A savvy dad who spent 16 years collecting rare trading and Pokemon cards for his kids is selling the lot for a whopping £250,000.. Gordon White, 58, managed to collate thousands of the cards, including dozens of complete Pokemon sets, after he began collecting them in the 90s for his kids.
The delivery driver started his obsession after his children asked to join a Pokemon league and he has been collecting them ever since. He has already cashed in by selling half of his collection, which fetched a staggering £200,000 when it went under the hammer in November last year.
Now, Gordon is set to rake in an additional £60,000 by flogging the rest of his 'treasure trove' of Magic: The Gathering cards. Magic: The Gathering - know as just ‘Magic’ or MTG - is considered the very first trading card game which pre-dates Pokémon and was a forerunner of the genre.
It was released in 1993 by Wizards of the Coast and is since believed to have been played by at least 35 million people. The collection will be sold by Richard Winterton Auctioneers in Lichfield, Staffs., in an online auction that began on Friday.
Gordon said he had decided to part with his massive hoard of trading cards after realising it was finally time to quit playing the game after 16 years. Gordon, from Livingston, Scotland, said: "For me, the fun is the completing, not the collecting. And as far as I’m concerned, I’ve completed it so it’s time to pass it all on."
Dad-of-two Gordon first began amassing Magic: The Gathering cards as well as those from the popular Pokemon Nintendo franchise in 1998. They featured sealed booster boxes, first editions, promotional cards, ones showing rare errors along with rare cards handed out to staff at Pokemon tournaments.
Over the years, he has ran a Pokémon league and has acted as a judge in UK events while 'mixing with the highest echelons in the Pokémon world.' Auctioneer Richard Winterton said Magic: The Gathering cards would also be as highly sought after by collectors as it was a 'landmark' in trading card games.
He added: “Magic is the first trading card of its type where you collected cards and then sent them off to do battle. It’s an absolute landmark in the early days of trading cards. Wizards Of The Coast became a big name from Magic: The Gathering.
"It was after Magic that Wizards Of The Coast got the licence to do Pokémon for the west. This is the first time we've had full sets of Magic: The Gathering. A collection of this magnitude does not come up for auction very often.
“Gordon initially chose to sell his collection through us as he saw how we had marketed other important Pokémon collections and the team has been painstaking in their attention to detail cataloguing these incredible cards.”
Highlights of the auction are said to include a Magic: The Gathering Seventh Edition foil set in excellent to mint condition, estimated to fetch up to £10,000.
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Other Magic foil variant sets include the complete Urza's Legacy with the Beast of Burden set to fetch between £3,000-£4,000. The auction also features highly collectable Pokémon set to sell for thousands of pounds.
They include complete Pop Series 5 with all 17 cards including the ‘extremely rare’ Espeon 16/17 and Umbreon 17/17, and a complete EX Keepers Set with all gold star cards. Other cards in the sale include VS System Marvel and DC, Lord Of The Rings and Harry Potter from the early 2000s.
