Base Set Charmander PSA 10 pop: the common with seven times Charizard's tens

Published October 5, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is October 1, 2026

A 1999 common that trades for about a dollar and a half raw has produced seven times as many Gem Mint copies as the Base Set Charizard. At the October 1, 2026 pull the Base Set Charmander PSA 10 pop stands at 3,646 tens from 20,359 submissions, while the unlimited Charizard holo has returned 491 tens from 106,701.

Stack all fifteen unlimited Base Set holos together and they hold 6,123 Gem Mint copies between them. Charmander 46/102 holds 3,646 on its own, off 4.7 percent of the grading volume.

The Base Set Charmander PSA 10 pop outruns every holo in the set

20,359 graded. 3,646 tens, 7,187 nines, 4,180 eights, and 5,264 copies finishing at PSA 7 or lower, which is 25.86 percent of everything ever mailed in. PSA added 138 more last period on a thirty day trend of -9%.

This page counts the unlimited print only, the one with a drop shadow running down the right edge of the art window and no stamp beside it. The shadowless Charmander and the 1st Edition Charmander are separate censuses with their own numbers, and mixing them is the most common way to misread a figure like this. If the idea of a census as a record of submissions rather than a count of surviving cards is new, start with what a population report is actually measuring.

One footnote on that count of fifteen. Base Set printed sixteen holo rares, but Machamp has no unlimited row at all, because every English retail copy of it carries the 1st Edition stamp.

Most of the gap is the foil, and that part is not close

Split the unlimited Base Set by whether the card has a holofoil window. The fifteen holos have taken 434,849 grades for 6,123 tens, a pooled gem rate of 1.41 percent. The eighty six non holos, numbers 17 through 102, have taken 177,711 grades for 37,319 tens, a pooled 21.00 percent.

Fifteen times better, out of the same factory, the same year and the same packs.

The mechanism is not mysterious. A holofoil window is a separate reflective layer, and that layer takes print lines off the press roller, scratches in the pack, and silvering where it meets the border. None of those failure modes exist on a card that is printed flat. The shadowless holo collapse is the same argument from the other direction.

Then the foil theory runs out

If the foil were the whole story, the non holos would cluster. They do not. Sixty five of them have passed 1,000 grades, and they run from Dragonair at 12.37 percent to Staryu at 32.69, a median of 24.86 and a standard deviation of 5.66 points.

Charmander ranks fifty second of the sixty five.

So the card at the top of the non holo volume chart is also near the bottom of its own gem rate chart. Sort those sixty five rows into three groups and the gradient is clean. The fifteen Trainers and Energy cards past 1,000 grades pool to 27.91 percent gem, with 15.11 percent of their census at a 7 or lower. The forty four other Pokemon pool to 23.17 percent and 18.30. The six starter line cards, Charmander, Bulbasaur, Squirtle, Charmeleon, Wartortle and Ivysaur, pool to 16.77 percent gem and 25.81 percent damaged.

Those six hold 67,249 of the grades. The cards collectors wanted are the cards that gem worst.

The damage happened long before PSA saw them

Across those sixty five rows the correlation between a card's share of 7 and below and its gem rate is minus 0.887. The spread lives at the bottom of the ladder, not the top. Charmander's ten point gem deficit against the Trainers and Energy block is matched almost exactly by a ten point damage surplus, while the nine rate barely shifts. It is not losing tens to a grader splitting hairs over centering. It is losing them because a quarter of everything mailed in was already beaten up.

Why would a Water Energy survive 1999 better than a Charmander?

Because nobody carried the Water Energy. The reading that fits: Charmander was the card a seven year old pulled out to show people, played in a deck, traded twice and slid in and out of a binder, while the energy and the Potion sat at the bottom of the box untouched. That is an inference from the shape of the census rather than anything documented, and it is worth holding loosely, but no other property separates these cards. They came off the same sheets, on the same stock, in the same packs.

It also explains the submissions. A card worth a dollar fifty gets mailed to PSA 20,000 times for two reasons: it evolves into the most valuable card in the hobby, and completing a Base Set in slabs for PSA's Set Registry means all 102 cards, commons included.

Arita drew a lizard in a field that was already burning

The credit on the face reads Illus. Mitsuhiro Arita, next to a copyright line of 1995, 96, 98, 99 Nintendo, Creatures, GAMEFREAK and 1999 Wizards. Basic Pokemon, 50 HP, the Lizard Pokemon at 2 feet and 19 pounds, Scratch for 10 and Ember for 30 behind a discarded Fire Energy. The rarity mark bottom right is a filled black circle, the Common symbol. English Base Set reached shelves on January 9, 1999 with 102 cards.

Arita put the Charmander in daylight on green grass with flame columns behind it, which matters at purchase time for a reason specific to this card. The art window is bright and busy, so surface scuffing reads far less loudly than it would against a dark field. Edge wear on the yellow border is the opposite, and it is easy to miss on a quick look.

Sixty dollars to find out, on a card worth one

PSA's Standard tier ran $59.99 a card on psacard.com on October 5, 2026, against a $1,000 maximum insured value and an estimated 90 to 100 business days. Value services remain paused. The fee is roughly forty times the card.

The two raw figures in play disagree and neither changes the answer. TCGplayer market read $1.45 on the October 1 data build, PriceCharting's ungraded column read $2.46 on October 5, and sixty two dated raw sales to October 4 ran a $2.48 median. A dollar of difference against a sixty dollar fee is noise.

The graded side is firmer. Twenty nine dated PSA 10 sales between June 19 and September 29, 2026 ran a $341.98 median across a $218.29 to $558.71 range, and twenty six PSA 9 sales over the same window ran $56.50. PriceCharting's algorithmic PSA 10 value sat at $365.00 on October 5, about seven percent above what copies actually cleared.

Now weight it. Take 15 percent off each rung for marketplace fees and a 10 returns $290.68, a 9 returns $48.03, an 8 returns $29.75, a 7 returns $24.65 and everything below that about $17. Weight those by the grades this card actually hands back and a submission comes home worth $80.79 against $61.44 spent.

Then add postage. A padded envelope out, insured, plus return shipping runs about $20 all in, and the same arithmetic lands at $80.79 against $81.44. The breakeven gem rate moves from 10.5 percent to 18.3, and this card gems at 17.9.

The trade clears on the fee and dies on the stamps. That is the reason a gem rate most modern chase cards would envy is still not a submission.

Grade the copy, never the population

25.86 percent of this census came back at a 7 or lower, and that figure records what twenty thousand other people mailed in, most of it pulled out of childhood collections. It is not the odds on a copy you screened yourself.

So screen for damage before centering, because that is where this card's census dies rather than at the 9 to 10 line. Check the yellow border under a loupe for the fine white nicks that years in a binder leave, check the blue reverse for chipping along all four edges, then put a ruler on the art window. If it survives that, the 10 is live, and the economics still only work if you send several at once so the shipping splits. One on its own is a sixty dollar ticket on a card worth a dollar fifty.

If you are filling a registry set rather than flipping, none of that applies, because you need the card either way. Every Base Set row sorts side by side in the BetterPop gallery, and the unlimited Charizard this one grows into is a 0.46 percent gem rate away.

Sources

• GemRate PSA population data via the BetterPop dataset, October 1, 2026 row pull. The holo and non holo pools, the sixty five row spread, the three group gradient, the minus 0.887 correlation and the set rankings were computed across all 111,050 rows on October 5, 2026.
• PriceCharting, Charmander #46 Pokemon Base Set, price table and completed sales tape both read October 5, 2026. The PSA 10 median uses 29 titled PSA 10 rows and the PSA 9 median 26 titled PSA 9 rows, in both cases after dropping CGC, BGS, SGC and ACE slabs from the same tables.
• PSA, grading service pricing, read October 5, 2026, for the Standard tier fee, maximum insured value and turnaround, and for the paused Value services.
• Illustrator credit, HP, attack text, species line, rarity symbol, card number and copyright line read from the card face of Base Set Charmander 46/102 in the unlimited printing.
• Release date and set size cross checked against two independent catalogs on October 5, 2026: the TCGplayer Base Set group published date and the Pokemon TCG API base1 set record, which agree on January 9, 1999 and 102 cards.