Celebrations Pikachu pop report: nearly half come back an 8

Published August 22, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is August 13, 2026

A near mint copy of this Pikachu cost $6.50 on August 21, 2026. A PSA 10 of the same card sold for $1,675 four days before that. The Celebrations Pikachu pop report is the entire explanation for the gap between those two numbers, and it fits on one line: PSA has stamped Gem Mint 10 on 941 of the 46,215 copies it has ever looked at.

The Celebrations Pikachu pop report, in four numbers

Full Art/Pikachu 005/025, English base print, from the 2021 Celebrations expansion. As of the August 13, 2026 pull PSA has graded 46,215 of them and returned 941 tens, a 2.0 percent gem rate. 12,855 came back 9. 20,940 came back 8, and that column is the one worth staring at, because it means the likeliest verdict on this card is a grade below the one modern submitters treat as their floor. Another 11,454 landed at 7 or worse, plus 25 graded Authentic with no number at all.

Almost half the census sits at exactly 8.

The queue has not taken the hint. 1,933 fresh grades landed last period against a 30 day trend of -12%, worth new tens in the dozens rather than the hundreds. It is comfortably the most graded card in Celebrations, ahead of the gold Mew 025/025 at 30,996 grades on the same pull.

Same packs, wildly different odds

Celebrations went on sale October 8, 2021. Bulbapedia's release notes put four cards in an English pack and every one of them foil, drawn from a main set of twenty five, so this Pikachu and a Surfing Pikachu VMAX 009/025 came out of the same wrapper in the same week.

Their censuses disagree completely about what happened next. Sort the set by gem rate and it splits along one line. Every card clearing 37 percent is a V, a VMAX or a full art, all of them borderless with the illustration running off all four edges, topped by Surfing Pikachu VMAX at 75.42 percent. Every card wearing a yellow border sits under 18 percent, and this Pikachu anchors the bottom of that half at 2.0 percent. Borderless art hands a grader no frame to measure the cut against and no pale margin for edge wear to show up on. Arita's forest is pushed hard against a narrow one.

Age is not the variable here. Neither is the factory, the year, or the way collectors of 2021 treated their pulls.

The border is not the whole answer either, because Ho-Oh 001/025 wears the same frame and gems at 9.64 percent. What separates those two is who bothers to submit. Ho-Oh has 2,438 grades against 46,215 here, and two thousand submissions come from people who sorted a stack and mailed the best copy. Forty six thousand submissions of a six dollar card that pays four figures at the top do not. The damage tail reports it: Ho-Oh left 12.6 percent of its grades at 7 or lower on the same pull, against 11,454 cards here, a tail few censuses match outside the theatre giveaway Ancient Mew. Across the aisle in the Classic Collection, the anniversary Charizard reprint gems at 59.25 percent.

What caps it at an eight

A narrow border and a crowd of indiscriminate submitters explain a low gem rate. They do not on their own explain a census whose modal grade is an 8, because centering misses tend to stop at 9 and handling wear scatters across the scale rather than piling onto one number. The explanation collectors keep landing on is the print. TeamPokeColors, walking the card in a July 2025 video, put it flatly: finding one with little to no flaws is hard because of the poor quality, and what actually runs scarce is a near mint copy with no print lines. Those are thin ridges left when press rollers put uneven pressure on a sheet, and on foil they read as a bright streak laid across the holo rather than sinking into paper. PSA scores them as surface defects regardless of who made them.

Take that as a shared read from people who open and submit this card in volume, not as a documented press study. Nobody publishes sheet data. What the census says for itself is that whatever caps this card does so on close to half of everything submitted, and does not do it to the borderless cards printed alongside it.

The forest Arita put him in

The illustration is Mitsuhiro Arita's, credited in the bottom left of the card face, the same corner where he signed the 1999 Base Set Charizard. That census and this one share an author across twenty two years.

It is a redraw rather than a reprint. Bulbapedia has it taking after the Base Set Pikachu, keeping both attacks, Gnaw and Thunder Jolt, and raising the HP from 40 to 60. Arita's Pikachu is rounder than the modern model sheet allows for, planted in a clearing with a Caterpie on a branch behind his left ear and light dropping through the canopy in purple. Deliberately old fashioned, which is the whole assignment on a 25th anniversary set. Keep one thing straight before comparing numbers with anyone: the Japanese version is 001/028 in the 25th Anniversary Collection and carries its own separate census.

The fee, the odds, and the seventy day wait

PSA's Value tier is still paused, checked on their services page August 22, 2026, so the cheapest route for this card is Regular at $79.99, insured to $1,500, quoted at 70 to 80 business days. Note how close that insurance ceiling sits to the card itself.

The PSA 10 figure above is a median of real sales, not a headline. Six changed hands on eBay between August 14 and August 19, 2026, at $1,300, $1,300, $1,325, $1,375, $1,525 and $1,675, and PriceCharting's algorithmic value read $1,415.85 the same week. PSA 9s across that stretch ran $29 to $55, median $36.

Which puts the weight on the second comp, not the first. A 9 returns about $36 against roughly $86 spent, so every miss costs around fifty dollars, and the misses are 12,855 deep. Run the whole census distribution through those prices, dock 15 percent for eBay fees and shipping a slab, and an average submission hands back something near $41 for every $86 laid out. This card needs a 6.1 percent gem rate to break even at August 2026 prices. It runs 2.0 percent.

The queue is not free either. That PSA 10 read $1,825 in June 2026 and $1,415.85 by August, down 22 percent in two months, and still up 123 percent on the $635 it read in July 2025. Both halves belong in the same sentence. A card that doubled in a year and then gave back a fifth of it in a quarter is a momentum position, and 70 to 80 business days means paying August money for a sale you cannot make until winter.

If one is sitting in your binder

Screen the stack, not the single card. Lay several copies under one lamp and look for the same faint ridge running the same direction across all of them, because a defect that repeats copy to copy came off the press, and that is exactly what stands between this card and the 2.0 percent. Only then measure the border, top against bottom and left against right. A frame this narrow gives a drifting cut nowhere to hide.

Most copies fail one of those checks, which is the unglamorous reason a card with 46,215 grade events behind it still costs six dollars raw. Price the decision off the 9 either way, because the 9 is what you are most likely to end up owning. If your copy clears both checks, the table above is a bet you can place with your eyes open; if it does not, the finished slab is the cheaper door, and whoever shipped the other 20,940 already absorbed the part you were hoping to skip. Our guide to cards where the PSA 10 count is genuinely small covers why two percent of forty six thousand is a different animal from two percent of two hundred, and the row behind every number above sorts live in the BetterPop app, next to the other Pikachu census in six figures.

Sources

• PSA population via the GemRate pull of August 13, 2026; figures refresh with each site build
• PriceCharting: Pikachu #5, Pokemon Celebrations, algorithmic values, dated eBay solds, and the monthly PSA 10 series read August 22, 2026
• Bulbapedia: Celebrations (TCG), read August 22, 2026, for the October 8, 2021 release, the four card all foil pack, and the twenty five card main set
• Bulbapedia: Pikachu (Celebrations 5), read August 22, 2026, for the Rare Holo rarity, the Arita credit, the Japanese 001/028 counterpart, and the Base Set Pikachu lineage
• TeamPokeColors, July 31, 2025, for the print line account; a creator read from someone submitting the card in volume rather than a documented press study
• PSA trading card grading service levels, tier prices, declared value maximums, turnaround, and the paused Value tier read August 22, 2026
• Border treatment, the Caterpie, and the illustrator credit verified against the card scans for 005, 007, 025 and Base Set 4 on pokemontcg.io