I sold around 300 cards for Rs10 million in January,” says Kevin Kulatilake, managing director of Synapse VII, a marketing agency, adding this was about twenty times what he originally paid. These cards are from the Pokémon Trading Card Game, a tabletop strategy game that pits brightly coloured monsters against each other. Today, many buyers treat these cards less as game pieces and more as nostalgia-driven collectibles. New shops like SoleTroll, which sell licensed Pokémon products and purchase cards from the public, have further driven demand.
The Pokémon franchise began as a video game in Japan in 1996, where players travel a fictional world, capturing creatures and using them to fight other creatures. This concept was later adapted into a card game.
A sealed box of Pokémon cards released in 2016 for $50 sells today for over $2,200, over 45x its original price. A single Pokémon card was sold at auction in February 2026 for $16.5 million, obtaining a world record for the most expensive trading card ever sold. Pokémon is the world’s highest-grossing media franchise, bigger than Marvel, Disney, and Star Wars combined, and its trading cards have quietly become a global alternative asset class.
Saif Yusoof knew this when he paid Rs10 million to Kevin Kulatilake, Managing Director at Synapse Seven, for a binder on a Tuesday in January. He is a logistics and travel executive who has spent years building a portfolio across stock markets, precious metals, and antiques — the last of these an instinct inherited from his father, who has spent decades collecting them. The binder holds approximately 300 trading cards, each slipped into a plastic sleeve, explaining “I thought it was a good deal for me. I thought I was crazy. My father still thinks I’m a bit mad on the risk, but it is what it is. But he’s always supported me and my ideas.” When we spoke, he had checked the market data that morning. “It’s a gamble,” he said. “There’s a good chance that I spent Rs10 million and it could become zero tomorrow — literally like buying cardboard. But last I checked this morning, the cards I bought are already worth Rs14 million.”
Sri Lanka, for most of that run, had no reliable way to participate in this market. That is changing — but not without friction. Three years ago there was no source for authenticated cards. Today there is one, and a Rs10 million deal took place between a collector and an investor who liquidated equities to fund it. But getting cards into the country means navigating customs duties that swing between 15% and 150% depending on which officer opens the shipment.
Why Pokémon Trading Cards Have Value
Pokémon began as a video game in 1996, built around the premise of collecting and training creatures. A trading card game followed the next year, giving children something physical to own and trade. Then the generation that grew up with them acquired disposable income. Shevinda Tilakaratna, an investment analyst at Argent Capital who re-entered the collector market in 2024, put it plainly. “The generation which grew up with Pokémon now has our own adult money. No matter how crazy it seems, you are willing to spend that.”
How Pokémon Card Products Are Officially Sold
The main types of sealed products and what each one contains
Booster Packs: A single sealed pack containing 10 cards selected at random from a larger set. Typically includes a mix of common, uncommon, and at least one rare or higher-value card.
Booster Boxes: A factory-sealed box containing 36 booster packs, or 360 cards in total. Used by collectors and resellers to access a larger volume of cards from a single set.
Elite Trainer Boxes: A bundled product designed for collectors and players. Usually includes 8–10 booster packs, a guaranteed promo card, and additional items such as card sleeves and game accessories.
There are now more than 40,000 unique card varieties, with new sets releasing every few months. There are two ways to buy them. The first is as sealed products containing packs of randomly assorted cards. You do not know what you will find inside. The second is as “Singles”, individual cards bought directly, at a known price, from a seller.
Most cards are worth a few dollars. A select few trade at prices bearing no relationship to their cost of production. Three things determine which is which. The first is the Pokémon depicted: some creatures carry thirty years of cultural weight that makes them universally desirable. The second is scarcity. The Pokémon Company controls how many copies of each card get printed, deliberately andprecisely, the way a luxury watchmaker limits production runs. The third is the condition of the card itself, which can set a heavy multiplier.
What Makes A Pokémon Card Valuable
The four criteria PSA che cks and how grading multiplies value
Pikachu drives demand as the franchise’s most recognisable character. The raw card is common, but PSA 10 copies are scarce. That scarcity produces a premium at top grades.
A card emerges from a printing press with microscopic variations. Out of ten copies of the same rare card, one or two may be pristine; the rest carry imperfections invisible until an expert looks. Grading is the process by which a specialist company verifies a card’s authenticity and assesses its physical condition, assigning it a score that the market then uses to set its price. Each card is assessed on four criteria: surface, corners, edges, and centering, and scored on a scale from 1 (poor) to 10 (virtually perfect) by Professional Sports Authenticators — a US-based grading company recognised as the global standard.
A card that scores perfectly on all four is sealed permanently in a tamper-evident plastic case collectors call a slab. The difference between a PSA 9 and a PSA 10 on the same card can be between $300 and $3,000. Saif ran that calculation when he looked at Kevin’s binder. Every card was raw: ungraded, held in a sleeve. “These same cards,” he said, “if they were PSA 10 — you’re talking about a Rs40 million binder.”
Where those factors converge into an actual price is the American secondary market. Platforms like Price Charting and TCG Player track completed sales continuously, functioning like a stock chart in real time.
“We depend on the United States lastsold data to evaluate how much a card is,” said Kevin. “The USA is the main market — not even Japan, by the way.” Sri Lanka has no say in those prices. It simply pays them. And it pays them at a premium: for the past 3 years, buying any new Pokémon release at its official retail price has been, in Kevin’s words, “quite literally impossible.
” Scalpers buy entire allocations the moment they drop and relist them at multiples of retail. Every card that reaches Sri Lanka has already passed through that markup before customs has even seen it. It was int
o this market — expensive, relationship-driven, and still taking shape — that Saif Yusoof liquidated his stocks and made his move.
The Rs10 Million Deal For 300 Pokémon Cards
The collection Saif bought belonged to Kevin, who has spent 12 years assembling what he believes is one of the largest private Pokémon card collections in Sri Lanka — more than 25,000 rare cards in total. The 300 he sold were his duplicates. Kevin spent approximately Rs500,000 building them over five years. “I intentionally bought two to three duplicates of cards I felt would skyrocket in price,” he said. “I predicted it would take years. I wouldn’t have thought it would come so soon.”
The cards had a full market value of approximately $43,000 — roughly Rs13 million — priced using Price Charting and TCG Player, the two platforms that track completed sales the way a stock chart tracks traded
prices. Saif negotiated a 25% discount in exchange for buying the lot at once. “Because I was buying all these cards in one go, I wanted an upside on the deal,” he said. He settled at Rs10 million. Kevin, meanwhile, had been considering flying to Dubai to sell piece by piece — the flights alone would have added considerable cost.
THE CARDS THAT DREW SAIF YUSOOF TO THE RS10 MILLION COLLECTION
Three names he identified for their strong demand, pricing power, and consistency in the global market
Name: Latias & Latios GX #170
Release Date: February 1st 2019
Starting Price (Ungraded): $266.82 – March 2022
Current Price (Ungraded): $1,771.34 – April 2026
Price Change (2022 to 2026): 565%
Name: Umbreon VMAX #215
Release Date: August 27th 2021
Starting Price (Ungraded): $220.51 – September 2021
Current Price (Ungraded): $1,786.03 – April 2026
Price Change (2021 to 2026): 711%
Name: Charizard #4
Release Date: January 9th 1999
Starting Price (Ungraded): $232.1 – April 2021
Current Price (Ungraded): $325.61 – April 2026
Price Change (2021 to 2026): 40%
What drew Saif to the collection were three specific cards. The Latias & Latios GX, depicting two dragon-type Pokémon entwined in flight, traded at $266 in March 2022 and now fetches roughly $1,770. The Umbreon VMAX, known to collectors as the Moonbreon, has risen from $220 in September 2021 to approximately $1,786. And a vintage Charizard — the franchise’s enduring icon — whose presence in any serious collection functions like a blue-chip stock in an equity portfolio.
Saif did not buy 300 cards to hold 300 cards. Of the colle
ction, he plans to trade some at collector shows in Singapore, Malaysia, and Dubai — exchanging them for specific cards he values more highly. “From the 300, a good 100 to 150 cards I plan to take and trade for cards that I do want,” he said. The binder is not a destination. It is a starting position. Three years ago, a transaction like this would have been impossible in Sri Lanka.
A Market Built From Nothing
“Previously, we never had a store selling real Pokémon cards,” said Rolando Gunesekere. “Even today, 80% of the cards people bring to us for authentication are counterfeit. It breaks my heart to tell kids their cards are fake. I’ve seen them standing in front of me, crying.” The people who closed that gap understood it from the outside. Dion Abeyesinhe grew up in the United States with the original Pokémon anime, and understood cards as a market when he studied in Australia between 2016 and 2018. He returned, found nothing comparable, and co-founded SoleTroll with Rolando. Kevin spent his childhood buying fake cards from local shops like everyone else — he learned to identify real ones only because his father worked in Japan.
Walk into SoleTroll on Flower Road on a weekday and you will find graded slabs in display cases, walls of sealed product, and shelves of collectibles that extend well beyond trading cards. The customers are not who you might expect. “There isn’t a set demographic,” said Rolando. “It can be 5-year-olds, it can be 60-70-year-olds. We’ve had a 58-year-old who actively collects, buy
s, and sells cards to us.” Orders go out to Jaffna. Customers come up from the south.
LOCAL POKÉMON CARD DEALS IN SRI LANKA
Examples of prices and transactions recorded before the Rs10 million sale
Name:Mega Charizard X Ex #125
Release Date:February 1, 2019
Ungraded Price (April 2026):$830.84
PSA 9 Global Price (April 2026):$849.50
SoleTroll Price (April 2026):Rs240,000 ($761.17)
Name:Rayquaza VMAX #218
Release Date:August 27, 2021
Ungraded Price (April 2026):$675.10
SoleTroll Price (2025): Rs70,000 ($239 at the time of the sale)
The numbers behind that scene are measurable. SoleTroll processes over 100 Pokémon transactions a month, according to Enos Christie, Finance Executive at SoleTroll. Dion puts monthly revenue at more than Rs1 million in singles and Rs1.5 million in sealed products, figures that have grown 20–30% annually since opening, said Rolando. The most expensive single card the shop has independently sold traded between Rs300,000 and Rs500,000; in March 2026, a PSA 9 Mega Charizard EX sold through the shop for Rs240,000. The shop marks every card to its current global market value — prices are live, not fixed — and when buying from customers offers 80% of that value in store credit or 70% in cash, said Enos. Every card SoleTroll holds is priced against the same American benchmark that drives the global market.
The market has also produced its own local price record. In their
second year of operation, SoleTroll sold a Rayquaza VMAX Alt Art for Rs70,000. The US dollar was at approximately Rs292 at the time, making that roughly $239. “The same card is now $500 to $600,” said Enos. That is 2.5x its sale price in under two years.
Beyond SoleTroll, the market extends, though thinly. At the last Lanka Comic Con, approximately ten vendor booths were selling cards; two years earlier, there was one. A search of Facebook Marketplace in Sri Lanka in March 2026 returned 17 active listings, almost all in Colombo, ranging from Rs160 to Rs38,500. The median asking price was Rs3,500. The highest-value listing, a sealed booster box, had been sitting unsold for 13 weeks.
That gap between activity at lower price points and illiquidity at higher ones is something Saif mapped from his own experience, “Cards below Rs5,000 move readily.” Above that, finding a local buyer means finding one of a small number of people with both the knowledge and the capital to transact. He is careful not to treat local illiquidity as the full picture, though. In Singapore and Hong Kong, he said, institutional investors treat Pokémon cards as, “an alternative asset, the same as gold or crypto.” Sri Lanka is not yet in that conversation. “Don’t take your life savings, don’t sell a house,” he said. “I sold my stock — money I had mentally prepared to lose. If you’ve got something you’re mentally prepared to lose, then you enter the game. Otherwise, expectations can create disappointment.”
The Investment Case for Pokémon Trading Cards
In October 2017, Paul Newman’s personal Rolex Daytona sold at Phillips auction in New York for $17.75 million — a record for any watch ever sold. At the ceiling of the Pokémon market, on February 16, 2026, Log
an Paul sold the Pikachu Illustrator at Goldin Auctions for $16.5 million. He had paid $5.3 million in 2021. One of only 39 ever made, the card is certified by Guinness World Records as the most expensive trading card ever sold at auction. The buyer was a venture capitalist. The pattern behind the spotlight figures has repeated twice: products released for the 20th anniversary surged during the 25th; products released for the 25th are surging during the 30th. Pokémon turns 30 this year.
Logan Paul’s sale did not just set a record. It set a new floor. “If there’s just one guy willing to sell, that card will be 10x the price. And if it sells at that price, that is the new standard for that card,” said Kevin. The last sold price is not an average. It is a floor.
Saif entered this market two and a half years ago after reading a Forbes article listing collectibles among the areas expected to grow most significantly over the next 20 years. He saw his daughter and her classmates talking about a franchise that was then 27 years old. “I liked the cards, but I’m an investor,” he said. “I invested in everything from the stock market to precious metals, all kinds of things. But when it came to trading cards, I really got married to it.”
“About 75% of my Pokémon have all gone up,” he said. “You’re talking anywhere from 20–200%.” Those returns have shifted how he thinks about his money. His cards have outperformed every other asset class in his portfolio over the period he has been collecting, he said. “It was like a percent when I started. Now it’s like 50%.” He has been liquidating equities to fund the shift. “I had some shares I couldn’t sell — there were no buyers. I find it easier to liquidate cards, actually.” At shows in Singapore and Dubai, informed buyers exist
on both sides of every transaction.
Shevinda is precise about where Sri Lanka currently sits in this story. The institutional investors in Singapore and Hong Kong entered an already mature market: deep, informed, infrastructure on both sides of every transaction. The local market today is in the enthusiast phase, he says. Early adopters have come and gone, the enthusiasts arrived around 2024, and the general public has not yet entered in any meaningful way. That sequencing matters for anyone thinking about timing. “Whether the cards will always hold their value — there’s no way we can tell,” he said. “As long as the passion keeps going, it’ll hold its value.”
THE INVESTMENT CASE FOR SEALED POKÉMON PRODUCTS
Anniversary sets and nostalgia-led releases have produced 10x–45x returns as collectors accumulate ahead of milestone years
Name: Elite Trainer Box Pokémon Scarlet & Violet 151
Release Date: September 2023
Retail Launch Price: $52
Secondary Market Price Today: $594.88
Price Appreciation Since Launch (3 year period): 1044%
Description: Built around the original 151 Pokémon, this set tapped directly into nostalgia demand. With supply now limited, prices have risen as collectors accumulate sealed boxes.
Name: Celebrations Ultra-Premium Collection
Release Date: October 2021
Retail Launch Price: $119
Secondary Market Price Today: $949
Price Appreciation Since Launch (5 year period): 697%
Description: Released for Pokémon’s 25th anniversary, this flagship product has appreciated as demand builds ahead of the 30th anniversary, continuing a pattern seen in prior cycles.
Name: Generations Elite Trainer Box
Release Date: July 2016
Retail Launch Price: $49.99
Secondary Market Price Today: $2,283.91
Price Appreciation Since Launch (10 year period): 4561%
Description: Launched for the 20th anniversary, this product surged during the 25th anniversary cycle, showing how older sealed products gain value as milestone years renew demand.
The Local Barriers Raising the Cost of Getting In
Three days before we spoke, Saif ordered a card online. It arrived with a customs duty of Rs1,500 on a $70 product — roughly 5%. A higher-value import, bought the same way from the same kind of seller, had cost him close to 50%. He cannot predict which rate he will get. Neither can anyone else.
Sri Lanka has no dedicated customs classification for trading cards. Shipments are logged as playing cards, the same category as a poker set, and assessed at the discretion of whichever officer is handling them that day. “There is no consistent rate,” said Rolando. “It depends on the mood of the customs officer handling us.” The range runs from 15% on a cooperative day to 150% when a shipment is classified as a luxury import. A Surging Sparks booster box sells for S$350 in Singapore, roughly Rs84,000. To import that same box and make the economics work, SoleTroll would need to sell it at Rs145,000, according to Dion. That is a 73% premium for an identical product.
When you insure an expensive card during shipping for its true worth, the declared value flags a luxury import to an officer with no frame of reference for what a trading card costs, said Saif. Shevinda encountered the same logic: his first import in 2025 attracted 15–17% duty; his second, from the same seller, came back at approximately 80% after being held while customs determined the HS code. “If you were to import it directly,” he said, “You are paying maybe 3-4x the price. Probably more, actually.” The calculation stacks: scalper price first, because retail sells out immediately; import duty at whatever rate the officer decides; shipping on top. Singapore charges a flat 8% with a dedicated category for trading cards. Dubai similarly charges 5%.
Grading compounds the friction further. SoleTroll routes submissions through a partner store in Singapore or Malaysia, since there is no direct path to PSA from Sri Lanka. SoleTroll charges Rs14,000 per card, roughly double the base international rate. The economics only work when the PSA 10 premium justifies it. For most cards it does not. Shevinda’s solution when he wants something graded is to hand a card to a friend travelling abroad with $25 and ask them to drop it at a grading office. It works. It does not scale.
The infrastructure gap may not be permanent. eBay has acquired PSA and, through an entity called The Collectors, is building a service that stores graded cards, tracks live prices, and offers instant buyback at a percentage of market value, said Saif. Formal recognition from the Pokémon Company would change the supply and import picture significantly. “Sri Lanka is not recognised as a country under their wing yet,” said Dion. “We have communicated with them already — they know we exist.” Recognition would make Sri Lanka only the second market in the region to achieve it. India, despite its scale, has none.
Saif has been in this market for two and a half years. He is not waiting for something official. On weeknights, when he needs to decompress, he goes through the binder and checks the charts. His father still thinks he is mad. His cards were worth Rs10 million in January. He checked that morning. For now, the number was higher.