Pokémon Art Academy Sableye Card Sells for Record $976,000 at Goldin

A 2015 Pokémon Japanese XY Promo Art Academy Sableye has sold for $976,000 at Goldin, setting what the auction house says is the all-time highest public sale for any Sableye card. The card, illustrated by iwaiya, was graded PSA Gem Mint 10 and sold during Goldin’s Pokémon 30th Anniversary Auction. Goldin announced the final result after the sale.

The Sableye is part of one of the most unusual and difficult-to-find Pokémon promotional releases of the past decade. It came from the inaugural Pokémon Art Academy promotion, which invited players to create artwork using the Pokémon Art Academy game for Nintendo 3DS. Ten winning designs were selected from the Japanese competition, including the Sableye artwork by iwaiya. Goldin says each winning artist received just 100 copies of their own card.

That limited distribution has left very few examples available to collectors. According to Goldin’s auction listing, PSA had graded only five copies of the Sableye when the lot was cataloged. Four of those had reached the Gem Mint 10 level, including the card that sold for $976,000.

Goldin described the card as one of the most elusive entries from the Art Academy promotion, particularly because the majority of winning cards from the Japanese contest featured Pikachu. Six of the 10 winning designs depicted Pikachu, leaving Sableye as one of the much less frequently encountered non-Pikachu cards from the group.

The card’s scarcity is also tied to the way the Art Academy prizes were distributed. Unlike cards released through booster packs, retail products or widely available promotions, copies were awarded directly to the winning artists. Goldin notes that it is unknown how many of those cards ever left the original artists’ ownership. That has made public auction appearances extremely uncommon.

The $976,000 result also came during the same Pokémon 30th Anniversary Auction that produced another major record. A 1997 Japanese Gold 1st Place Trophy Pikachu graded PSA 8 sold for $3,080,500, which Goldin called the highest public sale ever recorded for any Trophy Pikachu. That card was awarded to a first-place finisher at the first official Pokémon TCG tournament in 1997, placing two very different types of Pokémon trophy and prize cards among the headline results of the same auction.

The Sableye belongs to a newer generation of Pokémon rarity, but the basic appeal is similar. Both cards were distributed in tiny numbers outside the normal retail card market, and both are tied directly to specific events in Pokémon history. Other Art Academy cards have also produced major auction results. A PSA 10 Pikachu illustrated by Y. Fujishima sold at Goldin for $1.037 million earlier in October, further demonstrating the growing market for cards from the 2015 promotion.