At the end of September, a little Pikachu in a red raincoat took over the hobby headlines. A PSA 10 copy of the 2015 Japanese Art Academy promo closed at $8,400,000 on Fanatics Collect, which made it the second-priciest Pokémon card ever reported at auction. Three weeks later, nobody can say for sure that the sale ever closed properly. If you price slabs off recent sales, you need to know why.

What is the "Raincoat Pikachu"?

The card started with a fan contest. Pokémon ran a competition tied to the 3DS game Pokémon Art Academy, and artist Y. Fujishima won the "Dress-Up Pikachu" category with a drawing of Pikachu in a raincoat holding an orange umbrella. The prize was 100 officially printed copies of the card, and none of them were ever sold in stores (GamesRadar).

Rare? Yes. But "one of 100" doesn't mean one of a kind. Kotaku points out that PSA lists 57 copies at Gem Mint 10. Back in 2025, PSA 10s were selling in the tens of thousands. GamesRadar cites a $19,200 sale in 2025. Earlier this year, Chase Society tracked copies selling for $79,999.99 on eBay in January and $156,250 at Heritage in June.

The $8.4 million close

The Fanatics lot closed on the night of September 27 on 64 bids. The $8.4 million price includes buyer's premium, and only Logan Paul's roughly $16.5 million Illustrator Pikachu sits above it (GamesRadar). Gaming sites reported it as a completed sale within days.

Then Chase Society checked Fanatics' public sales feed, which shows whether each lot has been paid. Here's how the payment status changed over the next few weeks. All times are Eastern:

• Sep 27 to Oct 13: the lot stayed marked unpaid in the feed. Fanatics' FAQ gives buyers five days to pay, and that deadline passed on Oct 2.

• Oct 14: the row disappeared from the feed, and the lot's own page read cancelled.

• Oct 15, 1:09 pm: the row came back marked paid, updated in the same minute as at least 64 other lots from that night.

• Oct 16: the lot page still read cancelled, and Fanatics listed the card's value at $1,037,000.

Chase Society is careful about what this means, and so are we. One innocent reading fits: the buyer paid late, and Fanatics restored the sale without updating the lot page. From the outside, nobody can tell whether a "paid" flag means the money actually arrived. For now, the honest word is unresolved.

The reality check: $1,037,000 at Goldin

While all that played out, another PSA 10 of the same card sold at Goldin on October 11 for $1,037,000, also on 64 bids (Chase Society). That's about 87% below the Fanatics number, a gap Men's Journal and Yahoo Finance framed as the card "losing $7 million" (Cofre).

Still, $1.04 million is more than six times what the card sold for at Heritage in June.

Why flippers should care

The Pikachu wasn't the only lot like this. According to Chase Society, as of October 16:

• A $960,000 Great Encounters Cresselia and an $840,000 Southern Islands Mew from the October 4 auction still showed unpaid.

• Twenty-seven Pokémon lots over $100,000 from the Sep 27 and Oct 4 nights showed unpaid, worth $6.2 million in total.

• Thirteen lots of $40,000 and up had been quietly deleted from the feed. Each one showed unpaid the last time it was seen.

Some of these numbers still show up as sales elsewhere. On October 15, the collection app Collectr still counted the $8.4 million as a sale and valued the card's PSA 10 at $6.78 million. A day earlier, on October 14, PSA's cert lookup still listed it too. A sale that may never have been paid can quietly push up the "market value" of every copy out there.

How to protect yourself

1. Check payment status where you can. Fanatics shows a paid flag for every lot. Most auction houses only publish the hammer price.

2. Don't price off one blockbuster. Look for a second copy that sold near that price, the way Goldin's $1.04M tested the $8.4M.

3. Treat headline "first sales" of tiny-print promos with caution, especially when the PSA 10 population runs into the dozens.

4. Watch what happens next. Chase Society says the Oct 4 lots hit their payment deadline between Oct 16 and 20. Fanatics' new rule requiring a credit card on file to bid took effect Oct 14.

The Raincoat Pikachu may still turn out to be a real seven-figure card. But until the $8.4 million is clearly settled, the safest comp is the one that was actually paid.

Sources: Chase Society, Chase Society weekly sales, GamesRadar, Kotaku, Cofre.