Crown Zenith Pikachu pop report: the set printed two of them

Published September 15, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is September 12, 2026

Crown Zenith printed exactly one secret rare, and PSA has now counted it 61,950 times. At the September 12, 2026 pull the Crown Zenith Pikachu pop report puts card 160 at 32,774 Gem Mint 10s and a 52.9 percent gem rate, which makes it the most graded card in a set of 375 English rows.

The complication is that Crown Zenith contains a second Pikachu, and it is not this one.

Forty four percent of a set, on one card

61,950 graded. 32,774 tens, 24,005 nines, 3,941 eights, 24 Authentic, and 1,206 sitting at PSA 7 or lower. Another 1,216 arrived in the last reporting period against a 30 day trend of -12%.

Strip out the Galarian Gallery subset and Crown Zenith has 283 English rows left, holding 139,386 grades between them. Card 160 is 44.44 percent of that on its own. Radiant Charizard 020 is the next main set card at 31,339 grades, so a 70 HP Basic Pikachu has been mailed to PSA roughly twice as often as the Charizard printed beside it.

Widen the frame and it ranks 10th among all English cards in the dataset. The nine above it are four Charizards, the Van Gogh museum Pikachu, Ancient Mew, a Prismatic Evolutions Eevee, the Kanto legendary bird trio promo and a Blastoise ex.

What stops these cards is tolerance, not damage. Only 1,206 copies of 61,950 came back below an 8, roughly one submission in fifty one. The rest were measured and found a fraction out. That alone puts it in different company from the Celebrations full art Pikachu, which gems at 2.01 percent and sends a quarter of its census home at a 7 or worse.

The other Pikachu came out of the same packs

Card GG30 is the Galarian Gallery Pikachu, illustrated by Kouki Saitou, pulled from the same Crown Zenith packs in the same boxes in the same January. At this pull it holds 4,083 Gem Mint 10s from 14,173 submissions, a 28.81 percent gem rate. Card 160 gems roughly 24 points better.

Price is not what separates them. A raw GG30 cleared a $45.00 median across sixty PriceCharting sales in the three months to September 14, 2026, and a raw 160 cleared $47.73 across fifty eight. Two cards that cost the same to buy give a submitter the same reason to screen before mailing.

Incentive is not what separates them either, and it points the wrong way. A GG30 in a PSA 10 cleared a $515.00 median across twenty nine sales. A 160 in a PSA 10 cleared $275.00. The card worth nearly twice as much in the slab is the one that gems half as often, which is the reverse of what careful submitters would produce.

GG30 also loses at the bottom of the scale as well as the top. It stops at a 9 on 53.90 percent of submissions against 38.75 percent here, and it lands at an 8 or below on 17.15 percent against 8.31 percent. Two doors, both narrower.

Why this ten costs half what the Gallery ten costs

32,774 against 4,083. That is most of the answer, and the pop report is the receipt.

Eight times as many Gem Mint 10s of card 160 exist, sitting in front of roughly the same set of buyers, and the gap is still widening: PSA returned 1,216 copies of card 160 last period against 427 of the Gallery Pikachu. The likeliest reading is that supply and not desirability sets the price here, though a census cannot separate those two cleanly.

Iribi drew four cards in this set

You Iribi takes the illustrator credit on the card face. Serebii's cardex lists 58 Pokemon cards under that name, four of them inside Crown Zenith: Eevee V 108, the Bede supporter 124, Hisuian Goodra GG21 and this Pikachu. Four cards in the whole catalogue are named Pikachu, and card 160 is the only one that ever came out of a booster pack. The other three are promos.

Which is a narrower door than it sounds, because Crown Zenith booster packs were never sold on their own. The Pokemon Company says so in one line on its own product page for the Crown Zenith Elite Trainer Box, a $49.99 box holding ten packs and an etched foil Lucario VSTAR. Every copy of card 160 in circulation arrived through a gift box or a tin, the same channel that produced the Champion's Path Charizard census.

The two years nobody wanted it

PriceCharting's monthly history, read September 15, 2026, opens high and then collapses. A PSA 10 charted $297.08 in January 2023 and $40.28 in February 2024, down 86 percent in thirteen months. Raw copies ran $41.22 to $6.00 across the same stretch.

Then it climbed back: $317.50 by May 2026, $275.00 now. That leaves the ten 13.4 percent below its peak and still 6.8 times the trough, while raw copies sit at 7.6 times theirs.

Nothing in the print changed over those three years. A set that only ever shipped inside sealed boxes eventually stopped being restocked, which is the reading the tape supports, but the same window covers a broad run in Pikachu prices and the numbers here cannot tell the two apart.

Realised sales agree with the algorithm. Thirty PSA 10 sales cleared a $275.00 median between August 24 and September 14, 2026, twenty five titled PSA 9 sales cleared $61.00, and fifty eight raw copies cleared $47.73 across three months.

Which Pikachu should you actually mail in?

PSA's Standard tier costs $59.99 for an estimated 90 to 100 business days and a $1,000 maximum insured value, read off psacard.com/pricing on September 15, 2026, with Priority at $79.99 and the Value tiers still paused. Against a $47.73 raw copy and 15 percent off the sale for fees and shipping a slab, card 160 needs a 31.8 percent gem rate to break even. Its lifetime rate is 52.9 percent, and weighting the payouts by the grades this census returns gives about $147 back on $108 of cost, a 36 percent return.

Run the identical arithmetic on the Gallery Pikachu and it looks better. Breakeven sits near 12.6 percent against a 28.81 percent lifetime rate, and a submission comes back around $167 on $105. On lifetime numbers the market has spent two years grading the wrong Pikachu.

Now use the rate that applies to a card mailed tomorrow. Differencing the August 13 and September 12 pulls, PSA returned 1,216 copies of card 160 and 576 of them were tens, a 47.37 percent window. It returned 427 Gallery Pikachus and 44 tens, a 10.30 percent window. At those rates card 160 still clears by about 27 percent and the Gallery card turns negative, roughly 9 percent underwater.

The whole set cooled, so read that gap carefully. Of the 25 Crown Zenith rows that took at least 100 grades in that window, 24 came in under their own lifetime rate and the median row gave up 7.5 points. What makes the two Pikachus worth the comparison is that they are the extremes of that spread. GG30 gave up 18.50 points, the worst in the set. Card 160 gave up 5.54, the fifth smallest.

Measure the yellow frame first

Card 160 puts a full bleed illustration inside a solid yellow frame, which is about the easiest border in the hobby to judge on a kitchen table. Compare the width of that yellow band top against bottom and left against right. A difference you can see without a loupe is a 9 already, and 24,005 people have paid a grading fee to find that out.

If the frame reads even, this is one of the rare submissions on this blog where the arithmetic says go. If it does not, sell it raw near $47 and let somebody else's fee buy you the ten. For what a census this large can and cannot tell you, start with our guide to what a pop report actually measures, and to pull the counts on either Crown Zenith Pikachu yourself, open the BetterPop gallery.

Sources

• PSA population via the GemRate pull of September 12, 2026; every figure in the data blocks above refreshes with each site build
• The GG30 counts, the 139,386 main set total and the 44.44 percent share, the 10th place English ranking, and the 25 row Crown Zenith window comparison were computed from that pull and the August 13, 2026 pull held alongside it
• PriceCharting: Pikachu #160, Pokemon Crown Zenith and Pikachu #GG30, price tables, dated sold tape and monthly history read September 15, 2026
• PSA pricing, read September 15, 2026, giving Standard at $59.99 for 90 to 100 business days, Priority at $79.99, and the continuing Value pause
• The Pokemon Company's Crown Zenith Elite Trainer Box page, read September 15, 2026, for the ten pack contents, the Lucario VSTAR promo and the line that booster packs are not sold separately for the expansion
• The You Iribi credit, the 70 HP and the 160/159 card number read off the card face; the catalogue of 58 cards and the four Crown Zenith entries from Serebii's You Iribi cardex, read September 15, 2026
• The single Rare Secret rarity in the 160 card Crown Zenith main set, and the Kouki Saitou credit on GG30, from the Pokemon TCG API card records for swsh12pt5 and swsh12pt5gg, read September 15, 2026