Base Set Blastoise PSA 10 pop: 381 tens, and seven in ten below a 7

Published August 17, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is August 13, 2026

PSA has stamped Gem Mint 10 on 381 unlimited Base Set Blastoise. It has looked at 51,151 of them. That is a 0.74 percent gem rate as of the August 13, 2026 population pull, and among every Pokemon card with more than 40,000 grades on file, only Base Set Charizard does worse.

What fifty one thousand submissions produced

51,151 graded. 381 tens, 4,924 nines, 10,117 eights, 40 Authentic, and 35,689 cards sitting at PSA 7 or lower. That bottom group is roughly seven of every ten Blastoise 2/102 ever mailed in.

PSA added 788 more in the last reporting period and the 30 day trend reads -7%. Twenty seven years after the Base Set booster boxes were opened, the row is still getting longer, just more slowly than it did in 2021.

Why does the shell gem better than the flame?

Line up the three Base Set starters at the same August 13, 2026 pull and a gradient falls out. Charizard gems at 0.47 percent across 104,121 grades. Blastoise gems at 0.74 percent across 51,151. Venusaur, the one nobody was chasing, gems at 1.27 percent across 46,359. Same print sheet, same 1999 factory, same galaxy foil, and the order runs exactly inverse to how badly the hobby wanted each one.

The likeliest explanation is submission economics rather than anything about the cardboard. A beaten Charizard is still worth grading, because even a PSA 5 clears the fee comfortably, so damaged copies get mailed in anyway and land in the denominator. A Blastoise in that condition returns much less, so more owners look hard at their copy and decide not to bother. The Blastoise that arrives at PSA has already passed a filter the Charizard never had to. That reads off the census shape, though, and it is not something PSA publishes.

What both cards share is the 1999 production. PSA wants centering inside roughly 55/45 on the front and 75/25 on the reverse, four sharp corners, and full original gloss. Wizards era cuts missed that window often enough that plenty of copies were disqualified before a child ever touched one, and the foil arrived from the factory with surface marks already under the wrapper.

If you are screening a copy yourself, flip it over first. The Base Set back is a dark saturated blue, which means edge whitening and back centering are visible in a second, and back centering is where a lot of otherwise clean Blastoise quietly cap out at a 9. Front cut and corners after that. Whitening on the yellow border last, because by then you usually know the answer. For the wider version of this question, our guide covers which low pop cards are genuinely scarce rather than merely old.

Six rows share this card number

The census does not treat Base Set Blastoise as one card, and neither should you before you read a number off it. This page tracks the unlimited print. The 1st Edition sits in its own row at 4,059 graded and 101 tens, gemming at 2.49 percent, more than three times the unlimited rate. Shadowless is worse than both at 7,606 graded for 44 tens, the same inversion documented in the Shadowless Charizard census, where the scarcer print grades worse because the people who owned it knew to hold it.

Below those sit the oddities, each with a separate PSA label and a separate count at the same pull: a 'Stage' error missing that word from the play instruction line, 674 graded; a Red Dot error with an ink mark above the Hydro Pump energy cost, 242 graded; a 1999 to 2000 copyright variant, 390 graded. Bulbapedia documents the first two as genuine print variants. And Base Set 2 from 2000, a different set entirely, carries its own Blastoise at 11,891 graded and 61 tens.

Telling unlimited apart takes two seconds. There is a drop shadow along the right edge of the art window, which shadowless copies lack, and no Edition 1 stamp under the bottom left corner of the art.

The first English card ever test printed

Ken Sugimori painted it, credited on the card face itself, and the English Base Set reached shelves on January 9, 1999 with Blastoise at 2/102.

Here is the part most owners of this card do not know. Collector research surfaced in 2020 established that Blastoise, not Charizard, was the first card Wizards of the Coast test printed for the English game, carrying the identifier 009/165R. Two of those presentation copies were commissioned in 1998 with blank white backs, made to show Nintendo and the press what an English Pokemon card would look like. One of them, graded CGC 8.5, sold for $360,000 at Heritage Auctions on January 14, 2021. The other has not surfaced.

There is also a Blastoise with a red border and no holofoil from Trainer Deck B, handed out to prototype Pokemon Leagues before the North American launch. The census has seen 79 of those, ever. So the holo that spent 27 years being the other one in the box is the card Wizards put in front of Nintendo first.

What a submission actually returns

Regular service is the honest tier for this card. PSA lists Regular at $79.99 per card with a $1,500 maximum insured value, checked on psacard.com on August 17, 2026, and a raw copy that looks clean to the eye is realistically a 7 or an 8. Declaring for a grade you are probably not getting only moves you up to Express at $149.

Two sources disagree about what a raw copy costs, and that gap decides the whole trade. TCGplayer's market price on August 17, 2026 was $220, which is roughly what near mint listings ask. PriceCharting's ungraded figure the same day was $89.54, which leans on sales of played copies. Buy at $220, add the $80 fee, and a PSA 7 at about $231 loses money; the trade only turns positive at an 8, around $377. Buy at $90 and the 7 clears comfortably. Neither figure is wrong. They are describing two different cards that share a name.

The 10 is a separate conversation entirely. PriceCharting's $7,600 is an algorithmic value rather than one dated sale, and with 381 tens in existence the top of this ladder trades thinly enough that it is worth checking against recent solds before you plan around it.

Where this leaves your copy

Send it if the back is clean and the cut is even, and price the decision off an 8 rather than a 7. That is where the margin actually begins on a copy bought at market, and the fact that it begins so early is why the denominator keeps climbing while the gem rate sits near 0.74 percent. If you want the reprint that shares this artwork and gems dozens of times more often, the same comparison plays out in the Celebrations Classic Collection numbers, and the unlimited sibling that beats Blastoise to the bottom of the table is broken down in the Base Set Charizard pop report. All three prints sort side by side in the BetterPop gallery.

Sources

• PSA population via the GemRate pull of August 13, 2026; every figure above refreshes with each site build
• PriceCharting: Blastoise #2 (unlimited), read August 17, 2026
• PSA grading standards and PSA service levels and fees, both read August 17, 2026
• CGC on the $360,000 Blastoise presentation card, Heritage Auctions, January 14, 2021, read August 17, 2026
• Base Set release date, the 009/165R test print research, the Stage and red dot variants, Trainer Deck B, and the Ken Sugimori credit via Bulbapedia's Base Set and Blastoise pages, read August 17, 2026; artist credit confirmed on the card scan