Crown Zenith Galarian Gallery pop report: one subset, two gem rates

Published September 21, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is September 19, 2026

Sort the seventy Galarian Gallery cards by gem rate and a gap opens between the thirty fourth and the thirty fifth that no card crosses. Below it sits every ordinary Pokemon in the subset. Above it sits every V, VSTAR, VMAX and Trainer. That makes the Crown Zenith Galarian Gallery pop report two pop reports wearing one set symbol, and Mewtwo VSTAR GG44, the most graded of the seventy, sits on the generous side with 26,591 Gem Mint 10s from 47,111 grades at the September 19, 2026 pull.

The Crown Zenith Galarian Gallery pop report splits in two

GG01 through GG34 are Basics, Stage 1s and Stage 2s, thirty four plain Pokemon printed at full art. Their gem rates run from 24.39 percent on GG27 Swablu to 43.23 on GG17 Thievul. GG35 through GG70 are the V, VSTAR, VMAX, Supporter and secret cards, thirty six of them, and they run from 44.47 percent on GG60 Cynthia's Ambition to 79.78 on GG47 Hatterene VMAX.

Between 43.23 and 44.47 there is nothing. Seventy rows and an empty 1.24 points.

Pool each side: 103,938 grades at 29.20 percent below the line, 468,025 at 57.66 percent above it. The Gallery is where Crown Zenith's grading actually happens, taking 571,963 of the expansion's 710,954 English grades on seventy rows against the main set's 265.

The two sides also fail differently, and at both doors. Below the line, 53.35 percent of submissions stop at a PSA 9 and 17.41 percent land at an 8 or lower. Above it, 34.29 percent and 8.04 percent. So the plain Pokemon are not simply hitting a centering ceiling that pins them at a nine. They take more than twice the share of real damage too.

GG44 carries the generous pattern: 16,919 nines and 2,865 eights against its 26,591 tens, with only 729 copies at 7 or lower. One card holds 8.24 percent of everything the Gallery has ever been graded. Its GG30 Pikachu neighbour sits below the line, and the two Crown Zenith Pikachus already show how far apart one set can print.

Four more subsets, four more empty bands

Crown Zenith did not invent this. Run the same sort on the four Trainer Gallery subsets that came before it and the line lands in the same place every time, between the plain Pokemon and the first V card. Brilliant Stars leaves 8.15 points of empty range between the two groups, Lost Origin 11.25, Astral Radiance 14.83, Silver Tempest 16.09.

Five subsets, 190 rows, a million graded cards, and not one of them sits in its own set's gap.

A lifetime census can also just be preserving an old habit, so the recent window matters. Differencing the August 13 and September 19, 2026 pulls gives 3,072 fresh Gallery grades below the line returning 400 tens, a 13.02 percent rate, against 8,535 above it returning 4,430, at 51.90 percent. Among rows that took 100 or more grades in that window the two sides still do not touch: GG05 Lapras tops the low side at 20.51 percent, GG67 Palkia floors the high side at 39.93. Five weeks of current grading, a 19.41 point hole.

GG44 took 854 of those grades and returned 422 tens, 49.41 percent, a little under its 56.4 percent lifetime figure. GemRate's own thirty day number for the row reads 49.0, which is about as close as two independent measurements get.

The cheap cards are the ones that gem

The obvious explanation is money. Expensive cards get screened before they go in the box, cheap ones get shovelled in by the hundred, so the cheap ones come back worse. Check it and it falls over.

GG62 Grant is a Supporter almost nobody chases. PriceCharting had an ungraded copy at $2.93 on September 21, 2026, and 659 submissions have returned a 54.32 percent gem rate. GG10 Mew, on the other side of the line, was $61.52 the same day and has returned 27.62 percent across 27,671 submissions. Twenty one times the card, half the odds.

Lost Origin says the same thing louder. A TG26 Kabu costs $2.01 and gems 41.60 percent on 262 grades. The TG03 Charizard in the same subset costs $27.67 and gems 26.26 percent on 19,298. Whatever is separating these cards, it is not what submitters paid for them, and census size does not rescue the theory either: rank each half by submissions against gem rate and Spearman comes back at minus 0.430 below the line and plus 0.149 above it, so the gradient does not even point the same way.

What the card faces actually show

Put GG34 Mareep next to GG35 Leafeon VSTAR, the two cards on either side of the line. The Mareep is an illustration running to all four edges with a thin yellow band around it and its attacks printed straight onto the art. The Leafeon carries a pale pearlescent edge, gold scrollwork through the middle and its text in framed panels. GG60 Cynthia's Ambition sits in a brushed silver edge instead. Different furniture, same subset, same booster packs.

I measured those frames off the official renders first, because a narrower border turns a given miscut into a worse centering ratio. They are identical. Whatever the furniture is doing it is not doing it with width, and PSA publishes no reasons with a grade, so take the rest as what five censuses imply rather than as a finding. A single set version of this turned up in Celebrations, where the Birthday Pikachu census sits in a subset that will not come apart while the main set beside it spreads over seventy points.

The Mewtwo is signed GOSSAN in the bottom left, over an illustration of Mewtwo firing a psychic sphere past a Charizard and a Blastoise. That signature reaches this size in exactly one other place, which the Snorlax 151 promo covers.

Good odds, and a raw card priced for them

PSA's Standard tier ran $59.99 with a $1,000 insured ceiling and an estimated 90 to 100 business days, read off psacard.com on September 21, 2026 with Value services still paused. A GG44 ten clears well under that ceiling, so Standard is the right door.

Weight the four outcomes by the census this card actually produces, take 15 percent off each payout for fees and shipping a slab, and a submission hands back about $361 against $308.24 of raw card plus service, a gain of 17.2 percent. Breakeven lands at a 33.47 percent gem rate, under both the lifetime 56.4 percent and the 49.41 percent the last five weeks produced.

Now run it on the Mew across the line. Its ten is worth $552.13 against this card's $543.42, near enough the same money, but a raw copy quoted $61.52 that day rather than $248. Cost $121.51, expected return about $183, a gain of 50.6 percent, breakeven 12.07 percent against a 27.62 percent gem rate. The card with half the odds is three times the trade, because the market already priced the odds into the raw copy: nine times raw for a Mew ten, 2.2 times for a Mewtwo ten.

The queue argues against both. A GG44 PSA 10 charted $689.44 in May 2026 and $543.42 in September, down 21.2 percent in four months, while the raw card came off a $285.14 June peak to roughly $249. Ninety to a hundred business days is a long time to hold a number that has fallen every month since spring.

Which side of GG34 your copy sits on

Check the card number before anything else, because it tells you the odds before you look at the card. GG35 or higher and roughly nine in ten come back a 9 or a 10, so the question is only whether the centering carries. GG34 or lower and one in six lands at an 8 or worse, which means surface and edges deserve the first look and the fee deserves a harder question.

Buy near the tape and the table above is yours; thirty one titled sales between September 12 and 20, 2026 ran a $248.00 median. If a small PSA 10 count is what you are hunting rather than a census this size, our guide to cards with genuinely small PSA 10 populations draws that line. To sort all seventy rows yourself and watch the gap open, use the BetterPop gallery.

Sources

• PSA population via the GemRate pull of September 19, 2026; every figure in the data blocks above refreshes with each site build
• The seventy row Galarian Gallery sort, the 1.24 point gap, the pooled band rates, the grade distribution on each side, the 80.45 percent share of Crown Zenith grades, the Brilliant Stars, Astral Radiance, Lost Origin and Silver Tempest bands, the Spearman figures and the five week window rates were computed from that pull and the archived pull of August 13, 2026. The four earlier subsets are measured across every row with 20 or more grades
• PriceCharting: Mewtwo VSTAR #GG44, Pokemon Crown Zenith, live grade ladder, dated sold tape and monthly history, read September 21, 2026; series units verified against the live price table. Prices for Mew #GG10, Grant #GG62, Lost Origin Charizard #TG03 and Kabu #TG26 read the same day
• PSA service levels and pricing, Standard fee, insured ceiling, turnaround and the continuing Value pause, read September 21, 2026
• The GOSSAN credit, the GG44/GG70 numbering, the 2023 copyright line and every frame description verified against the card faces for GG30, GG34, GG35, GG44, GG60 and GG69 on pokemontcg.io; the border measurements taken off those same renders
• Card types and rarities for all seventy Galarian Gallery rows from the Pokemon TCG API record for set swsh12pt5gg, read September 21, 2026