University of North Georgia student pays for medical school by selling Pokémon cards

2020 saw a massive rise in the market for Pokémon TCG cards, fueled in part by coronavirus escapism. It's somewhat appropriate then that someone aiming to one day heal illnesses like this should have been able to take advantage of this market spike. Caleb King, a junior at the University of North Georgia, recently talked to Fox 5 Atlanta about having raised $80,000 towards tuition at medical school by selling off a selection of cards from his collection. The full video from Fox 5 Atlanta's on air report can be viewed here. While sadly the exact cards that were sold were not discussed in his interview, the video does highlight a number of the PSA graded cards that he still owns, including a GEM MT 10 ("Gem Mint") first edition of the "Red Cheeks" variant of the Base set Pikachu.

Caleb initially purchased much of his collection with an approximately $4000 investment in 2016, which was opposed at the time by his parents. For any readers considering actively investing in cards (as opposed to simply selling off part of an existing collection), we would suggest you take the time to research the market throughly. While speculation on TCG cards has been very profitable for Caleb and a number of people this past year, prices for classic cards are constantly in flux, and it is inherently a risky investment with no guarentees of return. For instance, though Caleb King told Fox he had seen copies of "Red Cheeks" Pikachu selling for as much as $USD 20,000, at the time of writing we are aware of an identical GEM MT 10 graded copy of this card selling at closer to $USD 1000. Given that much of the current sky high prices has been driven by content creators jumping on a bandwagon of opening boxes of classic booster packs on Twitch and Youtube, there is only so much supply of unopened vintage booster boxes and packets, and it is possible these high prices will not outlast this current video trend.