Lost during a big move? Stolen when you’re out of town? Consumed in a tragic fire? What’s the worst way your meticulously grown Pokémon card collection could perish? Water damage from flooding is definitely up there. Water damage from a broken sewer line might be the absolute worst, though. That’s what recently happened to one collector who’s still trying to process what happened. “It hurts that I lost a multiple thousand dollar collection, but it really just hurts from losing all the memories,” he wrote.
Pictures shared over the weekend in the Pokémon trading card Reddit community tell the grim story (via Dexerto). Unopened packs of Astral Radiance, Surging Sparks, Chilling Reign, Stellar Crown, and more lay on a grey basement floor after having sat in pools of contaminated water from a broken sewer line. Their owner, Reddit user Substantial-Pie-4973, said he also lost his entire collection of opened packs as well. Some of the rarest cards spotted in his binder included a Moonbreon and Tomokazu Komiya Charmeleon,
“I go to the store and get a phone call from my wife. She tells me the basement is flooding and right when I heard those words my heart dropped,” he wrote. “The sewage line busted in the basement which ruined almost all of our belongings and my entire Pokémon collection. The cards in my binders, all of my sealed/loose packs had been soaking in the sewage water for about 2-3 days from what I’m being told, but since the storage room is closed off, we did not smell or see any of the flooding.”
Substantial-Pie-4973 went into the circumstances of how the collection ended up in the basement in the first place. He said he took a pay cut to help his father open a new business, and he and his wife were living at his grandparents until they could afford a new place to live. As a result, everything was sitting in cardboard moving boxes in the basement. In addition to not being aware of the leak at first, Substantial-Pie-4973 said he also recently had surgery for a hernia, delaying him from getting everything opened and sorted as soon as the mess was discovered. None of it was insured either. An absolute nightmare scenario.
“Category 3 water damage can be super harmful and porous items like cards are not safely salvageable, so pretty much everything that was touched had to be thrown out,” Substantial-Pie-4973 wrote. “Getting that hit after opening so many packs, finding that product that everyone is wanting on the shelf at the store, trying to complete certain sets, etc…all gone before I felt like I could blink.”
While this is as good a moment as any to remind people to 1) not store collections in basements, 2) keep everything in sealed plastic containers, and 3) get the collection added as separate item in your insurance policy, it’s also a reminder that those best practices aren’t always available to everyone all of the time. Sometimes life cuts you a break and sometimes it kicks you when you’re already vulnerable.
If there’s one silver lining, it’s that fellow collectors are already encouraging Substantial-Pie-4973 to livestream his pulls for the remaining damaged packs and encourage others to donate to help him start rebuilding his collection. “Open the poop packs! Open the poop packs!” chanted one commenter. “It’s every collectors worst nightmare,” wrote another. “Hard to spin it in any positive way. I’m sorry you’re going through all that.”
