The strongest collection in the hobby this week never came from a vault or a grading company. It came down from an attic in Surrey. A retired decorator from Woking sold 41 complete master sets at Ewbank’s on October 21 for £1.56 million, after the cards spent about 15 years stored away untouched and after the auction house had expected the collection to reach about £270,000 at most. For collectors the real story is not the surprise alone. It is what the room paid a premium for, and that was completeness and condition preserved by doing nothing at all.
Built set by set, then left alone
The collection started in the late 1990s when the seller watched his young son trade cards at school and decided the cards might be worth holding. Rather than chase cards pack by pack he bought complete sets from a seller in Malaysia through eBay. SWNS reports that the first set he bought cost about £300 and that the same set sold for £75,000 in this auction. The cards went into bespoke Pokémon binders while still sealed and stayed in mint condition, and his son had his own separate cards to play with and never handled this collection.
When his son lost interest the binders went into the attic, where they stayed for about 15 years. The seller has asked not to be named and told reporters he had no idea what the collection was worth until he read a local newspaper story about a single card selling for more than £6,000. He then took a sample of the cards to Ewbank’s to be assessed, and the house found 42 sets in total. He sold 41 of them and kept one back.
The room blew past every estimate
The warning signs were there before the sale began. James Spooner, head of trading cards at Ewbank’s, said the house had already taken £825,000 in commission bids by the day before the auction, against that early estimate of up to £270,000. The sale ran under the name Pokémon A Decade of Masters and covered sets from 1999 to 2009. BBC News reports that Ewbank’s called the result the most valuable trading card auction ever held in the UK and suggested it could be a European record, and that the £1.56 million total passed a previous mark of £872,000 set in London on October 9. Those record claims are the auction house’s own, and the total itself is the part every report agrees on.
The leading lot was the Legendary Collection Complete Master Set, with all 110 cards, all 110 Reverse Holo Firework cards, and the four Box Toppers. It had been estimated at £15,000 to £20,000 and made a hammer price of £100,000. Andrew Ewbank conducted the sale himself and said bidders came from all over the world, with more people in the saleroom than at any time since before the Covid pandemic. The house called it the most successful sale in its more than 30 years in business and the most valuable collection it has ever handled.
Why untouched complete sets command this money
Our take is that this result rewards a kind of collecting the market rarely gets to buy. A master set removes years of hunting from the purchase, because the buyer receives every card in one transaction instead of assembling the set one listing at a time. Mint condition removes the second risk, because the cards were protected from the start rather than rescued later. And a single owner collection with a clear story gives bidders confidence about what they are buying. Put those three together and the estimate, which was built set by set, starts to look like the wrong way to price the whole.
This is also not the first attic story out of this one auction house this year. The Alton Herald reported before the sale that a Surrey teacher named Andrew Braund brought Ewbank’s a collection stored for 20 years in his parents’ attic, and that three of his rarest cards sold for a combined £32,800 on April 16. The scale this time is in another league entirely, but the pattern is the same, and it says something real about how much vintage product still sits in ordinary homes rather than in dealer stock.
What to watch next
Watch for more single owner vintage collections reaching auction while results like this are fresh, because a £1.56 million headline is exactly the kind of news that sends other families up into their own attics. Watch whether complete master sets keep outperforming the sum of their graded singles, because that gap is the clearest signal in this sale. And watch the next big UK trading card auction closely, because Ewbank’s has now set a public benchmark that every rival house will want to test.