Jungle Vaporeon pop report: the worst gem rate in the data

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

PSA has returned 35 Gem Mint tens on this card against 16,783 submissions. Nothing else in the dataset past 15,000 grades has done worse. At the October 1, 2026 pull the Jungle Vaporeon pop report sits at 0.21 percent gem, which means the unlimited Base Set Charizard, the card the hobby treats as the hard one, returns a ten more than twice as often at 0.46 percent on 106,701 grades.

417 rows have passed 15,000 grades. Sorted by gem rate, Vaporeon 12/64 is last of the 417, below Base Set 2 Charizard at 0.28 percent, Fossil Dragonite at 0.35 and the shadowless Charizard at 0.38.

One Gem Mint copy for every 480 sent in

16,783 graded. 35 tens, 964 nines, 3,317 eights, and 12,462 copies finishing at PSA 7 or lower, which is 74.25 percent of everything ever mailed in. PSA added 289 more last period on a thirty day trend of -7%.

Walk the full ladder and the shape is stranger than the headline. The commonest verdict on this card is a PSA 7, at 3,719 copies, with a PSA 6 right behind at 3,634. A census piles up where the submitted stock actually lives, and this one says the stock being mailed in is not near mint and everybody involved knows it.

These numbers cover the unlimited print only, the one with no Edition 1 stamp beside the Bubble Jet Pokemon bar. The 1st Edition Vaporeon is a separate census of 4,975 grades at 1.45 percent and the No Symbol error print a third at 1,573 and 1.14. Mixing them is the quickest way to misread a figure like this, and what a population report actually measures covers why a census counts submissions rather than surviving cards.

One more date, because it carries the section. GemRate records the last Gem Mint 10 awarded to this row on June 9, 2025. That field is not stuck: 240 of the 368 dataset rows dated 2001 or earlier with 3,000 grades or more carry a 2026 date in it, and inside Jungle the non holo rows gemmed last month, Meowth on September 30, Jigglypuff and Mankey on September 29. Of the sixteen unlimited holos, one carries a 2026 date, and it is Wigglytuff in January.

Why the Jungle Vaporeon pop report keeps growing anyway

16,783 grades makes this the most graded holo in Jungle, in any of its three prints. The next busiest is Kangaskhan 5/64 at 10,482, then Snorlax at 9,937.

So people are paying to grade the expensive ones. Except they are not. A raw unlimited Vaporeon carries a TCGplayer market price of about $31, twelfth of the sixteen holos by that measure, while Kangaskhan is the cheapest holo in the set at $18.98 and holds the second largest census. Rank the sixteen by submissions and by raw price and the two orders correlate at 0.02, which is another way of saying no relationship at all.

Rank them by submissions and by what a PSA 10 fetches instead and the correlation is 0.62. The three largest censuses, the three worst gem rates and the three dearest PSA 10 prices are the same three cards: Kangaskhan, Snorlax, Vaporeon. Not overlapping sets. The same three, three times.

Which end of that is cause is genuinely hard to call. A thin pop lifts the price of the ten, the price pulls submissions in, the submissions arrive off a 1999 supply that was handled by children, and the pop stays thin. Fossil behaves the same way, with Dragonite, Gengar and Lapras taking the top three censuses and the three worst gem rates in their own set, so this is not something peculiar to Jungle.

Wizards printed this Vaporeon twice, and only one of them gems

English Jungle landed on June 16, 1999. The Japanese set it came from held 48 cards and the English release shipped with 64, because Wizards of the Coast added flat reprints of the holo rares. Bulbapedia gives the reasoning in the company's own terms, to make the expansion larger and to stop packs from guaranteeing a holofoil card.

The practical result is a controlled experiment nobody designed. Kagemaru Himeno's Vaporeon illustration went to print twice in the same set, identical pose, identical text, identical flavour line about a tail mistaken for a mermaid's. Number 12 got the Starlight foil window. Number 28 got a flat yellow background. Same packs, same year, same shoeboxes.

Number 12 unlimited gems at 0.21 percent. Number 28 unlimited gems at 11.47 percent, 132 tens from 1,151 grades. That is a factor of 55 between two printings of one picture.

That pair on its own overstates the case, because #28 is a cheap non holo with a small census and people only bother mailing in the clean ones. The set level version survives the objection. All sixteen unlimited holos together have taken 109,500 grades for 874 tens, a pooled 0.80 percent, against 14.48 percent across 41,226 grades on the unlimited non holos. An 18 times gap, the widest of the four English Wizards sets of the era, ahead of Base Set at 14.9, Fossil at 12.0 and Team Rocket at 3.6. The Base Set version of this split, and the point where it stops explaining things, is worth reading next to it.

Himeno drew the Eeveelutions, then wrote a comic about drawing them

Kagemaru Himeno, born in Kanagawa Prefecture in 1972, illustrated all three Jungle Eeveelutions and has drawn Pokemon material since 1997, after starting in manga for Shueisha's RIBON Original in 1994. She also wrote and drew a series called How I Became a Pokemon Card, the artist documenting what making the artwork is like.

None of which the grader sees. The grader sees a dark foil field with a pale animal sitting in the middle of it, and PSA's published Gem Mint standard asking for centering inside roughly 55/45 on the front and 75/25 on the back, four sharp corners and full original gloss, on cardboard that spent its first decade in a binder.

Ninety one dollars in, sixty one dollars of expected value

The PSA 10 row is the part to read slowly. PriceCharting's own sold tape carries no unmasked Gem Mint result for this card since $1,800 on May 23, 2023, so that figure is an algorithmic estimate rather than a price anybody paid recently. The auction house rows in the same tape are real, and they sit low: a PSA 9 cleared $317.20 at Goldin on June 15, 2026, a PSA 8 cleared $120.00 at Fanatics on October 9, a PSA 7 cleared $65.00 at Fanatics on October 14.

Weight every grade by how often this card actually lands there and a 7 or better is worth about $61 on average. A raw copy plus the $59.99 Standard fee costs about $91 to put in the queue. The 51.7 percent of the census finishing at a 6 or lower would have to average $57.76 to close that gap, and heavily played copies traded between $13 and $20 through the week of October 13.

Standard also tops out at a $1,000 declared value, the honest tier for a card whose likely outcome is a 7. The outcome being chased is worth four and a half times that ceiling.

Grade the one you can defend, or sell it raw into a falling tape

Raw prices have slid all year. Near Mint copies tracked on TCGplayer went $52.99 on June 12, $45.00 on August 22, $42.99 on September 15, $39.99 on September 21 and $35.99 on October 10, so for anyone sitting on a copy they meant to send, the drift is the real cost of waiting rather than the queue.

Anything less than sharp, sell it raw. A sharp one, check the back before the front, because a 75/25 reverse is the quiet failure on vintage Wizards cards and it caps the grade however clean the foil window looks. Populations this thin also behave differently from ordinary scarcity, and every row quoted above is live in the BetterPop gallery.

Full Jungle pop report

Sources

• Population figures: GemRate PSA population tracking, pulled October 1, 2026. Comparative figures computed across the full dataset on October 17, 2026.
• Set history, print structure and the No Symbol error run: Bulbapedia, Jungle (TCG), read October 17, 2026.
• Illustrator biography: Bulbapedia, Kagemaru Himeno, read October 17, 2026. Card credits confirmed off the card faces and TCGdex.
• Prices and dated sold results: PriceCharting, Vaporeon #12 Pokemon Jungle, read October 17, 2026.
• Grading fees and Gem Mint standards: psacard.com, read October 17, 2026. Value service paused, Standard $59.99 at a $1,000 maximum insured value.