Base Set 2 Charizard pop report: 70 tens, and the foil changed

Published August 27, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is August 13, 2026

Two hundred and forty four Pokemon cards have passed 20,000 grades at PSA. The Base Set 2 Charizard pop report is the worst of that entire group: 70 Gem Mint 10s out of 24,077 submissions at the August 13, 2026 pull, a 0.29 percent gem rate. Same Mitsuhiro Arita illustration as the 1999 original, same yellow border, roughly six tenths the odds.

Seventy tens out of 24,000 tries

24,077 graded. 70 tens, 1,406 nines, 3,979 eights, 106 Authentic, and 18,516 sitting at PSA 7 or lower. That bottom group is 76.9 percent of every copy the grading room has ever seen.

One submission in 344 has come back a 10.

The row is still moving, too. PSA added 425 more in the last reporting period and the 30 day trend reads -1%. Spread the 70 tens across the twenty six years this card has existed and the grading room has produced fewer than three a year.

Fourteen of the fifteen holos it shares with 1999

Base Set 2 reprinted fifteen of the Base Set holos. Stand each next to its 1999 unlimited counterpart at the August 13, 2026 pull and fourteen of the fifteen gem worse in the 2000 print. Charizard runs 0.29 percent against 0.47. Nidoking, 0.79 against 2.36. Clefairy, 0.58 against 1.24. The lone exception is Ninetales at 2.43 percent against 2.29, a gap small enough to be nothing. Across all twenty Base Set 2 holos the census holds 110,536 grades and 1,044 tens.

So whatever is dragging this card down is not the card. It belongs to the print run, and the census cannot say which part of it did the damage. The candidates arrive tangled together: the cut, the foil, and packs opened at the loudest moment of the boom by kids who wanted to play. The 1999 packs were opened by the same kids. What separates the two is a factory run and a year, and only one of those left physical evidence. For the benchmark, the unlimited 4/102 census holds 104,121 grades and 488 tens.

The set nobody asked for, in February 2000

Base Set 2 landed on February 24, 2000 with 130 cards, every one of them a reprint from Base Set or Jungle. It has no Japanese equivalent. Wizards of the Coast assembled it for the English market alone, and eight Base Set cards did not make the cut, Machamp and Porygon among them. There was no 1st Edition print run either, which is why this Charizard occupies a single row in the census while the 1999 card needs three.

The set also changed the foil, and that is the part worth knowing if you own one. Base Set, Jungle and Fossil used the pattern Bulbapedia names Starlight: starbursts of varying size, slightly blurry, thrown across the art window. Base Set 2 introduced Cosmos, which trades the stars for dots and circles and then stayed the default English holo pattern for eleven years, through Call of Legends. Hold the two scans side by side and you do not need a loupe. The 1999 background has stars in it. The 2000 background has specks.

Whether the new foil is what costs this card its tens is not a question a population report can settle. It is simply the one documented physical difference between two prints of the same painting that grade this far apart.

What the census cannot see on your copy

Read the sold tape and a second market shows up that the pop report has no column for. Copies carrying a foil swirl, the circular pattern in the holo layer that collectors treat as its own product, take clear premiums. A raw swirl sold for $360.00 on August 25, 2026 against a $242.50 median that fortnight. A PSA 9 with a swirl took $2,184.05 on June 17, 2026 against a $1,625 median. The highest PSA 10 sale ever recorded here, $14,999.99 on March 8, 2022, was a swirl too. PSA does not put any of that on the label, so none of it reaches the census. The sellers put it in their titles every time.

Separating a Base Set 2 copy from a 1999 one takes three glances. The card number reads 4/130 instead of 4/102. The copyright line ends in 1999 to 2000 Wizards. And a set symbol sits at the right end of the Flame Pokemon line, where the 1999 card carries nothing at all, because Base Set never shipped with one.

Priced off a near mint copy, not a median one

The raw figure there is deliberately not the median. Twenty four dated sales of 4/130 cleared PriceCharting's completed auctions between August 10 and August 26, 2026 at a $242.50 median, but the titles say what those copies were: heavily played, moderately played, damaged. The ones described as near mint or lightly played took $320 to $410 in the same fortnight. Nobody grades the median copy, so the submission starts at the top of that band.

Regular service is the honest tier. PSA lists it at $79.99 per card with a $1,500 maximum insured value and a 70 to 80 business day estimate, checked on psacard.com on August 27, 2026, and the defensible declared value on a raw copy is a 7 or an 8. The awkward part is the ceiling rather than the fee: a PSA 9 of this card has been clearing well above $1,500, so the tier that fits your realistic outcome does not cover your hoped for one. Express lifts the cap to $2,500 and takes another $69 out of the trade.

Both graded numbers in the table need a footnote. PriceCharting's Grade 9 headline was $1,489.59 on August 27, 2026, but that blends PSA with CGC, BGS and SGC, and those slabs do not trade alike: ten of them sold between $930 and $1,400 this summer while fifteen PSA 9s ran a $1,625 median. The 10 is thinner again. It is an algorithmic value rather than a sale, and the tape under it holds eleven sales in five years, from $1,920 in November 2021 to $21,393.72 in February 2026, the last confirmed titled one at $12,000 on July 1, 2025. A price built on two sales a year moves when one collector changes their mind.

Which raises the obvious question. Why would 24,000 people submit a card that gems 0.29 percent of the time?

The answer sits in the middle of the ladder rather than the top. An 8 was worth $675.38 on August 27, 2026 against $440 all in, and 22.7 percent of this census came back an 8 or better. The trade works before the 10 is ever in play. The 10 is a lottery ticket resting on a deal that already pays.

Be clear about what the scarcity is not buying you, though. This card holds 70 tens. The 1999 unlimited Charizard holds 488, seven times as many, and its PSA 10 was valued at $26,566.47 on the same August day against $11,764.45 here. Our guide on what a low population actually buys you works through the rest of that gap.

The move on a 4/130

Buy it for the 8. At a near mint entry the trade clears at an 8 and sits close to even at a 7, and everything above that is upside on a card where upside is genuinely scarce. Screen for deck time before anything else, since 76.9 percent of this census landed at 7 or lower and that is corner and edge territory: look at all four corners under magnification, then run a finger along the top edge for the soft fanning that shuffling leaves. If you want the other reprint that turned an Arita Charizard into an enormous census and a punishing gem rate, the XY Evolutions numbers repeat this shape sixteen years later, while the Celebrations Classic Collection reprint is the one that broke it. All four prints sort next to each other in the BetterPop gallery.

Sources

• PSA population via the GemRate pull of August 13, 2026; every population figure above refreshes with each site build
• Comparative gem rates for the fifteen shared holos, the twenty card Base Set 2 holo run, and the 244 cards above 20,000 grades computed from the same dataset pull
• PriceCharting: Charizard #4, Base Set 2 and Charizard #4, Base Set unlimited, headline values and completed auction tapes read August 27, 2026
• PSA service levels and fees, read August 27, 2026; Value services listed as temporarily paused
• Release date, set size, the reprint composition, the eight omitted Base Set cards and the absence of a 1st Edition run via Bulbapedia's Base Set 2 page, read August 27, 2026
• Starlight and Cosmos holofoil definitions via Bulbapedia's Holofoil article, read August 27, 2026, and confirmed against the official 4/102 and 4/130 card scans
• Artist credit, card number and copyright line read directly off the 4/130 card face