Charmander Obsidian Flames Elite Trainer Box promo pop report: two cards, one stamp

Published September 14, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is September 12, 2026

Two Charmanders shipped inside the same Pokemon Center box in August 2023, the same illustration on the same stock, one of them carrying a small logo stamp. The plain one gems 22.8 percent of the time. The stamped one gems 8.36. That gap is what makes the Charmander Obsidian Flames Elite Trainer Box promo pop report worth reading rather than just checking, because at the September 12, 2026 pull the plain print holds 11,117 Gem Mint 10s out of 48,710 submissions and almost nothing separating those two rows is the packaging.

One in five comes back a 10

23,250 copies sit in a PSA 9 holder, 47.73 percent of everything ever submitted. Another 10,316 came back an 8, and 4,018 landed below that. Put the bottom two together and 29.43 percent of this census never reached a 9.

That share, not the gem rate, is the strange number. Thirty nine English cards in this dataset have passed 40,000 grades. Rank them by how often a submission returns an 8 or worse and this Charmander comes tenth overall, and third among the twenty five printed since 2022, behind only the Mewtwo and Charizard VSTAR promos out of Ultra-Premium Collection boxes.

Every card that grades worse than this one is either a print from 1999 to 2016 or a chase: a Gold Star, a Celebrations full art, an ex, a V, a VMAX or a VSTAR. This is a Basic Charmander with 60 HP that came free with nine packs, and it is the only thing of its kind down there. The Special Illustration Rare Charizard the set was actually chased for gems 22.44 percent off 57,543 submissions, a third of a point below the giveaway.

The other Charmander in the same box

Pokemon.com lists the standard Obsidian Flames Elite Trainer Box, launched August 11, 2023, as nine booster packs and one full art foil promo card featuring Charmander. The Pokemon Center version of the box, same launch date, lists eleven packs and then two promos: one featuring Charmander with a Pokemon Center logo, and one featuring Charmander.

Both of them. Every stamped copy that exists travelled to its buyer beside a plain copy, in the same carton, down the same shipping lane.

So the box is held constant, the handling is held constant and the artwork is held constant, and the two rows still finish 14.46 points apart. The stamped print stands at 8,196 grades and 685 tens. Nearly half of it, 48.82 percent, comes back an 8 or lower, against 29.43 percent for the plain one.

What is left to explain it is who decided to mail the card. A plain copy clears about $65 raw, so PSA's cheapest open tier costs almost as much as the card itself and a submitter reads the edges twice before paying it. A stamped copy trades near $240, where the same fee is a quarter of the card and a middling copy still looks worth the wait. That reading seems to fit, though a census only counts what people sent, never what they set aside.

The stamp itself is not the problem

One tempting conclusion dies on the shelf. Twenty four English promos in this dataset exist as both a standard Elite Trainer Box row and a Pokemon Center row with at least 300 grades apiece, and the standard print gems better in fifteen of them. The Pokemon Center print takes the other nine, and Surging Sparks Magneton takes its pairing by 23.08 points in the opposite direction. Whatever is dragging on this Charmander is not dragging on stamped promos as a class, which is where the Prismatic Evolutions Eevee promo landed from the other end of the same question.

A window, a Pidgey and no border to read

The credit line reads Illus. MINAMINAMI Take. Charmander is indoors with both paws flat against the glass and its tail flame burning in front of a bookshelf, while a Pidgey sits on the sill outside among the flowerpots and a second one picks through the garden below. The picture runs to all four edges inside a thin silver frame.

That frame is the thing to inspect before money moves. Silver shows a nick the way a dark border does, and a borderless layout gives you no printed margin to judge the cut from the front, so the centering that settles your grade sits on the back. Read the reverse first. The front will flatter a card the back has already failed.

Sixty dollars of card, five months of queue

PSA opened a service level called Standard on September 14, 2026, at $59.99 a card, capped at a $1,000 insured value and estimated at 90 to 100 business days. A PSA 10 of this Charmander sits well under that ceiling, so Standard is the tier that fits, and the $79.99 level above it was renamed Priority on the same day. The Value tiers are still paused, and Standard orders queue behind the Value and Bulk work already in the building.

Twenty seven PSA 10 sales carrying this card's own title cleared a $609.00 median between July 19 and September 7, 2026. Twenty seven PSA 9s ran $102.50 over the three weeks to September 7, matching PriceCharting's quoted figure to the cent, and thirty raw Near Mint sales cleared $64.94.

Card plus fee is $124.93, and eBay with postage takes something near 15 percent of whatever comes back. A Gem Mint 10 nets about $518. Weight all four outcomes by the lifetime census and a submission returns roughly $176, a 40 percent gain, with breakeven landing at an 11.06 percent gem rate against a lifetime 22.8 percent.

Now read the recent window instead. GemRate's thirty day gem rate on this row is 7.0 percent across the 827 grades PSA returned in that period, and at that rate the same submission comes back around $107 and loses 14 percent. Do not hang a theory about this card on it: thirty six of those thirty nine English cards past 40,000 grades are running under their lifetime rate at this pull. The direction belongs to everybody. The level still belongs to the card.

Buy the ten or sell the raw one

The price series already made this argument. The PSA 10 climbed from $399.32 in September 2025 to $635.00 now, up 59 percent, and sits 5.4 percent under its May 2026 peak. The raw card is 12.9 percent off its own peak and the PSA 9 is 16.9 percent off. Money is pooling in the top grade while everything beneath it drifts.

If a copy came out of your box, plan on the 9, because that is the outcome the census keeps producing, and a 9 returns about $87 net against $125 of card and fee. Sell it raw or sleeve it and move on. If what you want is the slab, a finished PSA 10 changes hands near $609 most weeks and arrives without five months in a queue.

A population count alone will not settle which of those suits you, which is the argument our guide to reading a census keeps returning to. Line the gem rate, the census and the price up against each other in the BetterPop gallery first, or begin with low pop Pokemon cards if real scarcity is the goal.

Sources

• PSA population via the GemRate pull of September 12, 2026; every token above refreshes with each site build. The 47.73 and 29.43 percent grade shares, the stamped row's 8,196 grades and 48.82 percent, the thirty nine card English 40,000 grade cohort and its 2022 subset, the twenty four paired Elite Trainer Box promos and the Surging Sparks Magneton comparison were all computed from that same pull
• Pokemon.com, Scarlet and Violet Obsidian Flames Elite Trainer Box and the Pokemon Center Elite Trainer Box, for the August 11, 2023 launch date and both contents lists, read September 14, 2026 via the Internet Archive because the live pages render empty
• PriceCharting: Charmander #44 Pokemon Promo and Charmander [Pokemon Center] #44, price tables, sold tapes and monthly history read September 14, 2026. Units on the monthly series were confirmed as dollars by checking the last point of every grade series against the live price table on the same page. Three Pokemon Center sales between $6,400 and $6,550 were removed from the plain card's PSA 10 tape before taking its median, one of them titled as a Pokemon Center Elite Trainer Box copy
• PSA, on opening the Standard service level, read September 14, 2026, for the $59.99 fee, the 90 to 100 business day estimate, the $1,000 maximum insured value, the Regular to Priority rename and the continued pause on Value tiers
• PSA service levels, fees and turnaround, read September 14, 2026
• Illustrator credit, card number, HP, promo number and copyright year confirmed on the card scan itself