Base Set Mewtwo PSA 10 pop: 596 tens, and only Zapdos has more

Published August 31, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is August 13, 2026

Only one Base Set holo has more Gem Mint copies than Mewtwo, and it is not one of the starters. At the August 13, 2026 pull the Base Set Mewtwo PSA 10 pop stands at 596 tens out of 30,765 submissions, a 1.9 percent gem rate. Zapdos leads the set with 685. The unlimited Charizard, mailed in more than three times as often, has 488.

Where the Base Set Mewtwo PSA 10 pop sits in its own set

Fifteen of the sixteen Base Set holos have an unlimited print. Machamp is the exception, because every copy Wizards sold at retail carries a 1st Edition stamp. Of those fifteen, Mewtwo ranks second by Gem Mint count, fourth by total submissions, and seventh by gem rate. Second, fourth, seventh. The last of those three is the honest one.

Seventh of fifteen is the middle of the set. Poliwrath gems at 3.73 percent and Zapdos at 3.60; Charizard bottoms the run at 0.47 percent. Mewtwo sits between Raichu and Gyarados, which is to say it grades like a perfectly ordinary 1999 holo.

The submission count is where it stops being ordinary. Three cards in the set have been graded more often than Mewtwo, and they are exactly the three starters: Charizard at 104,121, Blastoise at 51,151, and Venusaur at 46,359. Then Mewtwo. The next card down, Gyarados, sits at 24,969, and every remaining holo is under 22,000.

Volume did this, not odds

Zapdos makes the mechanism plain. It has been submitted 19,027 times, 38 percent fewer than Mewtwo, and it still holds 685 tens, because it gems at nearly double the rate. Zapdos earned its census. Mewtwo accumulated one, a submission at a time, on odds that were never better than average.

So why does a card with average odds pull starter volume? The name, most likely, though a population report records what was mailed in and never why. A second census points the same direction. The Mewtwo handed out with cinema tickets for Pokemon: The First Movie, Wizards Black Star promo 3, has been graded 11,166 times and holds 1,043 tens at a 9.34 percent gem rate. More people own that Mewtwo in Gem Mint than own any Base Set holo in Gem Mint, by a margin of over 350 copies.

Five thousand submissions, and no new tens

Something has stalled across the whole run. At the August 28, 2026 GemRate pull, all fifteen unlimited Base Set holos showed a trailing thirty day gem rate of zero. Two read negative, which is a count being restated rather than a grade being taken back. None read positive. In that same window PSA returned 5,465 of these cards.

That is unusual rather than routine. Across every card in the dataset that added 200 or more grades in the window, 2.9 percent posted a zero. The Base Set holo run posted fifteen of fifteen. It is worth knowing what a population report actually counts before reading that as a permanent ceiling, because one large submission returning in a single week would break the pattern.

February's median was $2,555

PriceCharting's completed auction tape, read on August 31, 2026, carries eight PSA 10 sales dated to February 2026 at a median of $2,555. Since June 2 it carries seven titled sales at a median of $4,200. That is a 64 percent climb over six months, and the Gem Mint count did not move underneath it. One June sale at $1,191.94 arrived with no title attached and is excluded from both figures.

The two numbers that usually argue happen to agree here. PriceCharting's own algorithmic PSA 10 value reads $4,200.00, the same figure as the recent sold median. On most cards that gap is the story. On this one there is no gap.

Sixty HP, and a sentence about gene splicing

Base Set reached English shelves on January 9, 1999, 102 cards with sixteen Rare Holos. Ken Sugimori is credited on the face of this one, and he drew most of that holo run; the 1st Edition Machamp census sets out which four he did not.

What the card itself promises is modest. A Basic Pokemon, 60 HP, printed at LV. 53, with a Barrier attack that makes you discard an Energy to block the next turn. The flavor text is the part that has aged strangely: it describes a scientist producing this Pokemon through years of gene splicing and DNA engineering experiments, printed on a card sold to nine year olds ten months before Mewtwo Strikes Back opened in American cinemas on November 10, 1999.

Buying the odds instead of the card

PSA's Regular tier ran $79.99 a card on August 31, 2026, against a $1,500 maximum insured value and a stated turnaround of 70 to 80 business days. Value services remain paused. A submission today is eighty dollars and roughly four months of waiting.

One note on the nine in that table. PriceCharting pools every grader into its Grade 9 bucket, and the CGC and TAG copies on the tape sold for half what the PSA ones did, so $410 is the median of the 23 PSA nines alone rather than the pooled figure.

Weight the August 28 grade counts by that ladder, $4,200 at a ten, $410 at a nine, $161.61 at an eight, $99.68 at a seven, and the expected return lands near $210 before selling costs, or about $178 after the 15 percent or so an eBay sale removes. Against thirty dollars of card plus eighty of fee, that clears comfortably.

Then you try to buy the card. Fifty one ungraded copies sold on that same tape since February 1 at a median of $32.00, and the titles under that median read heavily played, damaged, moderately played, has scratches. The single copy described as EXC/NM went for $70.95 on August 27, 2026. Nobody sells the census average. A copy with a real shot at a nine costs nearer seventy dollars than thirty, and at that price the same arithmetic thins to about twenty percent for four months of exposure.

The deeper problem is that the census shares are not your odds either. Those 18,277 copies sitting at 7 or lower are the record of people mailing in whatever came out of the shoebox. Before you pay any fee, measure the yellow border: on a 1999 holo the left and right margins are rarely equal, and that is the cheapest reason to reject a copy. Surface is the second check, and the dark field behind Mewtwo conceals very little.

If you hold a nine, the tape supports holding it. The ten is a one in fifty two draw and the nine trades at roughly a tenth of it, so the crack and resubmit math does not work. If you hold a raw copy, measure the borders before you buy a submission slot, not after. And if you want to see how the rest of the run compares, the BetterPop gallery carries every row in the set.

Sources

• GemRate PSA population data via the BetterPop dataset, August 13, 2026 pull; grade ladder, trailing thirty day gem rates and set wide submission counts read from the August 28, 2026 pull.
• PriceCharting, Mewtwo #10, Pokemon Base Set, price table and completed auction tape read August 31, 2026.
• PSA, grading service pricing, tier prices, insured values and turnaround read August 31, 2026.
• Illustrator credit, HP, level, attack text and flavor text read from the card face of Base Set Mewtwo 10/102.
• Bulbapedia, Base Set (TCG) and Mewtwo (Wizards Promo 3), read August 31, 2026.