Celebrations Mew pop report: four dollars raw, nine hundred graded

Published October 20, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is October 1, 2026

PriceCharting's PSA 10 value for this Mew read $51.01 in October 2024. The same column read $895.85 on October 20, 2026. The raw copy barely moved in that stretch, going from $1.47 at launch to $4.10 on that same reading. What moved is the number of people willing to pay a grading fee to find out whether their four dollar card is the one in forty two that gems. The Celebrations Mew pop report is the record of how that went.

How many PSA 10 Celebrations Mews are there?

Mew 011/025, English holo rare, from the Celebrations expansion Pokemon released on October 8, 2021. At the October 1, 2026 pull PSA has looked at 17,191 of them and handed back 406 tens, a 2.4 percent gem rate. 4,916 stopped at 9. 7,762 stopped at 8, 45.15 percent of everything submitted and the largest column on the card. Another 4,106 landed at 7 or worse, and 1 came back Authentic with no number.

The 8 is not a near miss here. It is the forecast.

Submissions keep landing anyway: 978 fresh grades last period against a 30 day trend of +9%. Sort every card in the dataset past a thousand grades with a gem rate under 3 percent by how many arrived last period, and only two beat this one, the Celebrations Pikachu at 1,963 and the unlimited 1999 Charizard at 1,622. Everything else near the front of that list is a Wizards era holo.

The odds are also getting worse, not better. Between the August 13 and October 1 pulls the census took on 1,524 grades and 20 tens, which is 1.31 percent against a 2.4 percent lifetime rate. GemRate's own trailing 30 day field read 1.0 percent on the October 1 pull. Two different windows, measured two different ways, both land under half the lifetime number.

Fifteen setmates with ordinary censuses

Celebrations was sold only inside branded merchandise, never as a plain booster box, and an English pack held four cards. Seventeen of the twenty five main set cards are plain holo rares rather than a V or a VMAX, and all seventeen rode the same cartons to the same shelves that October.

Fifteen of them left censuses that read like nothing much. Their gem rates run from 6.67 percent on Solgaleo 021 to 16.64 percent on Yveltal 019, and the share finishing below an 8 runs from 8.4 to 18.7 percent, every figure taken from the one October 1 snapshot. Mew sits at 2.4 percent with 23.88 percent below an 8. The Pikachu at 005 sits at 1.97 and 25.4. The two cards outside the band are the two cards anyone chases.

So why these two and not the Lugia?

What the data supports is that the census follows the submitting. Ho-Oh 001 has 2,599 grade events behind it and Mew has 17,191, and nobody queues at the post office with a Ho-Oh they already know is cut crooked. Whether the price pulled those marginal copies in or the thin census built the price is not something these numbers can separate.

It is worth naming what this is not. Bulbapedia splits the main set into Rare and Rare Holo entries, which looks like a foil tier doing the damage until you check it: TCGdex records every Celebrations single as a standard holo, and TCGplayer files all seventeen as Holo Rare. Age, factory and year are out too, since the whole set shipped together. Across the aisle, all twenty five Classic Collection reprints from those same boxes finish below an 8 on 2.6 percent of their grades or fewer, on the etched Confetti holofoil Bulbapedia describes rather than the standard one.

The same Mew, printed again fifteen months later

Crown Zenith landed on January 20, 2023 carrying this exact card. Same Mysterious Tail, same Psyshot for 30, same 60 HP, redrawn by Ryota Murayama for the Galarian Gallery subset as GG10. PSA has graded 28,011 of those and returned 7,675 tens, a 27.40 percent gem rate with 3.0 percent below an 8 on the October 1 pull.

Almost twelve times the gem rate on identical rules text. Whatever is capping the 2021 print is not following the card around.

Yuu Nishida was teaching art when she won the contest

Nishida signed the bottom left of the art window. She won the first Pokemon Card Game Illustration Grand Prix, and the Gardevoir she entered became her first printed card; in the contest's own interview series she describes going freelance in 2017, drawing in Clip Studio Paint on a touchscreen tablet because working straight on the screen feels more natural, and teaching part time in the art department of the high school she once attended. She never studied art formally.

Her Mew is a pink animal turning inside a burst of yellow and magenta, closer to a firework than to the sleeping cave painting most collectors picture. The card under it was brand new. Bulbapedia has 011/025 debuting in Celebrations rather than reprinting anything older, and then it kept being printed: Japan ran it again in Start Deck 100, the VSTAR Premium Trainer Box, VSTAR Universe, the Premium Trainer Box ex, the Ruler of the Black Flame Deck Build Box and the Terastal Starter Set. Six reprints in two years reads less like a commemorative card and more like one people kept needing in a deck.

What a submission is worth at October prices

PSA's Value tier is still paused, checked on their pricing page October 20, 2026. Standard runs $59.99, insured to $1,000, quoted at 90 to 100 business days.

That nine hundred dollar figure is an algorithm's estimate rather than a sale. PriceCharting now masks the price on recent graded eBay rows, so the dated tape is unreadable except where an auction house or a big retailer shows through. The rows that do show: a PSA 9 at $35.00 on October 8, a PSA 8 at $25.00 on October 19, a PSA 7 at $9.00 on October 10 and a PSA 6 at $11.00 on October 9, all 2026.

Push the whole distribution through those prices. 2.4 percent of submissions return the top figure, 28.6 percent return about $35, 45.2 percent return about $25, and the remaining 23.9 percent return about $9. That averages $44.58, or $37.90 after a 15 percent haircut for eBay fees and shipping a slab, against $64.09 of card plus fee. Every copy mailed in is worth roughly twenty six dollars less than it costs to mail.

The gem rate that squares that ledger is 5.9 percent. This card has run 2.4 percent over five years and 1.0 to 1.3 percent since August. The wait compounds it: 90 to 100 business days is most of two seasons spent holding a slab that climbed seventeen times over in two years and sat 1.6 percent under its July 2026 high at the last monthly reading.

If you pulled one in 2021

The screen that decides this is arithmetic, not a lamp. Settle on what you would take for an 8 first, because an 8 is the single likeliest thing to come back and one sold for $25.00 on October 19. If that number does not interest you, the submission is not a plan, and the raw card is a four dollar binder slot with an expensive cousin.

If it does interest you, measure the yellow border top against bottom and left against right before paying anything, since a frame that wide leaves a drifting cut nowhere to hide and 7,762 copies already stopped one grade short. Otherwise buy the finished slab and skip the queue. Our guide to cards where the PSA 10 count is genuinely small covers why two percent of seventeen thousand behaves nothing like two percent of two hundred, and every row quoted above sorts live in the BetterPop gallery.

Sources

• PSA population via the GemRate pull of October 1, 2026; figures refresh with each site build. Trailing rate hand differenced against the August 13 and October 1 dataset snapshots
• PriceCharting: Mew #11, Pokemon Celebrations, grade values, the monthly price series and the dated sold tables, read October 20, 2026; series scale checked against the live price table on the same page
• PSA pricing, Standard tier fee, insured value and turnaround, and the paused Value services, read October 20, 2026
• Bulbapedia: Celebrations (TCG), read October 20, 2026, for the October 8, 2021 release, the branded merchandise only distribution, the four card English pack and the Classic Collection subset
• Bulbapedia: Mew (Celebrations 11), read October 20, 2026, for the card debuting in this expansion, the Japanese reprint run and the Crown Zenith GG10 print
• A Conversation with the Winners of the Pokemon Card Game Illustration Grand Prix, read October 20, 2026, for Nishida's contest win, her 2017 freelance start, her teaching work and her tools
• Foil treatment cross checked card by card against TCGdex and the TCGplayer product catalogue via tcgcsv, October 20, 2026