What price can you put on your child’s education? One Yu-Gi-Oh! fan finds out.
What wouldn’t you do for your child? Give them a kidney, or undergo a painful bone marrow transplant? Sure, no sweat. But sell your pride and joy Yu-Gi-Oh! card collection? More than a few Yu-Gi-Oh! card collectors might baulk at that. But not Twitter user @KnightMiyabi, who has sold his cards so that he can pay for his daughter’s education.
While most Yu-Gi-Oh! cards are very reasonably priced, and even a deck like the anime’s protagonist Yugi’s wouldn’t break the bank (although it may have friends and loved ones questioning your priorities), some rarer cards can be worth a (not so) small fortune. @KnightMiyabi was the proud owner of four Blue-Eyes White Dragon cards, of which it seems only a thousand were ever printed, and then distributed at the Tokyo Dome. While the English-language version is far less rare, and can be bought for pennies, the Japanese version was one of the first “secret rare” cards, and can command an extortionate amount at sale, especially when they’re still sealed, as in this case. Even in Japan, with its famously low levels of crime, a public display of rare cards last year in Shinjuku Station required security guards and we’ve reported before about some criminals stooping to stealing kids’ collections.
The photo on the right shows how much money @KnightMiyabi claims to have made from selling the cards, and if every note is the same as the front one (10,000 yen, US$87.23), the sale of those four cards alone should go a long way towards paying for his daughter’s schooling. While @KnightMiyabi didn’t reveal the full figure he received, he suggested that someone who knew anything about such rare cards wouldn’t part with one for less than 600,000 yen (US$5,235).
▼ The cards, in all their mint, sealed glory.
The money isn’t to send their daughter to some prestigious high-ranking university right now but to ensure that she gets into a good kindergarten and as the makings of a nest egg for her education further down the line.
Will she be following in her father’s footsteps? @KnightMiyabi seems to suggest he made the tough decision to bid farewell to his treasured Blue-Eyes White Dragon cards for his daughter’s sake after she played with some of his (other, less valuable) cards and started crying after they were taken away from her. Perhaps he saw something of himself, a future Yu-Gi-Oh! fan in the making, in her.
Most respondents praised @KnightMiyabi as an exemplary parent, but there were plenty who professed they wouldn’t be able to make the same choice, parting with their precious cards would be too much. Hopefully the daughter will appreciate the sacrifice this Yu-Gi-Oh! fan made to give her the best possible start in life.
Source: Twitter/KnightMiyabi via Hachimakiko and jin115
Featured image: Twitter/@KnightMiyabi