Giratina V alt art pop report: more nines than tens, and a 4x price gap

Published August 15, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is August 13, 2026

The Giratina V alternate art has a census quirk its price refuses to forgive: PSA 9s outnumber PSA 10s, 9,875 to 9,667. On Lost Origin's biggest chase card, a coin flip weighted against the gem, the market pays about four and a half times more for the side that lands. That asymmetry is the whole page.

A census with a low ceiling

From the August 13, 2026 pull: 23,802 graded, the most of any card in Lost Origin. 9,667 tens, 9,875 nines, 3,054 eights, a 40.6 percent gem rate, and a 30 day trend of -2%. Within its own set the underperformance is stark: the 185 full art gems around 54 percent, the VSTAR secret around 56, the rainbow around 54. Same set, same printer, same era. This card misses where its siblings pass.

Why does the chase card gem worst in its own set?

Look at the canvas. Shinji Kanda's Distortion World art is nearly black, rendered in dense psychedelic linework, and dark etched foil is the least forgiving surface PSA grades: print lines, factory texture dents, and hairline scratches all glow under grading lights against dark ink, and edge whitening on near black borders reads from across the room. That mechanism is the grading community's account rather than a published study, but the sibling gem rates above are measured, and they all point the same direction. The identical physics with a lighter palette and a better outcome is on display in the Lugia alt art pop report from the set that followed, and the current generation is still failing the same test in the Umbreon ex Prismatic Evolutions pop report.

A census oddity worth a paragraph: language matters here more than almost anywhere. Italian copies of this exact card gem at 15 percent and the small Spanish population at 2 percent, against 41 for English. Print quality is a variable by market, which is exactly why a pop report keeps separate rows per printing and why you should read the row that matches your copy.

Kanda was nearly new to the TCG when he drew this, a Brilliant Stars debutant handed a franchise deity two sets later. The 130 regular and 185 full art are other artists' Giratinas; his is the one the market chose.

The asymmetric bet

Nine months ago this card cost less than half as much: Card Collective's November 2025 profile had this around $325 raw and $800 to $900 gem after three years of steady, catalyst-free growth. Nine months later PriceCharting reads $778 raw and $3,439 gem. The gem quadrupled; the census barely moved (291 grades added last period). When price outruns pop that hard, the market is repricing the difficulty, not the supply.

The submit decision

Only after the angled light test, and only understanding that the modal outcome is the 9, which returns barely more than raw after the fee. The buy side is cleaner: a 40.6 percent gem rate with 9s outnumbering 10s is real top-grade pressure, closer kin to the vintage math in our low pop Pokemon cards guide than to the gem floods of its era. Watch this row move week to week in the BetterPop gallery.

Sources

• PSA population via the GemRate pull of August 13, 2026; figures refresh with each site build
• PriceCharting: Giratina V #186, read August 15, 2026
• Card Collective profile, November 13, 2025 (price trajectory)
• Bulbapedia print tables (Lost Origin, Lost Abyss); artist credit verified on the card scan; sibling gem rates from the same census pull