Your unique story alone makes Tyler the Great Warrior probably the most valuable card in the trading card game Yu-Gi-Oh! In addition to its priceless emotional value, the card now also has a quite mundane financial value, as it was sold on Sunday after nearly 20 years.
What kind of card is this? Tyler the Great Warrior is a unique card created in collaboration between Konami and the Make-A-Wish Foundation, a foundation that tries to fulfill the dearest wishes of terminally ill children.
The card was designed by 14-year-old Tyler Gressle, who suffered from a rare form of liver cancer. In his design, he combined his love for Yu-Gi-Oh! and Dragon Ball Z. The sketch brought to life by the now deceased creator of Yu-Gi-Oh!, Kazuki Takahashi himself.
After 18 years, the now recovered Tyler Gressle put the card up for sale to finance his new life chapter:
Collector buys card for the value of a house
How did the sale go? After the auction started on April 19 with a starting price of just $0.99, the price shot up to over $100,000 in the first hours. From April 20, however, the price seemed to stagnate at $165,000.
But anyone who has ever participated in an eBay auction only to be outbid at the last second knows that a strategic bidder doesn’t reveal their maximum bid days before the end of the bidding.
How much did the card ultimately bring in? On eBay, it can be traced that it was only in the last hours that the auction came to life again. Within the last 10 hours, the price jumped from $165,000 to the final bid of $311,211, which is approximately €283,000 or about 56,713 booster packs at €4.99 each.
Could there have been even more?
Isn’t that too little for such a special card? The price fell short of the seven-figure expectations of some Yu-Gi-Oh! fans. As Twitter user Cephery explains, the collector scene in Yu-Gi-Oh! is not as pronounced as in Magic: The Gathering.
Other users speculate that the card was either sold too early or too late and would certainly have fetched a million sum at another time. MagicSilver suspects that the price would have been higher if the original sketches by Kazuki Takahashi had also been for sale.
Either way, it is a decent start-up capital for Tyler Gressle, who said in an interview that he wants to start a family. A portion of the proceeds is also intended to go back to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which made this special card possible.
Is this the most expensive Yu-Gi-Oh! card in the world? As Dot Esports reports, Tyler the Great Warrior is the most expensive confirmed Yu-Gi-Oh! card in the West. The also unique “Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon” prize card from the Asia Championships 2001 is said to have been sold for 45 million yen. That would today be equivalent to €299,000.
According to unconfirmed rumors, the “Black Luster Soldier”, awarded as a prize at the very first Yu-Gi-Oh Championship in 1999, is said to have been sold for 2 million dollars. However, this would not even be the most expensive TCG card, as the record is held by another one:
Controversial YouTuber spends over 4.4 million euros on a Pokémon card, wears it as a necklace
