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By Jack Beresford
Senior Reporter
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A man who recently dusted off his extensive Pokémon card collection has been left shocked to discover how much they are worth.
Juan Pardo from Kansas City, Missouri's love of all things Pokémon dates back to the turn of the millennium.
"My Pokémon collection started around 2000 when I was 5. My mom would get packs for me as gifts because I was obsessed with the Gameboy games, the Nintendo 64 games, and the show," Pardo told Newsweek.
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"She started buying them for me because I wanted to actually play the trading card game but, since no one in my hometown was into it, it just started becoming more of our thing to collect because packs and boxes were still so inexpensive."
Even as he got older, his mom continued to buy the cards. "Truth be told, it mainly became my mom's thing, too," Pardo said. "She kept buying and collecting the cards until, like, 2017."
Pardo and his mom aren't alone in being adult fans of the Pokémon franchise. It dates back to the mid-1990s with its depiction of a fantastical world where humans collect and train colorful creatures to compete against each other in battles.
For example, one of the franchise's most-popular recent titles, Pokémon Go, is played by a significant number of adult gamers. A Statista survey found that 49 percent of respondents aged 35 to 54 years were current Pokémon Go players, with 23 percent of games aged 55 and over also playing it.
That sustained interest in all things Pokémon might go some way to explaining why there is continued demand for the franchise's trading cards, particularly those kept in mint condition.
So you can imagine Pardo's excitement when he came across his cards, all of which have been kept in pristine condition in a specially designated binder.
It wasn't long before he set himself to work trying to find out the value of the cards using a special app. Footage shared to TikTok by his partner Madeline under the handle MadelineBrice.jpg captures the moment Pardo began to realize he was "sitting on a small fortune" of Pokémon cards.
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Pardo estimates he has "around 3,600 cards." Though ascertaining the potential value of these trading cards is a laborious process, he said that, from the pages he has gone through, the cards he owns are worth over $5,000, with even more still to check.
"I don't think selling is out of the question, but I just started scanning just out of curiosity to see what some of the cards could be valued at," he said. "It's a total shock for some of these numbers to pop up." There is one major roadblock Pardo needs to traverse if he wants to cash in, though.
"Unfortunately, I think you have to get them graded in order to really sell them at any value, which is a huge cost," Madeline said. "I believe it's about $15 to $250 a card, depending on their estimated value."
Without being graded, Pardo said the cards, while still valuable, would only fetch somewhere in the region of $2,800.
The word about Pardo's situation is out there, though. Madeline's video has already been watched more than 1.5 million times, and the hope is someone might be able to assist in getting them graded. Pardo already has some ideas of what he could do with the money.
"If we were to sell, we'd honestly probably move the money into savings and use it to just have an extra cushion for our finances," Pardo said.
The hope now is that someone out there can help him make that happen.
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