Piece #2 - My First Art Academy
Delphox
When I first began collecting as a legitimate hobby, I was just a Freshman in high school. The passion was reignited while cleaning the attic and finding my brothers collection. After collecting amateurly for a year or so, I decided that I wanted something that would set my collection apart from the majority. Something that you couldn't get from Walmart and were unlikely to find without a little bit of digging.
Although I had grown out of playing the Pokémon video games, I was still aware of them and the current iterations . In late 2014, a competition was announced that would combine the video games series with the cards and would culminate into exactly what I was looking for.
The competition in question didn't involve the main series games, but instead revolved around a fringe offshoot game designed to encourage young artists to draw Pokémon on Nintendo's most recent flagship handheld, the 3DS. The game would aptly be named Pokémon: Art Academy. There would be 22 winners total, 6 from North America & South America, 6 from Europe and Oceania and 10 from Japan. Half of all entries would revolve around Pikachu being dressed up in various outfits with the other half being open in any Pokémon however the artist wanted to depict them. Each winner would get 100 copies of their own winning art work and that would be it. The limited quantity and the art having to be drawn on a screen just bigger than 3.5 inches made it the perfect defining aspect of my collection
, if I could find them.
To be clear, stating that this game is a fringe Pokémon game is an understatement. The closest main series games that were released were Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire. These games were a remake with a modern twist that sold over 14 million copies world wide. Pokémon: Art Academy sold a fraction of that at just over 30 thousand.
In September of 2015 it was floating around that the packages had been delivered to the winners from other collectors that had more luck contacting winners than I did. I had already had a saved search for the cards on eBay for a few months and soon the first one would be listed. A Delphox was listed for auction starting at $200 but it wouldn't end for an entire week, so I had to wait.
At the time I was a server and I knew that I would be working at the time the auction was ending so I was hoping that it would be slow the night that the auction ended. I put in the starting bid before my shift and set an alarm for 10 minutes before. When the alarm went off, there was only one table in the restaurant so I took my break, got some food and waited. I was prepared to go as high as $350 as there had been little to no sales of any of the Art Academy cards and I didn't know how high it could get. As the last few seconds counted down, I placed my max bid at $350 and hoped for the best. To my surprise, not a single bid against me. Perhaps the mixture of uncertain market value and the release being recent lead to there not being many eyes on it. Regardless, I had acquired my first Art Academy for just a few Benjamins and it would remain in a safe spot for a couple of years before being graded a perfect Gem Mint 10.
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