Limited edition items are meant to be sold at a higher price, simply because of their exclusivity.
These items are often adorned with additional gimmicks, or enhancements, in order to differentiate them from the rest of their kind.
And this 2019 Blue-Eyes White Dragon 20th Anniversary Gold Edition Yu-Gi-Oh! card is exactly that.
With only 500 cards have been made, the cards were sold exclusively through the online shop of manufacturer Konami.
One of those rare cards, was owned by Zhang Yujie, a former government fund manager who was convicted in 2020 for embezzling nearly 70 million yuan ($10.8 million) from a government fund under his management, in the course of over three years from 2016, while working at the Chuzhou land resources bureau.
And that particular card went on an online auction, before the government stepped in.
Yu-Gi-Oh! cards were created for the franchise, but have since went beyond collection items for fans, and were also used in actual strategy card games and tournaments.
And this Blue-Eyes White Dragon in one of the most powerful.
That particular dragon was central to the storyline of the Yu-Gi-Oh! TV series and the corresponding card proved a powerful weapon during gameplay.
The limited edition cards for the dragon were made to mark the 20th anniversary of the trading card game.
Because of its rarity, the card was predicted to sell at the auction for a price between 200,000-300,000 yuan ($30,900-$46,300).
But when it was put online for the auction by the Chuzhou City Court in Anhui at an Alibaba-owned platform, with a price of just 50 yuan ($7), the value of the card went up so high, and reached $13.4 million within half an hour, with some 2,000 bids placed.
This figure is well beyond the embezzled amount that had earned Zhang his life sentence.
That figure was high enough that the court has to shut the whole thing down.
"This auction has been suspended," read the statement from Alibaba judicial auction online platform, "The lot is seriously inconsistent with the actual bid price, and malicious bidding behavior is suspected."
The government's federal court ordered the auction to be taken down, after roughly 18,000 people participated in the auction, while 2 million others became onlookers and watched it play out.
The government was also concerned, simply because the card is a collectible item which has its price tied to nothing other than its perceived value among the community as a whole. But still, the government suggested that there was something strange going on, considering that all those astronomical bids were coming in despite the auction organizers didn't providing any sort of proof that the card is not a fake.
In other words, the auction didn't provide any information about the card's authenticity.
The government was also worry that whoever did end up with the winning bid had no actual intention of paying.
Besides this Yu-Gi-Oh! card, other Zhang Yujie's properties that went on sale, include a USB drive, which skyrocketed to $77,000 based on “rumors spread that the drive held crucial information on some Bitcoins that Zhang owned. That auction had to be suspended as well.
Others include a PlayStation 4 adorned with gold and diamonds.
Auctions of assets frozen during criminal cases are relatively common in China. Often, the items were seized following corruption cases, and that by auctioning them, the government can provide an opportunity for the general public to buy unique or valuable items.
