Blastoise ex 151 pop report: seven illustrators, one gem rate

Published August 26, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is August 13, 2026

Seven Special Illustration Rares came out of Scarlet and Violet 151, drawn by seven different illustrators. At the August 13, 2026 pull, every one of them gemmed between 26.57 and 29.90 percent. The Blastoise ex 151 pop report sits at the top of that range, 18,716 tens from 62,596 grades, and the reason it wins has very little to do with Blastoise.

The count, and the gap under it

The August 13, 2026 figures: 62,596 graded, 18,716 Gem Mint 10s, 31,166 nines, 10,446 eights, and 2,255 copies sitting at PSA 7 or lower. Gem rate 29.9 percent. PSA added 1,254 in the last reporting period and the 30 day trend reads +1%.

The ratio between the top two rows is what decides your money, and there are more than half again as many nines as tens. PriceCharting's ungraded figure on August 26, 2026 was $133.00, the PSA 9 $155.00, the PSA 10 $587.50. The outcome you should expect pays $22 over a raw copy that day. The one you are hoping for pays 3.79 times as much. Everything on this card lives inside that single grade point.

Seven illustrators, one outcome

Line the whole Special Illustration Rare run up at the August 13, 2026 pull and the spread refuses to open. Blastoise ex 200/165 gems at 29.90 percent. Venusaur ex 198 at 29.03, Alakazam ex 201 at 28.93, Zapdos ex 202 at 28.74, Erika's Invitation 203 at 27.67, Charizard ex 199 at 27.58, Giovanni's Charisma 204 at 26.57. Three and a third points, top to bottom, across seven artists and seven completely different paintings.

Now set the submission counts beside them. Charizard ex has 102,881 grades on file at that pull. Giovanni's Charisma has 13,113. The hobby wanted to slab one of them almost eight times as badly as the other, and that appetite moved the gem rate by a single point. Taken together the seven have produced 97,156 tens from 340,497 grades, 28.53 percent.

So what is actually doing the grading here?

If the gem rate belonged to each card, it would track demand. The cards everyone chased would drag more beaten copies into the denominator, the way the 1999 starters do, and the chase card would land somewhere the bulk rare could not. Instead the seven sit on top of each other. The likeliest read is that the constraint lives upstream of the card, in the etched foil texture and the cut that every card in this tier shares, and the illustration is just what got printed on top of it. That is an inference off the census shape, not something any factory publishes.

The measurement that supports it is the same painting run through a different plant. Blastoise ex 202 in Japanese Sv2a, Arita's identical artwork on Special Art Rare stock, held 23,169 tens from 26,731 grades at that pull. 86.67 percent. One illustration, two production lines, and a gem rate that nearly triples when the line changes. The Charizard ex from the same set splits the same way on its own row. If keeping printings on separate rows sounds like bookkeeping, our guide on what a pop report actually counts covers why merging them destroys the only useful number on the page.

Arita, and the Charizard he did not draw

Mitsuhiro Arita illustrated this one, credited on the card face at the bottom left. Arita drew the 1999 Base Set Charizard; for 151, Charizard went to miki kudo and the water starter came to him. He put Blastoise deep underwater in a column of dark blue, bubbles streaming up past the shell, the shoulder cannons half lost in the murk. That dark field is precisely the kind of surface that shows a scratch.

He did not draw the original Blastoise, though. Ken Sugimori did, credited on the 1999 card, which is why the Base Set Blastoise census and this one share a Pokemon and no artist at all. English 151 reached shelves on September 22, 2023.

What the queue costs while the ten falls

Direction is doing more work here than the odds are. PriceCharting's PSA 10 series peaked at $720.78 in March 2026 and read $587.50 on August 26, down 18.5 percent from that high and down 11.3 percent across three months. It is still up 73.0 percent on the year and up 300 percent on two years. A card coming off a run, then, rather than one that broke.

Those quoted figures survive a check against the realised tape, which is not something to assume. Fourteen PSA 10 sales between August 13 and August 25, 2026 carry a median of $585.00 against the $587.50 algorithmic value, and fourteen PSA 9 sales came in at a $152.75 median against $155.00.

PSA listed Regular service at $79.99 on August 26, 2026, with a $1,500 maximum insured value and an estimated 70 to 80 business day turnaround. Value services are paused. Price the trade off that clock: roughly four calendar months between paying the fee and selling the slab, on a card whose 10 has posted five straight monthly declines since that March high.

Weight the four payouts by the census distribution, take 15 percent off each for eBay fees and shipping a slab, and a $133 raw copy plus the fee returns about $238 against $213 of cost. Breakeven lands at a 23.3 percent gem rate. The card gems at 29.9 percent. Six and a half points of edge, and pop report gem rates only count copies somebody already judged worth mailing in, so a blind purchase should expect less.

The call on this row

Buy the slab if you want the card. Skip the submission unless you can screen a copy in hand, because four months of queue against a falling 10 eats more of that six point edge than the odds ever will. And when you do screen, accept that this print has already made most of the decision: weight how the thin border sits against the art on all four sides, then whether the dark water behind the shell is clean, and let the corners come last. All seven Special Illustration Rares from the set line up by gem rate in BetterPop's card browser.

Sources

• PSA population via the GemRate pull of August 13, 2026; every token above refreshes with each site build. Sibling and Japanese figures quoted from the August 13, 2026 pull
• PriceCharting: Blastoise ex #200, price table, sold tape and price history all read August 26, 2026
• PSA service levels, fees and turnaround, read August 26, 2026
• Rarity tier, illustrator credits for 198 through 204 and the September 22, 2023 release date via the TCGdex API record for sv03.5, read August 26, 2026; the Arita credit and the 200/165 MEW EN print marks confirmed on the card scan itself
• Ken Sugimori's credit on Base Set Blastoise and Arita's on Base Set Charizard via the TCGdex records for base1-2 and base1-4, read August 26, 2026