Crown Zenith Lucario VSTAR promo pop report: the box decided the grade

Published November 13, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is October 23, 2026

Crown Zenith shipped with no loose booster packs anywhere in it. Every pack in the release sat inside a sealed product, every product carried its own promo card, and PSA has since graded those promos at rates running from 1.35 percent to 85.50 percent. At the October 1, 2026 pull the Crown Zenith Lucario VSTAR promo pop report reads 25,763 Gem Mint 10s from 44,851 submissions on SWSH291, a 57.4 percent gem rate.

Which box a buyer carried out of the store in January 2023 did more to the grade than which Pokemon was printed on the card.

Reading the Crown Zenith Lucario VSTAR promo pop report

44,851 graded. 25,763 tens, 15,029 nines, 2,684 eights and 1,370 copies at a 7 or lower, with 1,267 returned in the last reporting period against a 30 day trend of +21%. Only 3.05 percent of the census sits below an 8.

The submission rate is also still climbing rather than tailing off. The period before last added 1,043 copies and the last one added 1,267, on a card that reached shelves on January 20, 2023. Three years in, the pile is growing faster than it was.

Ten English Elite Trainer Box promos have passed 20,000 PSA grades. Read on November 13, 2026, this one has the best gem rate of the ten. It edges the Champion's Path box card at 56.24 percent on 91,176 grades and the Hidden Fates GX at 56.08 on 78,426, and it sits a long way above the Celebrations Greninja Gold Star at 5.14 percent.

Seven boxes, and the promo inside each one

Bulbapedia's expansion page states the distribution rule outright: Crown Zenith packs could not be bought separately and were available only inside set related products. That makes the promo program the whole retail map of the release. Every row below is an English promo attached to one Crown Zenith product, read from the dataset on November 13, 2026.

Eighty and a half points separate the top row of that table from the bottom, and the Lucario alone holds 51.2 percent of the 87,682 grades in it. What tightens the pattern is how little the cards inside a single product disagree. The three tin birds land within 5.35 points of each other. The two Pikachu promos land within 0.54. The two Premium Figure cards land within 1.62. The four Morpeko pieces spread 9.81.

The steps between products are the ones that move. It is 24.5 points down from the Morpeko pieces to the Lucario, another 22.1 down to the Rayquaza, and 15.0 from the Premium Figure pair to the Lugia. Call it a staircase and the table will embarrass you though, because the Rayquaza and the Unown V sit 0.58 apart on rows that have nothing to do with each other.

Why a product would stamp itself on a grade is the harder half. Packaging is the obvious candidate, since a tin promo and a boxed promo are handled by different trays and different hands, and submitter behaviour is the other, because a card people intend to grade gets screened before it is mailed and a card nobody values travels in bulk. Neither can be read off a census, and the data here cannot choose between them.

One product in the table breaks the chronology. The Rayquaza is a reprint of the 2020 SWSH029 promo, and it shipped in the Sea & Sky Premium Collection on August 14, 2024, nineteen months after the rest. Bulbapedia records a paper change with it: that print uses Pixel Cosmos holofoil, while the 2020 original used the smooth kind.

Two promos came out of the same box

The Unown V and Lugia V Special Collection put two promos in one package, and they are the pair that refuses to behave. Unown V SWSH300 reads 34.81 percent gem on 135 grades, with only 4 copies of the whole census below an 8. Lugia V SWSH301 reads 1.35 percent on 594, which is 8 tens.

The Lugia's ladder is where the damage shows: 256 of its 594 grades came back an 8 and another 211 came back a 7 or worse, so 467 copies, 78.6 percent of everything mailed in, failed to reach Mint. PSA has not awarded it a 10 since November 11, 2025. Something physical is wrong with that print and the census cannot say what, which is the honest limit on the product theory. The box explains most of the spread in the table above. It does not explain this.

hncl drew this one before he drew anything else

The illustrator line reads hncl, short for hungry_clicker, written はんくり in Japanese. Bulbapedia's page on him records SWSH291 as the first card he illustrated for the Pokemon TCG, which puts a 44,851 grade census on a debut. He went on to the Korean Trading Card Game League 2024 key art and a bonus illustration for the Hatsune Miku Project VOLTAGE collaboration.

The art is worth a note for a practical reason. Lucario is framed head on and the art runs out to the frame, so there is no interior art window to measure the centering against, and the pale rainbow border hides the whitening that a dark border would advertise. A promo wearing the same treatment from the year before, the SWSH214 Lucario VSTAR by aky CG Works out of the 2022 Premium Collection, reads 32.97 percent gem on 1,201 grades. Same Pokemon, same name, a different box and a different artist, and 24 points apart.

Forty dollars of fee against a hundred dollar ten

PSA reopened its Value tier, read live on November 13, 2026 at $39.99 a card with a $500 maximum insured value and a 90 to 100 business day queue. A card whose ten clears a shade over a hundred dollars fits that tier with room to spare, and the cheaper fee is what makes the arithmetic work at all.

At $9.94 of raw cost and $39.99 of fee, a copy needs to come back a 10 about 28 percent of the time to break even against a 9 at $28.50. The card runs at 57.4 percent. Weighting the whole ladder by its own census gives roughly $71 of expected return against $49.93 of outlay, which is positive before postage in both directions and before the queue eats three to four months. That is an unusually comfortable margin for a promo that still costs ten dollars raw.

Check the border before you check anything else

Lay the card on white paper and look at the pale foil frame, not the art. On this print the rainbow border shows handling as a dull grey smear rather than the obvious white nick a black border gives you, so it is the detail most likely to cost you the ten without announcing itself. If the frame reads clean on all four sides, the odds in the table above are genuinely in your favour and the Value tier is the right envelope. If you want to see where it sits against the rest of the release first, the Galarian Gallery splits into two gem rate bands of its own, card 160 is the set's most graded card by a distance, and the Pokemon has a second promo only print from 2026 that grades better still. If the idea of a census per printing is new to you, start with how a pop report is built, or page through the live counts in the BetterPop gallery.

Sources

• GemRate PSA population data, Lucario VSTAR SWSH291 Crown Zenith Elite Trainer Box row and every Crown Zenith promo row quoted above, dataset read November 13, 2026. Population figures on this card refresh on every site rebuild.
• Bulbapedia, Crown Zenith (TCG), for the January 20, 2023 English release and the rule that booster packs were sold only inside set related products. Read November 13, 2026.
• Bulbapedia, Lucario VSTAR (SWSH Promo 214), for the SWSH291 full art print, its hncl credit, its two Elite Trainer Box distributions and its Japanese Special Art Rare counterpart. Read November 13, 2026.
• Bulbapedia, SWSH Black Star Promos (TCG), for which Crown Zenith product carried each promo number. Read November 13, 2026.
• Bulbapedia, Rayquaza (SWSH Promo 29), for the August 14, 2024 Sea & Sky reprint and the Pixel Cosmos holofoil change. Read November 13, 2026.
• Bulbapedia, hncl, for the illustrator's name, his debut card and his later commissions. Read November 13, 2026.
• PriceCharting, Lucario VSTAR SWSH291, dated sold tape read November 13, 2026. Medians use PSA titled rows only, 29 sales for the 10 and 24 for the 9, with CGC, BGS, SGC, TAG and Ace slabs and multi card lots excluded. The $9.94 raw figure is the ungraded column, cross checked against four TCGplayer Near Mint sales the same day at an $8.50 median.
• PSA, grading service pricing, read November 13, 2026: Value $39.99 at a $500 maximum insured value, 90 to 100 business days.