Fossil Gengar pop report: the census peaks at a 7

Published October 29, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is October 23, 2026

Mail an unlimited Fossil Gengar to PSA and the likeliest single answer is a 7. Not a near miss at the top of the scale, not a centering call. A 7, the grade PSA hands to a card you can see has been handled.

That is an odd thing to be true of a card with a five figure census, and everything else in the Fossil Gengar pop report follows from it.

A census that stacks up at 7 instead of 8

14,502 submissions, 51 Gem Mint 10s, 1,184 nines, 3,435 eights, and 9,813 copies finishing at PSA 7 or lower, which is 67.67 percent of everything ever sent in. The gem rate is 0.35 percent. PSA added 442 more grades last period on a +18% thirty day trend, so the pile is still deepening.

Open the October 1, 2026 ladder and the shape reads more clearly than the totals do. 3,500 copies sit at PSA 7 against 3,435 at PSA 8, so the seventh rung is the tallest one on the card. That lead is 65 copies, slim enough to say out loud, and it would stay a curiosity except for how rare the shape is. Of the 725 cards in the data carrying more than 10,000 grades, 503 peak at a 10 and 181 peak at a 9. Six peak below an 8.

The other five have all been written up here already. The unlimited Base Set Charizard and its Base Set 2 reprint both peak at 6, the shadowless print bottoms out at 5, and the Jungle Vaporeon and the Neo Genesis Lugia sit at 7 beside this Gengar. All six are Wizards holos printed between 1999 and 2000.

Fourteen Fossil holos stop at 8, and one slides a step

Fossil shipped fifteen holo rares. In the unlimited print, fourteen of their censuses put the tallest rung at PSA 8. Gengar is the one that drops below the floor its own set stands on.

So what does Gengar carry that the other fourteen do not? The candidates a collector reaches for first all die inside the set.

Take the artist. Keiji Kinebuchi illustrated two of the fifteen holos, this Gengar and the Ditto at number 3. Ditto gems at 2.050 percent against Gengar's 0.352, a factor of 5.8 between two cards signed by one man. Ken Sugimori drew six of them, running from Lapras at 0.373 percent to Magneton at 2.731, a 7.3 times span inside a single signature. Every artist in the set spans at least 2.7 times across his own cards, which is most of the range of the set itself.

Then the dark art, which is the explanation this card attracts, since Kinebuchi rendered Gengar against something close to black and dark fields do show handling. Haunter at number 6 is the same evolution line on the same kind of ground, and it gems at 1.838 percent, five times this card. The foil cannot do the work either. Bulbapedia records Fossil as the last English expansion to use the Starlight holofoil before Wizards switched to Cosmos, so that surface is a set wide constant rather than a Gengar one.

The same Gengar, pressed three times, landing a step lower each time

Kinebuchi's illustration went to press three times between 1997 and 1999, and the three censuses stack in order. The Japanese print from Mystery of the Fossils, released June 21, 1997, peaks at PSA 9. The English 1st Edition peaks at 8. The English unlimited peaks at 7.

Gem rates run the same staircase: 5.79 percent on the Japanese card from 9,923 grades, 2.317 percent on the 1st Edition from 7,899, and 0.35 percent here. Nothing about the drawing changed across those runs. What changed is how many were printed and who ended up holding them, and the likeliest reading is that the unlimited print is the one that reached ordinary shelves in volume, in the autumn a nine year old wanted a Gengar more than he wanted a sleeve.

The Japanese row is no tidy story about careful collectors. It carries 661 copies at PSA 1 against its 575 tens, so that census runs wider at both ends rather than shifting cleanly upward.

Keiji Kinebuchi built this Gengar in LightWave

English Fossil arrived October 10, 1999, two years and four months behind its Japanese parent. Kinebuchi, born February 14, 1956, was one of very few 3D illustrators on the card game at launch, and Bulbapedia's entry, sourced to Pokemon Card Fan Club volume 2, has him building his art in LightWave 3D. The tools of that moment kept his Pokemon to simple geometry, plain textures and a lighting pass, which is why a Kinebuchi card announces itself before you read the name. He also brought Mitsuhiro Arita onto the project, a credit Arita posted himself in December 2021. His last illustrations ran in Aquapolis, and Bulbapedia dates his death to around 2002.

The card itself is a Stage 2 with 80 HP carrying the Pokemon Power Curse, which moves a damage counter from one of your opponent's Pokemon to another even when that knocks the second one out. Fossil printed the art twice, holo at 5/62 and flat at 20/62. The flat copy gems at 6.211 percent, roughly eighteen times this one, and the Vaporeon write up works that holo against non holo split out across all four Wizards sets of the era rather than one pair at a time.

What a 7 actually pays

Raw Fossil Gengar trades at two prices that have almost nothing to do with each other. Near Mint copies cleared $175.00 to $223.99 on TCGplayer across five sales from September 4 to October 23, 2026. eBay raw sales over the same stretch medianed $99.99 across 29 results, because eBay is where the played copies go, Heavy Played and Moderately Played written right into the titles.

Price the realistic outcomes against both starting points, using PSA titled sales only and dropping the CGC, BGS and TAG rows that share the search. A PSA 7 medianed $230.00 across 29 sales between September 30 and October 25, 2026. A PSA 8 medianed $410.00 across 12 sales from October 13 to 26. Buy the beaten copy near $100, pay $59.99, and a 7 clears about $70. Start from a Near Mint copy instead and that same 7 hands back roughly $25. The cheap end of the raw market is the end that works, which is not a sentence a vintage holo usually earns. The Sabrina's Gengar census is where that argument gets made at full length.

Two numbers up there deserve a warning. The Gem Mint figure is a single sale, $11,300.00 on March 16, 2026, against $2,448.40 for the one before it in January 2025, while PriceCharting's own algorithmic column currently reads $3,296.47. Twelve PSA 10 sales exist across four years, which is too thin a tape to call a price. A PSA 9 at $1,290.30 also clears Standard service's $1,000 insured ceiling, so the honest version of that row costs $79.99 on Priority. PriceCharting's Grade 9 column reads $999.50 only because CGC 9 copies cleared $375.00 to $449.95 in the same window and the column pools graders together.

Buy the worn one, or leave your clean one alone

If you already own a Near Mint copy of this card, the arithmetic says sell it raw into a TCGplayer market near $195 rather than paying to find out. Only 0.35 percent of submissions gem, and the grade your fee is most likely to buy is worth less than the card you mailed. If you want slabs of it, buy the worn copies cheap and let the 7 do the work it already does. The guide to low pop Pokemon cards covers why a thin top rung and a cheap bottom one so often travel together, and this row keeps updating itself in the BetterPop gallery.

Sources

• Population figures: GemRate PSA population data, pull dated October 1, 2026; full grade ladder from the October 1, 2026 snapshot.
• Card text, illustrator, print history and set dates: Bulbapedia, Gengar (Fossil 5) and Fossil (TCG), read October 29, 2026.
• Illustrator biography: Bulbapedia, Keiji Kinebuchi, citing Pokemon Card Fan Club volume 2 and Mitsuhiro Arita's own December 2021 post, read October 29, 2026.
• Prices: PriceCharting, Gengar #5 Pokemon Fossil, graded and raw sold tape read October 29, 2026, filtered to PSA titled rows.
• Grading fees: PSA trading card grading services, read October 29, 2026. Standard $59.99 at a $1,000 maximum insured value, Priority $79.99 at $1,500.