Entei Pokemon 3 movie promo pop report: the first reverse holo printed in English

Published October 17, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is October 1, 2026

Wizards of the Coast put reverse holofoil on an English card for the first time in April 2001, and the card it picked was this Entei. At the October 1, 2026 pull PSA has returned 1,032 Gem Mint copies from 23,297 submissions, a 4.4 percent gem rate. Ten other cards out of the same promo run sit between 15.47 and 34.57 percent.

Same year, same printer, same numbered series. One of them gems five times worse than the floor of the rest.

The Entei Pokemon 3 movie promo pop report, against its own run

23,297 graded. 1,032 tens, 8,531 nines, 7,432 eights, 19 copies labelled Authentic without a number, and 6,283 finishing at PSA 7 or lower, which is 26.97 percent of everything ever mailed in. PSA added 651 more last period on a thirty day trend of +64%.

Entei is the only row dated 2001 in the dataset past 23,000 grades, and across the whole Wizards promo program only Ancient Mew carries a bigger census. The two land in nearly the same spot: Ancient Mew returns 4.46 percent on 88,694 grades, and this card returns 4.4 percent. If a census shaped like that is unfamiliar, start with how a population report is built.

Three cards in that run carry foil, and only two collapse

Thirteen cards from the 2001 Wizards Black Star Promo run have passed 1,000 grades. Ten carry no foil at all and pool 21.64 percent Gem Mint across 21,338 submissions, Pikachu number 26 weakest at 15.47 and Igglybuff number 36 strongest at 34.57. Entei and Pichu number 35 pool 4.22 percent across 26,114 grades. Nothing in the unfoiled group comes within ten points of them.

Which makes the foil the obvious answer. It is not.

Scizor number 33 is a reverse foil card too, printed with no plain version at all, and it returns 17.69 percent on 2,091 grades. That is the middle of the unfoiled band. Three cards in the run took the reverse treatment and one of them grades like it never happened.

What separates them is the pattern. Entei and Pichu carry a dark cosmos field, the dots and circles foil that Base Set 2 introduced behind artwork in 2000, laid across the whole card face instead with the picture window left flat. Scizor's reverse is a pale diagonal sheen that barely registers at print size. Nothing published explains why two patterns separate that far, and the reading that fits is the dull one: a scuff or a whitened edge sits on a dark reflective field on Entei and on near white cardstock on Scizor. That is an argument about what a grader can see rather than a measurement, and it belongs here as such.

The bands agree from the other direction. The two cosmos cards put 32.63 percent of their census on an 8 and 28.17 percent at a 7 or lower, against 21.47 and 15.70 for the unfoiled ten. Copies like that are not losing the top grade by a hair of centering. Damage got there first.

This direction has been measured once before. Among XY Evolutions cards that carry no foil in their standard version, the reverse print loses all five matched pairs, 29.06 percent against 13.35. Entei is the 2001 instance of the same effect, fifteen years earlier and roughly four times as wide.

The giveaway line is not what did it

Entei went out at cinemas, one per ticket, which is the kind of distribution that usually explains a damaged census on its own. Pichu did not. It went through Pokemon League the same month, to people who played organised Pokemon and owned sleeves, and it gems 2.45 percent, lower than Entei. Two channels, two crowds, one floor.

Ken Sugimori, a ticket stub, and a file folder in Japan

Illus. Ken Sugimori runs along the bottom edge next to a 1995 to 2001 copyright line and the number 34. Basic Pokemon, 80 HP, Fire. The Pokemon Power is Bolt, which shuffles Entei and everything attached to it back into your deck on a coin flip whenever an attack damages it without knocking it out. Wizards gave the card away with the purchase of a ticket to Spell of the Unown: Entei from April 6, 2001, for as long as stocks lasted.

Japan had the art first and sold it. The same Entei was one of nine cards in Premium File 2, available at participating cinemas showing the film from July 8, 2000 and at retail from August 5, 2000. A folder you bought, rather than a card somebody handed you on the way into a dark room.

Eighty nine dollars, and less than a point of room

Every graded row across PriceCharting's fifteen completed sale tables reads $6, which is what the site now displays rather than what anyone paid. Two real PSA 10 results survive the mask: Goldin at $979.66 on September 21, 2026 and Fanatics at $2,000.00 on October 14, 2026, with PriceCharting's own estimate of $1,209.93 between them. The table above takes the auction result, the conservative of the two.

Lower down the ladder the numbers behave. Three Fanatics PSA 9 sales between October 11 and October 14, 2026 ran $110.00, $125.00 and $130.00 against an estimate of $123.75.

Raw depends on where you shop. Thirty TCGplayer Near Mint sales between March 1 and October 7, 2026 median $29.34, while thirty eBay sales in the week to October 16 median $17.49 with damaged and sealed copies mixed in. A submission needs the first number. Add PSA's Standard tier at $59.99 a card, read on psacard.com on October 17, 2026 against a $1,000 maximum insured value and 90 to 100 business days, and the cost is $89.33 before postage. Value services remain paused.

Net 15 percent out of every rung for marketplace fees. The ten returns $832.71 and arrives 4.4 percent of the time, the nine $106.25 at 36.62 percent, the eight $42.46 at 31.90 percent, and the 26.97 percent finishing at 7 or lower is carried at $21.25, a figure assumed rather than comped. Weighted together that is $95.09 back on $89.33 spent.

Now take the Gem Mint row out. Everything else on the card returns $58.20, thirty one dollars short of the fee and the copy, and the ten has to find that gap alone. At $832.71 net it needs a 3.74 percent gem rate against the 4.4 percent this card delivers. The trade clears, by less than a point of gem rate, on a Gem Mint price with exactly two observations a thousand dollars apart.

Check the four edges before anything else

The foil runs to the inner lip of the yellow border, so whitening along the edges reads as a bright line here instead of disappearing into cream cardstock the way it does on the unfoiled promos in the run. Look there before anything, then at the text box, which is the largest unbroken stretch of cosmos on the card and the place a press line turns up.

Sealed cello copies still turn up, and at 4.4 percent the wrapper is often worth more than the bet underneath it. If you would rather own the grade than chase it, the 9 is the rung that makes sense: it cost $125 in the second week of October 2026 and it arrives 36.62 percent of the time. The BetterPop gallery lines the rest of the 2001 promo run up beside it, and the wider version of this question runs through the cards whose tens stay scarce.

Sources

• GemRate PSA population data via the BetterPop dataset, October 1, 2026 row pull. The 2001 promo run comparison, the three foil groups, the 21,338 and 26,114 pooled grade totals, the Ancient Mew figures and the most graded 2001 row claim were computed across all 111,056 rows on October 17, 2026, with a 1,000 grade floor. Below that floor sit Unown J number 38 at 683 grades and 6.30 percent and Pokemon Center N.Y. number 40 at 995 and 17.59 percent; Unown J carries no foil and is the only card in the run that comes close to the cosmos pair.
• Bulbapedia, Entei (Wizards Promo 34) and Pichu (Wizards Promo 35), both read October 17, 2026, for the April 6, 2001 ticket giveaway, the Pokemon League release of Pichu in the same month, the Premium File 2 dates, and the claim that this was the first reverse holofoil card released outside Japan. That last point is a hobby reference rather than a Wizards document, and the dataset agrees with it: no English reverse foil row exists before 2001.
• Foil treatment verified card by card from the high resolution scans at images.pokemontcg.io for the 2001 run, cross checked against TCGdex, which lists numbers 33, 34 and 35 as the only reverse only cards in the Wizards Black Star Promos. The GemRate name field marks 34 and 35 but not 33, which is why the scans decided it.
• PriceCharting, Entei #34 Pokemon Promo, price table and all fifteen completed sale tables read October 17, 2026. Recent graded eBay rows are masked at $6, so every dated graded figure here is an auction house result: PSA 10 $979.66 (Goldin, September 21, 2026) and $2,000.00 (Fanatics, October 14, 2026), PSA 9 $110.00, $125.00 and $130.00 (Fanatics, October 11 to 14, 2026), PSA 8 $49.95 (Fanatics, October 10, 2026), PSA 7 $33.00 (Fanatics, October 7, 2026).
• PSA, trading card grading services, read October 17, 2026, for the Standard tier fee, maximum insured value, turnaround estimate and the paused Value services.
• Illustrator credit, HP, Pokemon Power and attack text, card number and copyright line read from the card face of Entei 34 in the Wizards Black Star Promos. Cosmos foil description cross checked against Bulbapedia's holofoil pattern article, read October 17, 2026.