Logan Paul’s big Pokémon card gamble just got worse

Logan Paul has spent July hyping up a livestream at the end of the month, when the YouTuber was set to open some rare Pokémon cards. The event finally happened, and it wasn’t at all what the moonlighting wrestler had hoped.

To recap: Earlier this month, Logan Paul uploaded a video where he revealed he had spent millions in pursuit of the first Pokémon cards to ever be printed. As he told it, those cards were ones that were included in CoroCoro magazine one week before the launch of the official trading card game in Japan. These cards came on sticker sheets that had to be peeled to separate them.

The whole thing was obviously a marketing stunt to pump the prices of the many cards Paul had acquired. The most critical piece of evidence here is that the CoroCoro sticker cards were not, in fact, the first Pokémon cards to ever be printed — that distinction belongs to an even earlier set of cards published by Bandai.

After wasting those millions, Paul teased that he had one more sticker sheet to unpeel, which he hoped would be good enough to get the highest possible PSA grading, or a 10. The higher the rating, the more a card is worth. The livestream documenting all of this was a four-and-a-half hour affair, where Paul opened a variety of other trading cards, such as sports cards. Paul left the main event until near the end of the stream.

Once he began peeling, things immediately went awry. The Jigglypuff card he attempted to unveil was deeply stuck to the sticker sheet, a fact that portended worse things to come later in the stream. Yet even before separating the card, it was evident that the collectible could never be graded a 10: the centering was off. Paul spent an entire five minutes trying to free the card.

“Sometimes, when you take a big swing, you miss big, bro,” Paul said to a live audience of 31,000 viewers. Paul tried to save face by noting that a PSA 9 card should still be worth around $150,000, but remember: he paid $400,000 to obtain it.

Next, Paul unpeeled a Pikachu CoroCoro card. This card also didn’t have perfect centering — and it had a nick to boot. Paul then spent nearly 10 minutes debating the dimensions of the card. At the end, he declared that, despite the visible damage to the card and its imperfect layout, it was actually a PSA 10 card.

Paul ended the stream by saying he had “made Pokémon history, theoretically.”

And by history, he surely means investing millions of dollars to get assets that are immediately worth a fraction of what he paid. The Pokémon fans who believe he played a part in ruining the hobby are already eating him alive.