Mega Evolution booster box topper Bulbasaur pop report: the same card, printed twice

Published September 30, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is September 20, 2026

Pokemon printed this Bulbasaur twice in one set, from one illustration, in one year. One print gems six times in ten. At the September 18, 2026 pull the Mega Evolution booster box topper Bulbasaur pop report reads 1,772 Gem Mint 10s from 24,632 submissions, a 7.2 percent gem rate, with 52.01 percent stopping at a 9 and 33.47 percent at an 8.

Nothing is wrong with the artwork, the set, or the year.

The Mega Evolution booster box topper Bulbasaur pop report, next to its own twin

Only 7.33 percent of the census lands below an 8, and that figure rules out the obvious answer. These cards are not arriving damaged. They are arriving intact and failing anyway.

Bulbasaur 133/132 also exists as an ordinary Illustration Rare you pull from a pack, which makes it about as clean a control as this hobby offers. Same art, same number, same set, same months on the shelf. At the same pull that version holds 13,049 Gem Mint 10s from 21,543 submissions, 60.57 percent, with 3.70 percent at an 8.

That is 53.38 points between two printings of one card. Across all 44 English pairs where a set numbers two versions of the same card and both have passed 5,000 grades, nothing else is close. Second place is the Surging Sparks promo #159 at 23.11 points, so this pair is more than double the widest gap anyone else manages.

The gap is not an artifact of an old number

A lifetime gem rate can be a fossil, so both prints were measured again over one recent window. Between the August 13 and September 18 pulls PSA returned 1,768 fresh copies of the topper and gave 92 of them a 10, a 5.20 percent rate. Over the identical window the pack print returned 1,391 copies and gemmed 920, or 66.14 percent.

The live gap is 60.94 points, wider than the lifetime gap. Whatever this is, it has not stopped. PSA has taken 1,533 more copies since, against a thirty day trend of -2%.

The set has already proved it can print this card

Mega Evolution is not a badly made expansion. Of its 52 English rows past 1,000 grades the median gem rate is 62.05 percent, and all 22 of its Illustration Rares land between 60.57 and 70.85. Among the 87 English Illustration Rare rows past 5,000 grades, where the median is 30.17 percent, four of the six best gemming cards in the tier come from this set.

Against that, the box topper is last of all 52, with nothing beneath it. The next weakest row is Mega Gardevoir EX #187 at 21.97 percent, three times its rate, and the Phantasmal Flames Mega Charizard X ex already found that whole Mega Hyper Rare tier sitting low. The topper gems worse than any of them.

Past the set it holds the same position. At 7.2 percent it is the worst gem rate of any English card printed in 2022 or later, whether the volume cut falls at 20,000 grades, 10,000 or 5,000.

Intact, and still not a 10

12,810 copies at a 9 and 8,245 at an 8 put 85.48 percent of this census on two grades, and no English row past 20,000 submissions concentrates more into a pair. Only three rows send a bigger share to an 8, and all three are cards the years chewed on: the Celebrations Pikachu, the Celebrations Greninja Gold Star and the XY Evolutions Charizard each drop 17 to 25 percent of their census below an 8, against 7.33 percent here.

So the failure is a measurement rather than an injury. PSA's published standard for a Gem Mint 10 asks that the image sit within roughly 55/45 on the front, a gate an entire print run can miss together without one copy being harmed. Which measurement is catching these, PSA does not say, and no population count can see it. What the count does establish is that the cause was already there when the box was sealed. For what a census can and cannot tell you, start with how these counts get assembled.

Journey Together ran the same experiment and got the opposite answer

Blaming the format is tempting, since a box topper travels loose in the carton while its pack sibling rides inside sealed foil. Tempting, and wrong.

Exactly one other English card ships as an Enhanced Booster Box Topper: N's Reshiram #167 from Journey Together, also a stamped illustration rare style promo, also loose in a booster box. It gems 32.78 percent on 22,230 grades against 26.27 percent on 19,387 for its own pack printed Illustration Rare. That topper is the better of its pair by 6.51 points, tenth on the same list of 44 and pointing the other way.

Same format, same carton, reversed outcome. The stamp does not settle it either, since the two Ascended Heroes N's Zekrom prints showed stamping cutting both ways across five pairs. Whatever went wrong belongs to this run of this card, and the general theory dies on its only other test case.

The name in the corner is mashu

The credit reads Illus. mashu in lowercase, beside a regulation mark I, the MEG EN set code, 133/132 and a 2025 copyright. A pale green Bulbasaur leaps through ribbons of pink and black, vines trailing behind it. Pokemon's own card API carries no artist field for this card, so the card face is the only place that name exists.

Seventy nine dollars, aimed at a nineteen dollar card

PSA's Standard tier runs $59.99 for an estimated 90 to 100 business days at a $1,000 maximum insured value, read off psacard.com/pricing on September 30, 2026, with the Value services still paused. Add a $19.11 card and a submission costs $79.10, most of it fee.

Take 15 percent off every sale for marketplace fees and for posting a slab, and a Gem Mint 10 returns $603.50, a 9 returns $25.50, an 8 returns $16.71. Weight those by the grades this card hands back and a submission returns $63.36, a loss of $15.74, or 19.9 percent. Breakeven wants 9.90 percent. The card runs 7.2 percent lifetime and 5.20 percent across that August to September window, missing from both directions and by more on the fresher number.

The two ends carry the whole trade. Hit the 10 and $79.10 becomes $603.50, a gain of 663 percent. Land the modal grade, which happens 52.01 percent of the time, and $79.10 comes home as a $25.50 slab. One submission in fourteen has to pay for the other thirteen, and the arithmetic says thirteen is slightly too many. Buying cheaper will not rescue it, since breakeven arrives at $3.37 while the softest raw print on PriceCharting's tape since July is $12.50.

Buy the finished one

The market has already run this calculation and put the answer in a single grade. The two prints sit 4 percent apart raw, at $19.11 and $18.35, and 7 percent apart at PSA 9, at $31.70 and $29.63. Their PSA 10s sit at $700.00 and $110.00. The only thing between them is how often the grade happens.

If a topper came out of your Enhanced Booster Box, sleeve it and enjoy the art, because the likeliest return on $79.10 is a $30 slab. If you want the Gem Mint 10, buy one near $700, where the thirteen failed submissions behind it are someone else's sunk cost. To judge whether a thin PSA 10 count is real scarcity, read when a low population actually counts, and to watch both Bulbasaur rows side by side, open the BetterPop gallery.

Sources

• GemRate PSA population data via the BetterPop dataset, September 18, 2026 row pull. The 44 print pair cohort, the 53.38 and 60.94 point gaps, the 52 row Mega Evolution set figures, the 87 row Illustration Rare tier, the 2022 and later ranking at three volume cuts, and the 85.48 percent two grade share were computed across all 110,641 rows on September 30, 2026. The August to September window was hand differenced against the dated August 13 snapshot.
• PriceCharting, Bulbasaur [Stamped] #133 Pokemon Mega Evolution and Bulbasaur #133, price tables, monthly series and sold tape read September 30, 2026. All six monthly series were checked against the live table and read in dollars. The PSA 10 median uses 30 rows and the PSA 9 median 23 titled PSA rows, after dropping three TAG 9, three CGC 9 and one ACE 9 slab; the raw figure is the median of 30 TCGplayer Near Mint stamped sales and matches the live Ungraded column.
• Pokemon.com, Mega Evolution product showcase, read September 30, 2026, for the September 26, 2025 release and for the Enhanced Booster Display Box holding 36 packs plus a stamped illustration rare style promo card featuring Bulbasaur.
• PSA, grading service pricing and grading standards, both read September 30, 2026, for the Standard tier and for the Gem Mint 10 centering tolerance.
• Illustrator credit, HP, attack text, regulation mark, set code and copyright line read from the card face of MEG EN 133/132.