Alt's auction that opened August 28 closed on Thursday, September 10, and its headline lot set a record that will take some beating: a 2004 EX Team Rocket Returns Torchic Gold Star #108 in PSA 10, sold for $2,700,000.
The record, twice in eleven days
The most expensive English-language Pokemon card had been the First Edition Base Set Charizard at $954,800 since February. On August 30 a Rayquaza Gold Star in CGC 10 Pristine passed it at $1,020,000. Eleven days later the Torchic more than doubled that. Alt called it the most expensive English-language Pokemon sale on record, and it is not close: the next English card is the Rayquaza at $1.02 million, then the Charizard at $954,800.
The Torchic's prior public PSA 10 sale was $25,400 in December 2020. The card has gone up roughly 106 times in under six years, almost all of it in the last month. PSA has graded nineteen copies a 10.
The 9
The same auction sold a PSA 9 Torchic Gold Star for $156,336. On September 5 the live bid was $90,336; the last public sale before that was about $22,000 in June. A seven-fold move in three months on a card with 233 copies in the grade is the result that matters for the Gold Star market as a whole, because it is a price the other 232 owners, and everyone holding a 9 of the other 26 Gold Stars, can actually act on. We made this argument a week ago when the bid was $90,000. At $156,000 it is stronger.
The undercard
| Card | Grade | Price |
|---|---|---|
| 2004 Team Rocket Returns Torchic Gold Star | PSA 10 | $2,700,000 |
| 2006 Dragon Frontiers Charizard Gold Star | PSA 10 | $393,000 |
| 2015 Double Crisis Team Aqua's Kyogre EX | PSA 10 | $348,000 |
| 2009 Rising Rivals Snorlax LV.X | PSA 10 | $253,680 |
| 1999 First Edition Base Set Chansey | PSA 10 | $238,597 |
| 2015 Double Crisis Team Magma's Groudon EX | PSA 10 | $181,314 |
| 2004 Team Rocket Returns Torchic Gold Star | PSA 9 | $156,336 |
Three things in that table are new. The Charizard Gold Star at $393,000 is the first time the set's most famous card has traded publicly since the repricing began; it is now priced below the Torchic and the Rayquaza, which would have been unthinkable in July. The two Double Crisis EX cards from 2015 at $348,000 and $181,314 put a 2015 set in the same conversation as the Gold Stars; with the Snorlax LV.X at $253,680 and last week's Palkia LV.X at $204,000, the 2009-2015 era has gone from priced-like-modern to six figures in a month. And a First Edition Base Set Chansey at $238,597 is a Base Set holo that is not Charizard clearing a number that only Charizard used to clear.
Six lots, about $4.11 million. The Alt auction alone was bigger than any single week of the summer.
In the Index
Team Rocket Returns, the Torchic's set, read +6.7 percent this week, the largest single-set vintage reading since the index began, and the basket as a whole posted +0.9 percent, also a record. Details in the Index section.
Sources: TheGamer, September 12, 2026; GempireCards, September 5, 2026.
The Lead ran in The Pack Report, September 14, 2026: $2.7 Million for a Torchic: the English Record Doubles in Eleven Days. Published by Rip Station.