Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering (Accidentally) Meet on A Misprinted Nidoran ♂ Card

From 1998 to 2003, Wizards of the Coast was in charge of translating, producing and shipping out Pokémon cards. WotC also created (and still manufactures) Magic: The Gathering, so that means that there are a few Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering "crossovers" on the secondary market, one of which just came up for auction. Goldin Auctions is offering a German-language 1999 Nidoran ♂ card with a Magic: The Gathering back, a fusion of late '90s goodness that's perfect for any rare card collector.

The Nidoran ♂ card was part of the Pokémon Trading Card Game's base set, the first slate of Pokémon cards to be offered outside of Japan, meaning this misprinted iteration was likely created when Wizards first set their printing machines to create Pokémon cards — though the company began printing Pokémon cards in 1998, it had been making Magic: The Gathering cards since 1993. The end result is a card that brings the two popular games together in a rather seamless fashion. These hybrid cards, created intentionally as part of test print runs or accidentally as printing mishaps, are incredibly rare and often incredibly valuable (card grading company CGC wrote an incredibly detailed breakdown of them in 2020). The highest price fetched by one of these cards was $216,000 USD, achieved by a "test print" Blastoise card with gold borders and a Magic: The Gathering back.

As this Nidoran ♂ was a mistake instead of an early print and is in German instead of English, it's unlikely to hit Blastoise numbers, but at the time of writing bids for it still exceed $2,000 USD. If you'd like to put a bid in, you can head to the Goldin webstore.

Elsewhere in the world of Pokémon, Ash and Pikachu are saying goodbye after 25 years of the Pokémon TV series.