Back in April, I wrote about how Pikachu with Grey Felt Hat (also called the Van Gogh Pikachu) was by far the Hottest Pokémon Card of the past year in terms of number of sales. Released back in 2023 in partnership with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, this card features Pikachu wearing the grey felt hat that Van Gogh wore in his self-portraits. It certainly says something about the global scale of Pikachu's influence when he's able to revitalize interest in one of the greatest artists of all-time!
Not only has this card dominated GoCollect's Hottest Pokémon Cards list for the past year (a list that measures sales volume and not sales prices), but it is currently experiencing a price breakout.
For the first six months of the year from January through June 2025, a PSA 10 copy of this card was stuck in a consolidation phase; i.e., owners of this card were willing to sell in the $740 to $840 range. Importantly, this seven month consolidation phase likely shook out owners who were hoping to unload this card. In July of 2025, however, we can observe a breakout in GoCollect's data -- i.e., the card broke out beyond its long-time resistance level of $840 and sold for $1,079:
Like in the stock market, that breakout sale in July proved to be a leading indicator of future momentum; the card's value steadily climbed during the next three months reaching a high sale of $2,100 earlier this month:
We can also observe this surge in value by comparing the 30-day sales average ($2,091) against the 90-day ($1,580) and one-year averages ($889). The 30-day sales average is more than 2x the one-year average. That's certainly rare to see a 100% return in just a three to six month period. This surge in sales prices is especially impressive when you consider there's a huge supply of PSA 10 cards available; specifically, there are a whopping 43,327 PSA 10s on PSA's population report. Demand appears to be outstripping even this ample supply.
And sales volume is also increasing with 402 sales of PSA 10 copies of this card in September; in comparison, there were only 206 in August (October sales appear to be low in the table below since we're only a third of the way through the current month):
We have less sales data about CGC-graded copies of this card, but we can observe a similar trend in those CGC-graded copies. Just as with the PSA-graded copies, the 30-day average for a CGC Pristine 10 ($2,253) is also more than 2x the one-year average of $1,073:
It's also interesting to observe that the value of a CGC Pristine 10 sells for a premium in comparison to a comparable PSA 10 copy of the same card. This is just my opinion, but if I owned one of these CGC Pristine 10s, I'd seriously think about selling that card right now. There are only going to be more and more raw copies of this card submitted to PSA and CGC in the near future, adding to the supply.
It's hard to discern why the value of this card is surging right now. For those Pikachu fans who have been priced out of the most expensive Pikachu cards like the Illustrator, some may have been driven to second, third or even fourth tier Pikachu cards like this Van Gogh Pikachu card. Other Pikachu cards, like this Holon Phantoms card, are also experiencing price breakouts.
I also expect their may be other macroeconomic factors at play, including the stock market setting new records on a weekly basis and the Federal Reserve currently cutting interest rates. After several years of a bear market for collectibles, are investors taking profits from the their stock portfolios and re-investing them into collectibles?
