BetterPop

Charizard VSTAR UPC pop report: the whole box grades like this

Published August 25, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is August 13, 2026

One sealed box from October 2022 produced three Charizard promos. PSA has graded 148,019 English copies of them since. 26,815 came back Gem Mint 10. The Charizard VSTAR UPC pop report is the busiest of those three cards and the worst grading: 9,243 tens out of 59,337 submissions as of the August 13, 2026 pull, a 15.6 percent gem rate on a card that was never inside a booster pack.

Charizard VSTAR SWSH262 shipped in the Sword & Shield Ultra-Premium Collection on October 28, 2022, next to Charizard V at SWSH260 and Charizard VMAX at SWSH261. Same box, same print run, same etched foil treatment.

All three grade badly. That is the whole finding.

The Charizard VSTAR UPC pop report, and the wall in the middle of it

59,337 graded. 9,243 tens, 31,226 nines, 14,660 eights, 7 Authentic, and 4,201 resting at PSA 7 or lower. The nines are 52.6 percent of every copy submitted, and they outnumber the tens better than three to one.

The gem rate reads 15.6 percent as of August 13, 2026. Of the twenty most graded Pokemon cards on file, only two do worse: the unlimited Base Set Charizard at 0.47 percent and Ancient Mew at 4.61 percent, both printed last century. PSA added 1,125 more of these in the last reporting period on a 30 day trend of -6%. Our guide covers how those columns get assembled.

Two more Charizards came out of the same box

Charizard V at SWSH260 carries 43,043 grades for 7,691 tens, a 17.87 percent rate. Charizard VMAX at SWSH261 carries 45,639 grades for 9,881 tens, 21.65 percent. The VSTAR beats both on volume by roughly 14,000 submissions and loses to both on outcome.

Three cards, one print run, 121,204 verdicts short of a 10.

A ceiling that reproduces across all three sits upstream of whoever opened the box, not with whoever handled the cards after. Something in the October 2022 production is doing it, which the census suggests rather than proves.

The format itself is fine. The 2025 Mega Charizard X ex promo from its own Ultra-Premium Collection gems at 47.85 percent across 102,624 grades, three times this rate on a bigger census. Pulled from boosters instead of boxed, the 151 Charizard ex manages 27.58 percent. Only the 2023 box that followed this one looks similar, with Mew ex at 18.24 percent.

What the etching costs you

Pokemon sold the box on its finish. The product page describes the three promos as carrying "etched foil treatments", the physical difference between these and an ordinary black star promo: a raised texture pressed into the foil across the whole card face.

Texture is a liability twice over at a grading desk. It holds handling marks a flat surface would shed, and it shows foil print flaws from any angle rather than one unlucky one. A pale pearlescent border runs to all four cut edges here, so a nick reads dark instead of blending, and the full art frame hands a grader a straight centering reference.

Centering is what owners complained about at the time. Under the box opening below, buyers posting in 2022 reported bad centering on their own promos and questioned the print quality of a product sold as ultra premium. Not a study, but the census does not contradict them.

Hill Top Collectibles opened four of these boxes in 2022 to answer the grading question directly, and the comment thread underneath is a live record of what buyers were seeing on their own promos that autumn.

Oshiyama's only Charizard

KIYOTAKA OSHIYAMA is credited in the lower left of the card face. Serebii's artist index lists 33 Pokemon cards to his name, from Battle Styles in 2021 through Paldean Fates in 2024, and SWSH262 is the only Charizard among them.

He is better known outside this hobby. Two years after this card shipped he directed the animated film Look Back and drew most of its key animation himself, and before that he directed Flip Flappers and designed the devils in Chainsaw Man. The card reads like his day job. Charizard cuts a diagonal of flame from top right to bottom left, and Mewtwo sits curled inside a glowing orb beneath the path. One frame lifted out of a sequence.

From ninety two dollars to fifteen hundred

This card did nothing for eighteen months. PriceCharting's monthly PSA 10 series puts it at $98.00 in April 2023 and $92.57 in March 2024, both below where it opened in November 2022. It reached $142.50 in August 2024, $665.00 in August 2025, and peaked at $1,603.01 in June 2026.

The quoted PSA 10 value read $1,500.00 on August 25, 2026, off 6.4 percent from that June peak. Recorded sales agree with the model here: 30 PSA 10 sales between July 27 and August 17, 2026 ran a median of $1,476.50, a low of $1,225.00 and a high of $1,748.75. Anyone buying a slab today is buying near the top.

The 9 is already moving the other way. It peaked at $141.50 in June 2026 and read $119.21 on August 25, down 15.8 percent while the 10 gave back 6.4. A raw copy went from $9.07 in May 2023 to $76.12 on that same read.

What lit it in mid 2025 nobody can prove: a Charizard name and a shrinking pool of unopened 2022 boxes point the same direction.

A one in six shot, and why it still pays

Grading mathAmount
Raw copy (as of August 25, 2026)$78
PSA grading, Regular service$80
PSA 10 sale (as of August 25, 2026, PriceCharting sold tape)$1,476
PSA 9 sale (as of August 25, 2026, PriceCharting sold tape)$118
Margin if it gems+$1,318
Margin at PSA 9-$40

Regular is the tier this card fits, and only just. psacard.com listed it at $79.99 per card on August 25, 2026, with a maximum insured value of $1,500 and an estimated turnaround of 70 to 80 business days. The median PSA 10 sale sits $23.50 under that ceiling, and 11 of the 30 recorded sales since July 27 met or beat $1,500. Value services remain paused, so nothing cheaper exists.

Weight all four rungs by the census, not by the one you want. 15.6 percent land on the 10, 52.6 percent on the 9, 24.7 percent on the 8 and the rest below, which averages about $315 gross per submission. Take off the roughly 15 percent an eBay sale costs and $268 comes back against $158 all in. Breakeven sits near a 6 percent gem rate.

Two things bend that math. Published gem rates only count copies somebody chose to send, so one bought blind off a listing page grades below the printed figure. And 70 to 80 business days is four months of price risk on a card whose 9 has already turned. The Greninja Gold Star arithmetic clears at 5.36 percent for the same reason this one clears: the distance between the rungs, not the odds of reaching the top.

Screen for the cut, then decide

Measure first, everything else after. The illustration frame gives you a straight edge on all four sides, so square the card up and compare the pale border top against bottom, then left against right. Uneven on either pair and you own a 9, which is a $118 card behind an $80 fee.

Send it if the cut is square. The gap does the work at this gem rate, since a 10 pays roughly twelve times what a 9 does. Buying instead, TCGplayer showed 158 Near Mint English listings on August 25, 2026 with 25 copies under $83 delivered, so raw supply is no constraint. All three sort side by side in BetterPop's card browser.

Sources

Every number above is one row of 109,086. Sort the whole census yourself, free, no login.

Open the BetterPop gallery