1st Edition Machamp pop report: the most graded, the worst gem rate

Published August 28, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is August 13, 2026

The 1st Edition stamp on Machamp 8/102 tells you nothing about when the card was printed. Every copy Wizards of the Coast sold at retail carries it, first print to last. So the 1st Edition Machamp pop report describes something odd: the most graded 1st Edition Base Set card of any rarity, and the one that gems worst of the set's sixteen holos. 428 Gem Mint 10s out of 36,187 submissions at the August 13, 2026 pull, a 1.2 percent rate.

What the 1st Edition Machamp pop report actually counts

36,187 graded. 428 tens, 5,990 nines, 7,137 eights, 23 Authentic, and 22,609 sitting at PSA 7 or lower. That bottom group is 62.5 percent of every copy the grading room has seen.

One submission in 85 has come back a 10.

Stand it next to the rest of the run and the shape gets stranger. The other fifteen 1st Edition Base Set holos hold 44,628 grades and 1,353 tens between them, a 3.03 percent rate. This one card accounts for 44.8 percent of all 1st Edition Base Set holo submissions and gems at well under half their combined rate. The 1st Edition Charizard census is 5,713 grades, a sixth the size. Even outside the holos nothing comes close, the next busiest 1st Edition row being the Charmander at 6,778. PSA added 498 more Machamps in the last reporting period and the 30 day trend reads -18%.

Why the stamp on this one means nothing

Base Set boosters never contained a Machamp. Bulbapedia's page on the 2-Player Starter Set says so plainly: the card is exclusive to that box and cannot be pulled from Base Set packs. The box held 61 cards, two fixed 30 card decks plus the Machamp, so nothing about getting one was random. Buy the box, get the holo. That is where 36,000 submissions come from.

Wizards then never took the stamp off. Bulbapedia records that the card was only ever printed commercially as a 1st Edition variant, and collectors cataloguing starter set print runs on the Elite Fourum boards describe unlimited era boxes still shipping a stamped, shadowed Machamp. The lone exception was not a retail product: Trainer Deck A, handed to prototype Pokemon Leagues before the game launched in North America, carried the only non 1st Edition Machamp, and it is not a holo. That row holds 73 grades in the dataset.

The stamp here is a print artifact rather than a scarcity signal, and PSA has said as much in its own Set Registry write up, which names Machamp as the one 1st Edition holographic card that does not command a premium and quotes Pokemon specialist Scott Pratte: every base set Machamp has a 1st Edition stamp.

Sugimori drew twelve of the sixteen

Ken Sugimori illustrated this Machamp, along with eleven other Base Set holos: Alakazam, Blastoise, Chansey, Clefairy, Hitmonchan, Mewtwo, Nidoking, Ninetales, Poliwrath, Raichu and Zapdos. The four he did not draw are Mitsuhiro Arita's Charizard, Gyarados and Venusaur, plus Keiji Kinebuchi's Magneton. Sugimori did the original artwork for all 151 Generation I Pokemon and is credited on more Pokemon cards than any other illustrator, which makes the famous holo run mostly his and the famous holos mostly not.

Then the reprint dropped him. When Wizards assembled Base Set 2 for February 24, 2000, eight Base Set cards did not make it and Machamp is the first name on that list, so the census that reprint did produce has no Machamp row at all. The card returned once, in the 2-Player CD-ROM Starter Set, still stamped.

One more split matters if you own one. Two print runs went into the starter set, and the dataset keeps them apart because they do not grade alike. First came shadowless cards, and that shadowless Machamp is its own census: 7,797 grades for 19 tens, 0.24 percent. The shadowed second print is the row this page is about.

What eighty dollars buys you here

The raw figure above is the median copy, and the median copy came out of a deck that got played. It carries the date of the last price pull rather than today, and it drifts: the table figure was set on August 27, 2026, while PriceCharting's ungraded value read $14.01 the following day. The sold tape explains both numbers. The listing titles say moderately played, heavy play, damaged, crease, and sales between $4 and $10 are ordinary. Nobody submits those. The copies worth mailing in are the near mint ones, and two of those cleared $28.28 and $25.48 on TCGplayer on August 18 and August 17, 2026.

Run the census odds against that entry instead. At $28 plus Regular service at $79.99, a submission costs about $108. The dataset says 1.18 percent come back a 10, 16.55 percent a 9 and 19.72 percent an 8. Price the 9 at its realised $256.00 median, the 10 at $3,851.00, the 8 at PriceCharting's $121.87, then take 15 percent off every payout for selling fees and shipping. Those three rungs return about $95 against the $108 you spent. Everything at 7 or lower, 62.5 percent of the census, has to cover the rest.

Which is the honest read on this card. Priced off a near mint copy it is roughly a breakeven submission, and the thing that swings it either way is a one in eighty five ticket.

Both graded prices need qualifying. PriceCharting's Grade 9 headline was $248.09 on August 28, 2026, but it pools graders, and they do not trade alike: CGC 9s cleared $127.50 and $164.99 this month while 24 PSA 9s ran a $256.00 median between July 12 and August 26, 2026. The 10 has moved much harder. Five PSA 10 sales between July and December 2024 ran a $1,131.00 median. Eleven sales between January 12 and July 20, 2026 ran $3,851.00, topping out at a $5,002.00 Goldin lot on July 20. Roughly three and a half times in under two years, on a card whose population grew the entire time.

The service tier has an awkward edge to it. Regular is the defensible pick at $79.99, because the declared value you can justify on a raw copy is a 7 or an 8, and PSA listed the tier at 70 to 80 business days with a $1,500 maximum insured value when we read the page on August 28, 2026. Gem it and PSA ships a roughly $3,851 card back to you under $1,500 of coverage.

If you own a starter deck Machamp

Do not assume the box protected it. That hope shows up regularly on Elite Fourum, where collectors ask whether sealed starter decks ought to grade near perfect, and this census is the argument against: 428 tens from 36,187 tries on a card nobody had to chase. Pratte names the two things PSA punishes on these, scratching across the holo surface and chipping along the blue borders on the back. Turn the card over and read those four back edges before you look at anything on the front, because that is where a shuffled deck leaves its evidence and no amount of Starlight foil hides it.

Then decide which trade you are actually making. If you want the same box priced the other way round, the 1st Edition Charizard numbers cover a census a sixth the size that gems nearly twice as often, and our guide to reading a population report covers why those two facts belong together. All six Machamp rows sort side by side in the BetterPop gallery.

Sources

• PSA population via the GemRate pull of August 13, 2026; every population figure above refreshes with each site build
• The sixteen card 1st Edition Base Set holo run, the 107 row 1st Edition Base Set census, the shadowless Machamp row and the Trainer Deck A row computed from the same dataset pull
• PriceCharting: Machamp #8, Base Set 1st Edition, headline values and the completed auction tapes for ungraded, graded and PSA 10 read August 28, 2026; PSA 9 and PSA 10 medians computed from those dated sales after excluding other grading companies and the CD-ROM Cosmos variant
• PSA service levels, fees and turnaround, read August 28, 2026; Value services listed as temporarily paused
• Starter set contents, booster exclusion, the 1st Edition only print history and the two starter set print runs via Bulbapedia's 2-Player Starter Set page and Trainer Deck A page, read August 28, 2026
• The eight cards omitted from Base Set 2 and that set's February 24, 2000 release via Bulbapedia's Base Set 2 page, read August 28, 2026
• Illustrator credits for the sixteen Base Set holos via Bulbapedia's card page and the Pokemon TCG API set listing, read August 28, 2026
• Scott Pratte on the 1st Edition Machamp premium and on holo scratching and blue border chipping via PSA's Set Registry article by Kevin Glew, read August 28, 2026; the article is undated and its price figures are years stale, so only its condition commentary is used here
• Unlimited era boxes shipping a stamped Machamp, and the sealed deck grading expectation, from collector discussion on the Elite Fourum boards, read August 28, 2026; treated as community research rather than documented fact