All Yu-Gi-Oh cards are great, but some cards are better than others. Take the Blue-Eyes White Dragon, a single example of which hit $13.4 million USD at a Chinese auction on Monday before court officials stepped in.
It’s that this particular Blue-Eyes White Dragon card wasn’t valuable. According to the South China Morning Post, this special limited edition card (of which only 500 were made back in 2019) could fetch anywhere between $31,000 to $46,000 at auction if the card’s authenticity was verified (which it wasn’t). But $13 million? That just raised too many red flags for the Chinese courts to go along with.
The auction was held in an Anhui Province court on Monday for a man convicted of embezzlement. His assets included a diamond-encrusted PS4, several Nintendo Switches, and some Sony/Apple products that weren’t identified (but were probably phones). The card, however, immediately drew the eye of collectors for being one of only 500 examples.
Bidding blew up almost immediately after the auction went live, hitting $77,000 in just a few minutes before climbing to $13.4 million, or 87 million yuan, in just over half an hour. At that point, court officials stepped in to cancel the auction suspecting foul play.
“This auction has been suspended,” said Alibaba judicial auctions in a statement to the SCMP. “The price is seriously inconsistent with the actual bidding price, and malicious bidding behavior is suspected.”
We don’t know the exact reason for the bidding war that put this Yu-Gi-Oh out of reach of even the 1%, but GameSpot blames the recent card craze where people have been going absolutely bonkers for trading cards–to the point where Target had to remove them from store shelves and scalpers are stalking grocery stores.
Things have gotten so crazy that Taco Bell has even created its own trading cards, which is more than a little weird.
