Speaking from my own research since I’ve been hunting this card the past few months. Besides the usual waifu tax and the illustrator being Naoki Saito, I think the main two components are:
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Tons of publicity it has gotten from HIKARU (a popular japanese Youtuber). He’s made several videos in the past few weeks/months related to the PSA 10 version of the card (buying, showing, talking about the card and its price). He also appeared in a live event back in March 2023 holding the card itself (similar to Logan Paul and his Illustrator Pikachu).
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PSA being relatively new in Japan and its rising popularity and demand, coupled with card shops very public buy offers that set a continously increasing floor price (referencing rabby250’s post with a more thorough explanation: post
Buy offers were 2M JPY (~15k USD) back in Feb/Mar 2023
and now they have doubled to 4.2M JPY (~31k USD)
The card doesn’t seem to be very common in the west, so price seems to be mostly controlled by the japanese market. However, I can say that supply doesn’t seem to be a problem since you can see several PSA 10 copies available on mercari and PSA 10 pop has increased by 20% since Mar 2023. (Pop was ~450 for PSA 10 back in March 2023)