Base Set Chansey pop report: 147 tens holding a $9,300 price

Published October 24, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is October 23, 2026

PSA last awarded a Gem Mint 10 to an unlimited Base Set Chansey on September 28, 2024. At the October 23, 2026 pull it had not awarded another one.

That is not a forgotten card sitting quietly in a binder. Collectors mailed in 210 more copies in the last reporting period alone, and the census is still climbing, +14% across thirty days. The submissions keep arriving. The tens stopped.

Why the Base Set Chansey pop report is the smallest in its set

Chansey #3, Pokemon Game (Base Set), unlimited print, 1999, reads 147 Gem Mint 10s from 16,543 grade events at the October 23, 2026 pull, a 0.89 percent gem rate. 2,108 copies stopped at the 9. 4,169 stopped at the 8. The other 10,115, which is 61.14 percent of everything ever submitted, came back below an 8.

Fifteen holo rares carry an unlimited row in this set, because every retail Machamp was stamped 1st Edition. Chansey owns the smallest ten count of the fifteen. Clefairy is next at 167, then Magneton at 190 and Hitmonchan at 212, while Zapdos sits at the top with 685 from a census only 18 percent larger than this one. Even the Charizard everybody photographs holds 491, six and a half times the submissions for a bit over three times the tens. The biggest count in the set belongs to no holo at all: the common Charmander has 3,646.

The dates sort the same way. Seven of the fifteen produced a new Gem Mint 10 somewhere in 2026, Charizard on September 16 and Mewtwo on September 18. Chansey's last one is from September 2024, the oldest in the set, with Clefairy's December 2024 the only other more than a year stale. That field moves elsewhere: 240 of the 367 dataset rows printed in 2001 or earlier with at least 3,000 grades carry a 2026 date. This row is the exception, not the format.

Chansey arrives in ordinary shape, and then stalls

The obvious explanation would be that these copies are wrecked. By Base Set standards, they are not.

61.14 percent of Chansey submissions land below an 8. Mewtwo sits at 60.0 percent and Hitmonchan at 59.9, both within a point. Charizard is the genuinely battered one at 75.4 percent, Blastoise at 70.2. Chansey reaches the clean tier about as often as the middle of the set does.

Then it quits. Of the 6,404 Chansey copies that graded an 8, 9 or 10, only 2.30 percent are tens. Mewtwo converts 4.72 percent of its clean copies, Hitmonchan 3.03. The one card that converts worse is Charizard at 1.93 percent, and Charizard had to survive a far rougher trip to get there. Whatever costs Chansey that last grade point is not wear, because the wear is already paid for in the 60 percent that never reach an 8.

One tidy answer did not survive a check. Chansey and Clefairy are the only Colorless type holos in Base Set and they hold the two smallest ten counts, which looks like a type effect. Pooled across Base Set, Jungle, Fossil and Neo Genesis, Colorless holos really do gem worse, 0.715 percent against 1.402 across 103,052 grades. But the card level median agrees in only two of those four sets, and the pooled gap leans on a handful of enormous rows. Not strong enough to call a cause.

What is left points at the print rather than the owner. Every copy is identical in the ways that matter: a pale Chansey filling the middle of the window in flat pink, with dark Starlight foil running bare to the edges of the art box around it. Centering and foil surface are what separate a 9 from a 10 on a 1999 holo, and neither is something a careful owner can undo. Which of the two is doing the work is not a question the census can answer.

Every print of this card does the same thing

Wizards ran this Chansey four times in English. The 1st Edition row reads 2,927 grades for 48 tens, 1.640 percent, the second worst of the sixteen 1st Edition Base Set holos. Shadowless: 3,793 grades, 16 tens, 0.422 percent. Unlimited is the row in the box above. Base Set 2 reprinted it in 2000 at 5,542 grades for 29 tens, 0.523 percent.

Four print runs, four separate groups of owners, four numbers near the floor. The 2000 figure carries one caveat worth stating: fourteen of the fifteen holos Base Set 2 shares with 1999 gem worse in the later printing, so that row is partly the set's problem and not only Chansey's.

Then Pokemon printed the artwork a fifth time. XY Evolutions put the Base Set illustrations back on 2016 stock with a 2016 foil, and its Chansey returned 0.528 percent from 4,921 grades, fifth worst of the 74 rows in that set. The order barely moved either. Across the eleven holos the two sets share, the 1999 ranking and the 2016 ranking correlate at a Spearman rho of 0.627, and four of the five worst in 1999 are still four of the five worst in 2016: Chansey, Clefairy, Hitmonchan and Magneton. Different factory, different foil, seventeen years apart, the same cards sitting at the bottom. That points hard at something in the artwork itself rather than at any one print run or any one group of owners.

Ken Sugimori, and a background bought off a photo CD

Ken Sugimori drew this one. Bulbapedia records a detail about the art that most card pages leave out: the background behind Chansey was not illustrated at all. It is lifted from Sozaijiten Vol. 9, a Japanese royalty free stock image CD. Under the foil it reads as a dark field, and it happens to be the part of the window where the holo sits fully exposed, because Chansey's body covers almost everything else.

There is also a Chansey that practically nobody has. Winners of the 64 Mario Stadium Pokemon Snap Best Photo Contest in Japan, spring 1999, got one printed with a photograph by Kaori Samoya where the illustration belongs, carrying a camera graphic in place of a set symbol. Bulbapedia states plainly that the number in existence is unknown. It is not the card in this report, and it is not the card in your binder.

Sixty dollars against a one in 112 shot

PSA's Standard tier is $59.99 per card with a $1,000 maximum insured value and a 90 to 100 business day estimate, read off psacard.com on October 24, 2026. Value service is still paused. Price the trip at Standard, because the likely outcome of this submission is nowhere near the $9,300 card.

Both graded figures there are medians of real dated sales rather than an algorithm's guess. Seven PSA 10 sales between March 22 and September 7, 2026 range from $6,082.19 to $19,999.99 and sit at $9,300.00. Thirteen PSA 9 sales between August 17 and October 17, 2026 sit at $365.00. CGC, BGS and TAG rows came out before either median was taken, which matters here: CGC 9 copies cleared between $133.50 and $225.00 in the same window, so a grade column that mixes graders reads low.

Thirteen dated PSA 10 sales in 2024 sit at a $2,226.00 median, so the figure has roughly quadrupled in two years while the population added nothing. Vintage ran generally in that stretch, so this is consistent with a closed population rather than proof of one.

Run the odds across the whole census and the trip is not obviously bad. 0.89 percent of submissions return a ten, 12.74 percent a 9 and 25.20 percent an 8. Value the 8 at its $117.50 median, the 9 at $365.00 and the 10 at $9,300, then value every copy below an 8 at absolutely nothing, and the average submission still returns about $160 against $106.11 all in. That is the lifetime distribution, though, and it is full of copies that were visibly played before anyone mailed them. Your copy is not the average copy, in either direction.

What to do with the one you already own

The 9 is the realistic target, and on this card the 9 pays: $365.00 against $106.11 all in. Aim at that and the submission works on its own terms. Aim at the 10 and you are betting against a population that has not produced one since September 2024.

So measure the yellow border on both sides before you seal anything. Centering is the cheaper of the two suspects to rule out at your own desk, and if the left and right strips are visibly unequal you are buying a 9, so price it that way. File one oddity while you are there: PSA 1 copies of this Chansey sold at an $80.50 median across fourteen dated 2026 sales, ahead of the PSA 3 at $25.49 and the PSA 6 at $39.99. Somebody wants a Base Set Chansey in a slab badly enough not to read the number on the label.

Every population figure above refreshes from the dataset behind the BetterPop gallery, so this page tracks the census instead of freezing it. If thin counts are what you collect, the rest are in the guide to cards with populations this small.

Sources

• GemRate PSA population data, pull dated October 23, 2026, for every population figure on this page and the comparison rows across Base Set, Jungle, Fossil and Neo Genesis.
• PriceCharting dated sold tape, Chansey #3 Base Set, read October 24, 2026. PSA titled rows only, CGC, BGS, TAG and ACE rows excluded before taking medians.
• PSA trading card grading service levels, read October 24, 2026, for the Standard fee, the maximum insured value and the paused Value tier.
• Bulbapedia, Chansey (Base Set 3), read October 24, 2026, for the Ken Sugimori credit, the Sozaijiten Vol. 9 background, the Base Set 2 reprint and the Pokemon Snap Best Photo Contest print.
• Card type data for the Colorless check from the Pokemon TCG API and TCGdex, read October 24, 2026.