtle.
That is four lots, not a dataset. It is suggestive of how thin-pop promos price, and it is not evidence of a general rule.
The provenance case - and where it stops
What separates these from ordinary low-pop cards is that supply for each design passed through a single household in 1999. All 20 CoroCoro Bulbasaurs went to one winner, Yuuki Tanaka of Saitama. All 15 64 Mario Stadium Charmanders went to Tsukasa Hosono. Nobody was allocated a few copies each; one person got the entire print run of their design.
Hosono has spoken about what happened next. In an interview published by Johto, he says he gave most of his 15 copies to relatives and friends, that relatives "either threw them away when renovating their house," and that he holds roughly five today.
That is the strongest survivorship evidence available in this family: first-hand testimony that the surviving population sits well below the distributed population. It is also testimony about the Charmander, from a 15-copy run. It is not evidence about the Bulbasaur's 20, and it shouldn't be laundered into one.
If you're holding a raw copy
The instinct is to grade it. Here that instinct is weaker than usual, for a specific reason: a PSA 8 just outsold a PSA 9's entire trading history on this card. If the market isn't paying a reliable premium for the higher tier, submitting converts a card with optionality into a card with a fixed, published number attached - and a bad outcome is a permanent, searchable mark against a design with seven data points total.
Grading here is a bet on a grading outcome in a market that has not demonstrated it prices grading outcomes. That's a different trade than the usual "slab it to unlock value" logic, and it deserves to be evaluated as one.
The comp problem, stated plainly
Ten Best Photo designs exist. Four have recent public sales. Six do not: Poliwag, Magikarp, Gyarados, and Pikachu from CoroCoro; Koffing and Articuno from 64 Mario Stadium.
Two of those six have stale marks and nothing since - a Snap Magikarp reportedly over $130,000 in 2022, and a Snap Articuno at roughly $43,000 (¥6,400,000) in 2021. Those are four- and five-year-old prints from a market that has moved 8x on adjacent cards. They are reference points, not comps.
And the 15-versus-20 split means the 64 Mario Stadium designs can't simply be priced off the Bulbasaur either. Different contest, different run size, different winner, different survivorship history.
The frame worth keeping
Four Best Photo Snap promos crossed in one session. That is consistent with a single consignment and a small pool of bidders competing across all four lots on one night. It is not four independent price discoveries, and treating it as four confirming data points overstates what happened by a factor of about four.
One more caution on the numbers themselves: headline figures here are final prices including buyer's premium. Goldin's 2023 premium was 22%, and $809,943 does not divide cleanly by 1.22 - so don't back-compute a hammer price for the 2026 lots without confirming the current premium schedule.
What survives all of that is still real. The record is real. The tape is genuinely three deep and points the same direction each time. There are no reprints coming and there never will be - these were mailed to five households in November 1999 and that was the entire event.
But a $809,943 print on a card with seven slabs in the PSA census is a price for that card, on that night, with those bidders in the room. It is not a curve. Nobody else gets to sit on it.
Related reading
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[The First Global Same-Day Pokémon Launch Kills the Japan-First Arbitrage That Has Priced English Preorders for a Decade](/article/global-same-day-pokemon-launch-kills-japan-first-arbitrage)
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From +4.5% to +3.1% in Five Days: The Pokémon Anniversary Bid Has Already Stopped Moving
Sources
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Vintage Pokémon Promo Becomes Most Valuable Bulbasaur Card Ever - Sports Illustrated (sale price and population figures)
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$18 Million-Plus in Sales Generated by Goldin's Summer TCG Auction - Action Figure Insider (Goldin release text, full results list)
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Goldin's Summer TCG Auction generates $18 million-plus in total sales - The Beat
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1999 Pokémon Snap Photo Contests - Pokumon (contest structure, 20 vs 15 print runs, winner names)
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Illustration contests - Bulbapedia (corroboration of distribution split and card lists)
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Interview with Tsukasa Hosono (English) - Johto (survivorship testimony)
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The World's Most Expensive Bulbasaur Card Just Sold For $200,000 - RetroDodo (prior record, July 2025)
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Rare variants of the original starter Pokémon cards just set an auction record at over $70,000 each - GamesRadar+ via Yahoo (November 2023 baseline; 2022 Magikarp and 2021 Articuno marks)
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Top 20 Results: Goldin's Record-Breaking Pokémon & TCG Auction - Auction Report (February 2026 1st Ed Charizard PSA 10 comp)
Note: This article contains AI-assisted content and has been reviewed in our editorial workflow.
DISCLAIMER: PureGrail articles are for informational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing on this site constitutes financial, investment, or legal advice. Collectibles are speculative assets and values can decrease significantly. Always conduct your own research before buying or selling. Past price performance does not indicate future results.
