Champion's Path Charizard pop report: the fee costs more than the ten

Published September 4, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is August 13, 2026

Grading this card loses money even when it comes back a Gem Mint 10. At the August 13, 2026 pull the Champion's Path Charizard pop report reads 50,967 Gem Mint 10s from 90,529 grades, a 56.3 percent gem rate, and PSA returned just 479 of them in the last reporting period.

The Champion's Path Charizard pop report stopped growing

Sixty cards in the dataset have passed forty thousand PSA submissions. Sort that group by how fast each census is still moving and this Charizard finishes last. Its 479 new grades come to roughly half a percent of its own population, and only two other cards on the list are still under one percent: the Hidden Fates Tins Charizard GX at 0.58 percent, and the XY Evolutions Charizard at 0.96 percent. All three of the slowest are Charizards, which is not where anyone would look for a demand problem.

Age does not explain it. The unlimited Base Set Charizard has been available to submit since 1999, and PSA returned 1,649 of those in the same window against this card's 479. A 2020 promo has gone quieter than a card from the first English print run.

The stall held on the following pull. GemRate's August 31, 2026 read puts the row at 90,727 grades with 415 added over the trailing thirty days, so the census grew slightly and slowed slightly at the same time.

The card that just overtook it makes the point better than any ranking. On that same August 31 pull the Mega Charizard X ex promo passed this one for the largest PSA 10 population of any English card in the dataset, 51,814 against 51,062, after adding more than twelve thousand grades in thirty days. Two Charizard promos pulled out of sealed boxes five years apart. Only one of them is still being manufactured.

One promo per box, through the biggest boom the hobby had

Champion's Path arrived on September 25, 2020, an eighty card special set built around the Galar Gym Leaders, and Bulbapedia's record notes its booster packs were never sold on their own. Opening Champion's Path meant buying a Champion's Path product. The Elite Trainer Box was the flagship, and Pokemon's own product page itemises it down to the dice: ten packs, sleeves, energy, a rulebook, and "1 full-art promo card featuring Charizard V."

Every box. One Charizard. Shipping into the autumn of 2020, when demand ran hot enough that Play! Pokemon issued a statement about additional stock.

That is the entire supply story, and it shows up in the ranking against the set's own chase cards. 90,529 of these promos have been graded, more than the two secret rare Champion's Path Charizards put together: the Charizard VMAX at 29,738 grades and the Charizard V at 28,968 at the August 13, 2026 pull, 58,706 between them. The card handed to everybody outdrew both of the cards people bought the boxes hoping for.

One thing the census does keep clean is language. The Italian, Spanish and Portuguese Elite Trainer Box promos are counted as their own rows, with 87, 20 and 9 grades against them, so nothing above borrows from a print that is not the English one.

The odds are not what went wrong

A 56.3 percent gem rate is ordinary, and that deserves saying plainly, because the reflex when a census stalls is to assume the card grades badly. This one does not. 31,177 copies sit at PSA 9 and 5,769 at PSA 8, with 2,602 below that, which puts about nine submissions in ten back at a 9 or a 10. There is no centering wall here and no fat tail of damage.

Set it beside the Greninja Gold Star from the Celebrations Elite Trainer Box, which gems at 5.36 percent and still drew four times as many submissions in the same window. Collectors will cheerfully mail in a card that fails nineteen times in twenty. They have stopped mailing in one that succeeds more than half the time.

So the census did not stall on difficulty. It stalled on arithmetic.

5ban Graphics drew the whole era

The credit under the art reads Illus. 5ban Graphics, the studio responsible for most of the Sword and Shield era's full art renders rather than a named illustrator working alone. Charizard stands wings open against a pink and teal wash, the art running to the edges behind a thin silver V frame, with a 2020 copyright line along the bottom and the black star promo mark beside SWSH050. It is a 220 HP Basic with Claw Slash and Fire Spin, and none of that has anything to do with why it is worth fourteen dollars.

What the frame does do is keep the grade honest. A pale silver border shows edge wear far less readily than the dark bordered promos of the same era, which is part of why nine in ten of these clear a 9.

The fee is bigger than the payout

PSA listed Regular service at $79.99 on September 4, 2026, with a $1,500 maximum insured value and an estimated 70 to 80 business day turnaround. Value tiers remain paused. A card whose best possible outcome sells under a hundred dollars has no cheaper door to walk through.

PriceCharting's realised tape, read the same day, puts thirty PSA 10 sales between July 31 and September 3 at an $86.50 median, thirty PSA 9 sales since August 10 at $28.49, and sixty raw sales since June 3 at $13.50. The site's own quoted values land within a dollar or two of all three, which is worth flagging because they frequently do not.

Now run it. A raw copy plus the Regular fee costs about $93.50, against a Gem Mint 10 selling at $86.50, and that seven dollar gap is the figure above, measured before anyone has actually sold anything. Add eBay's cut and the cost of shipping a slab, somewhere near 15 percent between them, and the 10 nets about $73.50. Even guaranteed, it comes back twenty dollars short of its own cost.

The fee on its own is what ends the argument. That $79.99 exceeds the $73.50 a certain 10 returns, so there is no purchase price, free included, at which this submission clears. Weight the payouts by the actual grade distribution instead of assuming the top result and the expected return drops to about $51 against that $93.50, a loss near 45 percent. The 9 is the reason: 31,177 of them exist and one sells for less than half the price of the fee.

What to do with the copy you already have

Leave it raw. A card with 50,967 Gem Mint copies already in circulation is not waiting on yours, and the queue would tie up a fourteen dollar card for about four calendar months to tell you something the census already knows. If you want one slabbed for the binder rather than for the spread, a finished PSA 10 at $86.50 costs less than making one and arrives this week.

A sealed Elite Trainer Box is the only version of this worth a second thought, since the promo inside has never been handled. The arithmetic does not move even there, so open it for the packs and treat the Charizard as something that came free with them. Cards where a pop report genuinely argues for a submission sit at the opposite end of the census, among the genuinely low pop cards, and you can sort the whole dataset by gem rate and population in the BetterPop gallery.

Sources

• PSA population via the GemRate pull of August 13, 2026; every token above refreshes with each site build. Cohort, sibling print and language row figures quoted from the August 13, 2026 pull, and the 90,727 grades, 415 additions and Mega Charizard X ex comparison from the August 31, 2026 pull
• PriceCharting: Charizard V #SWSH050, price table, sold tape and monthly price history all read September 4, 2026
• PSA service levels, fees and turnaround, read September 4, 2026
• Pokemon.com: Champion's Path Elite Trainer Box, for the box contents and the full art promo line, read September 4, 2026
• Bulbapedia: Champion's Path, for the September 25, 2020 release, the eighty card count and the note that packs were sold only inside set products, read September 4, 2026; the 5ban Graphics credit, the SWSH050 number and the 2020 copyright confirmed on the card scan itself