Card quest brings collectors and cash to Dunedin market

The trade in collectable cards is gathering momentum in New Zealand, with a card market held in Dunedin at the weekend.

The cards range from sports to fantasy card games, wizards and sorcery.

For many it is a hobby but earlier this year a Pokémon collectable card sold for more than US$16 million (NZ$28m) on the international market.

Balclutha dad Justin Knight and his two sons are in the process of collecting a full set of Pokémon cards - one of each type of Pokémon.

Knight told Checkpoint there were 1025 different Pokémon and several of those had variations, making a total of about 1200 different cards the family was aiming to collect.

They have been collecting since Christmas last year and already have about 700.

Knight and his sons attended the Dunedin market at the weekend, which he said helped boost their collection.

"The market actually helped quite a lot - we picked up like over 200 cards."

The cards range from common to rare, with rare cards often selling for high amounts.

"You have to do quite a bit of research looking online for them. You can look them up on specific sites and they'll let you know the market value."

While Knight and his sons are collecting the cards as a hobby, for some it has become a way to make some cash.

"It can be very serious - you see news articles and things where like people are fighting over trying to get boxes, especially in stores when it starts to get hard to come by.

"We recently got one out of a pack that was worth just over $170, which we used as trade value in the weekend."

Since they are aiming to get only one of each card, the family use some of their more valuable finds to trade for larger numbers of cheaper cards in the hope of adding to their collection.

But there is no guarantee they will get what they are looking for.

"It's random - so you know what's in the set but you don't know which cards you're going to get from that set."

Knight said it was clear that card trading and collecting was gaining more traction, particularly overseas.

"Overseas it's very popular in different aspects. There are people who enjoy the hobby but then there's also people making money from it," he said.

"So there's a lot of people entering in trying to do what they want to do, whether it's to collect or to make money."

While Knight had yet to stumble across his own $16 million card, he said there were a lot of cards out there that were worth somewhere in the millions. These tended to be one-off or signature items.