Birthday Pikachu pop report: the subset does the gemming, not the Pikachu

Published September 20, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is September 18, 2026

Twenty five cards make up the Celebrations Classic Collection, and PSA gems every one of them somewhere between 48.35 and 68.77 percent. The Birthday Pikachu pop report lands inside that at 27,352 Gem Mint 10s from 44,234 submissions, a 61.8 percent gem rate at the September 18, 2026 pull. No English card in the dataset past 40,000 grades gems more often except one. Almost none of that belongs to the Pikachu.

Twenty seven thousand of them are tens

The card is _____'s Pikachu, number 24, reprinted into the Classic Collection for the game's 25th anniversary in October 2021. From the September 18, 2026 pull: 44,234 graded, 27,352 tens, 14,784 nines, 1,481 eights, 88 Authentic, and 529 sitting at 7 or lower.

Two grades hold almost the whole census and everything under an 8 fits in a rounding error. That is the shape a count takes when copies travel from a sealed pack to a submission box without spending a decade in anyone's shoebox.

1,566 fresh grades landed last period against a 30 day trend of -4%. Measured against its own size that is the busiest of the twenty five, better than twice the pace of the Classic Collection Charizard, which took 913 grades on the same pull off a census half again as large. Five years in, people are still mailing this one.

The Birthday Pikachu pop report is really a subset report

Put the twenty five Classic Collection cards in order by gem rate and the distance from first to last is 20.42 points. M Rayquaza EX leads at 68.77 percent, Team Magma's Groudon finishes last at 48.35, and the Birthday Pikachu is tenth. Between them sit remakes of cards first printed across eighteen years of the game, from the 1999 Base Set to a Tapu Lele GX that came out in May 2017.

Now do the same thing to the other half of the expansion. The twenty five card main set runs from 75.36 percent at the top to 2.01 percent at the bottom, a spread of 73.36 points on the same pull.

Same launch day, same wrapper. The Pokemon Company's announcement of June 24, 2021 says each Celebrations booster pack holds four cards, all with foil treatments and a 25th anniversary logo, and introduces the Classic Collection as a special subset of twenty five close remakes. Both halves reached the same buyers out of the same products in the same October week, and only one of them came apart.

The border the reprint inherited

What the main set answers to is the border, and the answer is absolute. Every V, VMAX and full art in that half clears 37.40 percent, every card with a yellow edge stops under 16.97, and not one lands in the twenty points between; the Celebrations Pikachu census anchors the bottom of it at two percent.

Run the same test inside the Classic Collection and it returns nothing at all. The borderless M Rayquaza EX is first, then two yellow bordered vintage cards come straight behind it, Rocket's Zapdos at 67.66 percent and Cleffa at 66.51. The borderless Zekrom 114 sits seventh at 64.68, the Birthday Pikachu tenth, and a yellow bordered Groudon is dead last. All five checked against the card faces.

Lay the two Pikachus next to each other and there is something to see. Celebrations 005 pushes a whole illustration out to a yellow edge a couple of millimetres wide. The Classic Collection reproduces the 1999 furniture instead, a broad border with the artwork parked in a gold windowed box across the top half. A cut that drifts two millimetres is a verdict on the first card and invisible on the second. Press tolerances are published by nobody, so take that as what two censuses imply rather than as a measurement.

A card built to be written on

Kagemaru Himeno is credited in the bottom left corner of both prints, and the 2021 card carries the original copyright line untouched, 1995, 96, 98 Nintendo, Creatures, GAMEFREAK. What it drops is the 1999 to 2000 Wizards credit that sits beside it on the promo.

Then look at what the thing is for. A ruled blank runs where an owner's name goes, which is why the title reads _____'s Pikachu. A second blank at the bottom is labelled Your Birthdate, and the attack is called Birthday Surprise and hits harder if it actually is your birthday. Somebody designed a greeting card and gave it 50 HP.

The Wizards promo it copies has taken 8,296 grades and returned 148 tens, and PSA added 171 more grades to that print between August 13 and September 20, 2026 without producing a single new one. How much better a reprint grades than its original is ground the anniversary Charizard already covers for the whole subset. The blanks are what this card adds, since a promo handed out to be written on probably lost part of its clean population before a grader ever saw it. Nobody counts that, and the 2000 census sits roughly where its whole era sits anyway.

Thirty three percent to break even, sixty two on offer

PSA's Standard tier runs $59.99 with a $1,000 insured ceiling and an estimated 90 to 100 business days, read off psacard.com on September 20, 2026 with Value services still paused.

Every rung below the top one pays more than the raw card does. PriceCharting's ladder that day put a Grade 8 at $53.59 and a Grade 7 at $47.72 against $33.74 ungraded, so a bad outcome returns roughly the card and costs you the fee. Weight the four outcomes by the census this card produces, dock 15 percent off each payout for the platform and shipping a slab, and a submission hands back about $127 against $93.97 of raw card plus service.

Which makes the breakeven the number to hold onto. At those prices the submission needs a 33.3 percent gem rate. The lifetime census says 61.8 percent, differencing the August 13 and September 20, 2026 pulls gives 993 tens out of 1,801 fresh grades for a 55.14 percent trailing rate, and GemRate's own thirty day figure reads 56.0. Three measurements, all clearing the fee by more than twenty points, which is not how this usually goes.

The queue is the part that argues back. A PSA 10 charted $310.00 in May 2026 and $217.50 in September, down 29.8 percent in four months, while the raw card slid from $41.50 to $33.74 over the same stretch. Ninety to a hundred business days is most of a winter spent holding a number that has fallen every month since spring.

Check the two blank lines before anything else

Ink on the name line or the birthdate line is an Authentic Altered rather than a grade, and no other card in wide circulation asks for it so directly. Check the yellow second, because the 2021 face carries foil across the whole card rather than only the art window, so a scuff on the border reads here where the 1999 print would have swallowed it. Centering comes third on a frame this wide, the reverse of the order almost every modern card wants.

Buy near the raw tape and the table above is yours. Sixty sales between June 18 and September 19, 2026 ran a $33.98 median, and the arithmetic still works up to roughly $67 a copy, so the buy price is not what decides this one. For the far end of the distribution, where a small PSA 10 count means something, our guide to cards with genuinely small PSA 10 populations draws the line, and the one English card past 40,000 grades that gems more often is the Shining Fates Charizard VMAX, where the same arithmetic comes out the other way around. Stack the Classic Collection against the main set yourself in the BetterPop gallery.

Sources

• PSA population via the GemRate pull of September 18, 2026; every figure above refreshes with each site build
• The 20.42 point Classic Collection range, the 73.36 point main set spread, the twenty five card orderings, the trailing thirty day rate and the 40,000 grade ranking were computed from that pull and from the archived pull of August 13, 2026
• PriceCharting: Pikachu Birthday #24, Pokemon Celebrations, live grade ladder, dated sold tape and the monthly series, read September 20, 2026; series units verified against the live price table
• The Pokemon Company International press release, June 24, 2021, for the four card foil packs, the 25th anniversary logo, the twenty five card subset of close remakes and the October 8, 2021 launch
• PSA service levels and pricing, Standard fee, insured ceiling, turnaround and the paused Value tiers, read September 20, 2026
• Illustrator credit, copyright lines, the two blank fields, the anniversary stamp and every border description verified against the card scans for Celebrations 005, Classic Collection 9, 20, 24, 76 and 114, and Wizards Black Star Promo 24, on pokemontcg.io