Two Brothers Own The World's Largest Pokemon Card Collection.
In 1999, a kid named Owen Gray started doing something at his school in the UK that would define the next 27 years of his life. While other kids were in the playground swapping cards and bending them in their pockets, Owen was filing his in sleeves. "I needed to file them," he told Guinness World Records. "That became my initial obsession with it." Today, Owen and his brother Conner Gray hold the Guinness World Records title for the largest Pokemon card collection in the world, with 48,339 unique items verified in 2024. The collection includes countless rare cards worth thousands each, making a full valuation a job for a very large calculator. The brothers sat down with the Guinness World Records podcast What's The Record? this week to tell the full story, including one detail almost too painful to say: early on, Owen traded his first fully complete set for a box of Pogs.
Conner confessed to being more of a Yu-Gi-Oh! fan growing up, and was only pulled in when Owen asked him to help catalogue the collection. Owen said it would take "a few days." That was not accurate. Nine years later, they are still going. The collection is currently stored in Florida, and in the podcast episode, host Will Munford shared his own moment of personal anguish: he once unknowingly traded away a base set Charizard he had found in a Christmas pack, cards that now sell for hundreds of pounds. The nostalgia is rife. The records are real. And somewhere out there, every kid who ever traded a holographic Blastoise for something they now regret understands exactly how this started.
