A Pokémon card collector who bought an £18,000 set of cards said he "had to make his eight-year-old self happy", and that he would have been willing to spend more.

Joshua Nero, 29, from Ealing, west London, bought a set of 196 cards from an auction of a Woking man's collection which fetched £1.56 million in total when it went under the hammer on Wednesday.

Nero, who says he has been collecting cards for about 20 years, added that buying the set shows the "life-changing" value that Pokémon cards have nowadays.

He told BBC Radio Surrey: "For what it is, it was quite cheap."

He added: "I had to make my eight-year-old self happy. These cards are from what I remember most growing up and they are quite hard to get hold of.

"I look at my portfolio and do sometimes take a moment to think that it's life-changing money.

"I could sell everything now, buy a house and live a very comfortable life, but there's that part of me that thinks about how I grew up with this."

Pokémon is a Japanese franchise best known for its trading cards, video games and animated television series.

Nero, who attended the auction in Surrey with his wife and a friend, bought a master set of the Majestic Dawn set of cards.

A master set means it includes every variant of every card that is part of the set.

On picking up the cards, Nero said it felt like "carrying precious cargo", and that he had to go through and put each card in a protective sleeve to ensure that they were not damaged in transit, and would maintain their value.

He added that he would now hope to get some of the cards "graded" - a standardised system for comparing the quality of trading cards - which could see them increase in value over and above the £18,000 he spent.

Other lots in the auction at Surrey-based Ewbank's auction house, which included 42 sets of cards, sold for as high as £100,000.

Andrew Ewbank, who runs the auction house, said the sale had been their most successful in 30 years of business and included bidders from "all over the world".

Despite the high prices involved in trading Pokémon cards, Nero says he has enjoyed the experience of buying, selling and trading cards.

He said: "I met my wife Pokémon card collecting. I've travelled as far as the US and Japan in the past to drop off and pick up cards.

"I have friends who were living paycheck-to-paycheck who are now multi-millionaires because they dedicated a lot of time to this."

Nero, who also collects Pokémon figures and soft toys, added that the value of cards also meant that collectors needed to take precautions such as storing them in safety deposit vaults away from the home.

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