Base Set Venusaur PSA 10 pop: 589 tens, more than Charizard

Published August 24, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is August 13, 2026

Of the three Base Set starters, the one holding the most Gem Mint 10s is the one nobody was chasing. PSA has stamped a perfect ten on 589 Venusaur 15/102, against 488 for the unlimited Charizard census and 381 where Blastoise finishes last of the three, all read off the same August 13, 2026 pull. Venusaur got there on fewer submissions than either sibling.

Then look at what a ten costs. PriceCharting's PSA 10 value for this Venusaur read $2,871.89 on August 24, 2026. Its figure for the unlimited Charizard that day was $20,061.40, and for the unlimited Blastoise $6,700.00. Same 102 card checklist, same 1999 Wizards of the Coast production, roughly the same number of surviving tens.

So the Base Set Venusaur PSA 10 pop is not the strange half of this card. The price sitting next to it is.

The Base Set Venusaur PSA 10 pop, grade by grade

46,359 graded. 589 tens, 5,776 nines, 9,164 eights, 105 Authentic, and 30,725 copies resting at PSA 7 or lower. That bottom block is 66 percent of every Venusaur 15/102 ever submitted, and it drives everything else on this page.

The gem rate lands at 1.3 percent as of August 13, 2026. Of the 60 Pokemon cards carrying 40,000 or more grades on file, only three grade worse: unlimited Charizard at 0.47 percent, unlimited Blastoise at 0.74 percent, and the 2016 XY Evolutions Charizard at 1.13 percent. PSA added 669 more Venusaur in the last reporting period, on a 30 day trend of -12%. If that ladder is unfamiliar, our guide covers how a population report is assembled before you read a ratio off one.

Why the starter nobody chased kept the most tens

Grading is a paid decision, and the price of the card decides who bothers.

A wrecked Charizard is worth submitting anyway, because a PSA 5 covers the fee several times over, so twenty seven years of playground damage went into that denominator. Venusaur has a much lower floor. PriceCharting put a PSA 7 Venusaur at $178.50 on August 24, 2026; take off the roughly 15 percent an eBay sale costs and about $152 comes back against a $79.99 fee. Somebody who found the card in a closet still walks away ahead. Somebody who paid market for a played copy first does not, and mostly does not try.

What reaches PSA has therefore already passed a screen the Charizard never faced, which is the likeliest reason Venusaur gems at nearly three times the rate off half the volume. That reads off the shape of the census, not off anything PSA publishes, so take it as the best available explanation rather than a documented one. Neither card escapes the 1999 production itself: Wizards era cuts drifted outside PSA's centering window often enough that plenty of copies were finished before a pack was opened.

The same illustration, printed better in Japan

Arita's Venusaur ran in Japan first, in the original Expansion Pack, and that row grades nothing like the English one. The Japanese print carries 8,739 grades for 752 tens at the August 13, 2026 pull, an 8.61 percent gem rate. The English unlimited manages 1.3 percent on five times the submissions.

Nearly seven times better on identical artwork is wide enough that the cardboard has to be doing some of the work. Collectors who buy vintage Japanese in volume have argued for years that those cuts ran tighter and the packaging was kinder. The census fits that. It fits a smaller and more careful group of owners choosing what to send just as well, and counts alone cannot separate the two.

Not every 15/102 is this row

Five separate Venusaur rows share this card number and this picture, and they do not share a price. This page tracks the unlimited print. The 1st Edition sits at 3,817 graded for 145 tens, a 3.80 percent gem rate and three times the unlimited figure. Shadowless runs 7,554 graded for 101 tens. Base Set 2 from 2000 renumbers the card to 18/130 and holds 10,142 grades with 107 tens.

Then the 2021 Classic Collection reissue, which reprinted the card at 15/102 and has already produced 23,643 tens from 38,889 grades. A 60.80 percent gem rate on the same Arita painting, forty times the tens of the original in five years rather than twenty seven, which is the inversion running through the Celebrations reprint numbers.

Two spots separate the unlimited from its siblings: a drop shadow down the right side of the picture frame, absent on shadowless, and no Edition 1 stamp beneath the lower left corner.

Arita's flower, and the print run that called it number 68

Mitsuhiro Arita painted it, credited in the bottom left of the card face, and the English Base Set reached shelves on January 9, 1999 with Venusaur at 15/102. Stage 2, 100 HP, Solarbeam for 60, and the Pokemon Power that gave the card its brief competitive life: Energy Trans, which moved Grass Energy freely between your own Pokemon and built one of the few Stage 2 decks of the Wizards era worth building. Energy Removal and a knocked out Venusaur sent the whole stack to the discard pile at once, so it never became a staple.

One printing footnote, courtesy of Bulbapedia: the earliest Japanese No Rarity copies listed Venusaur as Pokemon number 68 rather than number 3, corrected in later runs. The English card reads number 3 in its flavor text line, so a 15/102 is always the fixed version.

Four months in the queue, four rungs of payout

Regular is the tier that fits, listed at $79.99 per card on psacard.com on August 24, 2026, since a raw Venusaur that looks clean across a table is realistically a 7 or an 8. Value services are still paused, so nothing cheaper exists right now, and the estimated turnaround on that same page read 70 to 80 business days. Four calendar months between paying and selling.

Apply the eBay haircut to each rung and the trade sorts itself. A 7 at $178.50 nets about $152 and loses money if you bought at market. An 8 at $252.54 nets about $215 and clears. The 9 at $565.14 nets roughly $480 against $178 all in, and that is the rung that carries this card, because missing the ten still returns about $300.

The ten is a thinner market than the count suggests. PriceCharting's $2,871.89 is a modelled figure, not one dated sale, and with 589 tens spread across the planet the top rung turns over rarely enough to be worth checking against recent solds first.

Where the money actually sits on this card

Screen it for centering before anything else. The picture sits inside a wide border on all four sides here, so a drifted cut shows up against the frame in a second, and centering is what quietly caps clean copies at a 9. Corners next, then the reverse.

Send it if the cut is square. The realistic prize is not the 589 club, it is the 9, and the 9 already pays for the trip. That is why 669 more went in last period even with the 30 day trend running -12%, on a card already counted 46,359 times. All five Venusaur rows and both siblings sort side by side in BetterPop's card browser.

Sources

• PSA population via the GemRate pull of August 13, 2026; every population figure above refreshes with each site build
• PriceCharting: Venusaur #15 (unlimited), read August 24, 2026
• PriceCharting: Charizard #4 and Blastoise #2, both unlimited, read August 24, 2026
• PSA service levels, fees and turnaround, read August 24, 2026 (Regular $79.99, 70 to 80 business days, Value services paused)
• Bulbapedia: Venusaur (Base Set 15) for the Energy Trans text, the Base Set 2, Legendary Collection and Celebrations reprints, and the Japanese No Rarity numbering error, read August 24, 2026
• Mitsuhiro Arita credit, the 15/102 number and the number 3 flavor text line confirmed on the card scan itself