It might sound a little silly that there’s an entire subgenre of influencers who offer investment advice around Pokémon trading cards. Probably because it is a little silly. The idea of some YouTube Jim Cramer breathlessly warning viewers that “Surging Sparks is setting a fire under collectors and investors” is the stuff Saturday Night Live sketches are made of.

Yet, there’s nothing silly about the amount of money changing hands in the Pokémon card space these days. Especially right now.

If it weren’t clear from all the viral videos of brawls at various Costcos, the soaring popularity of Pokémon cards has lately reached stratospheric new heights. (Costco ultimately had to institute a “one unit per membership per day” policy on its Pokémon offerings.) Overall value of the cards has spiked by 20% in the past six months—according to Elizabeth Gruene, who oversees Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA)’s pop culture and trading-card-games division—with some individual cards skyrocketing by as much as 150%. And a lot of that increase has happened in just the past few months.

What’s behind the surge? A confluence of events Gruene describes as a “perfect storm,” building on several years of intense interest in Pokémon.

The Pokémon phenomenon originally began in 1996 when Japanese boutique video-game company Game Freak launched the first-ever game in the series. Players set out to capture all 151 species of “pocket monsters” dispersed throughout a magical realm, hence the catchphrase, “Gotta catch ‘em all.” The game was an instant, monster-size hit that spawned a multibillion-dollar empire of movies, TV shows, theme parks, and, of course, trading cards. When it reached the U.S. in 1999, kids across........

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