Mega Gengar ex Ascended Heroes pop report: 21 points behind its own Japanese print

Published October 2, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is September 20, 2026

Swap the language on this card and the gem rate moves twenty one points. At the September 20, 2026 pull the Mega Gengar ex Ascended Heroes pop report reads 16,894 Gem Mint 10s from 24,030 submissions, a 70.3 percent gem rate. The Japanese printing, card 230 out of the High Class Pack set that preceded it, stands at 91.12 percent on 52,128 grades at that same pull.

Same illustration. Same illustrator. Same 350 HP and the same Void Gale.

Twenty four thousand submissions, and what came back

24,030 graded. 16,894 tens, 6,415 nines, 577 eights, 2 Authentic and 142 at PSA 7 or lower, with 5,938 more returned in the last reporting period against a 30 day trend of -13%.

Those 5,938 adds are 24.71 percent of the card's entire census arriving in one reporting period, fourth among the 64 English rows past 20,000 grades at this pull. The three ahead are the Bulbasaur, Charmander and Squirtle First Partner promos, so among cards pulled from a booster pack rather than handed out, nothing in English is filling faster.

Almost none of it arrives broken. 142 copies of 24,030 came back a 7 or worse, 0.59 percent, and another 2.40 percent stopped at an 8. Hold that number. It is the one that breaks the usual explanation.

The Mega Gengar ex Ascended Heroes pop report has a twin

Mega Attack Rare is new. It debuted with this expansion on January 30, 2026, and Ascended Heroes is still the only English set that carries the rarity: seven cards, numbered 265 through 271, each a full card illustration of a Mega Evolution Pokemon ex with the card's own attack name printed across the art in oversized type.

Japan printed ten of them first, and English got seven. That leaves seven matched pairs, which is as close to a controlled test as this hobby hands out, so here they are at the September 20, 2026 pull.

Seven pairs, seven wins, no exceptions and no close calls. The whole Japanese tier sits between 91.12 and 93.06 percent across 282,150 grades; the whole English tier sits between 65.64 and 74.05 across 59,816. Run a confidence interval on all seventeen rows and the worst Japanese one still bottoms out at 90.94 while the best English one tops out at 75.67, which leaves better than fifteen points of empty space between the two languages. Nothing is overlapping here, and nothing is being rescued by sample size.

Nor is this a legacy number dragging a fresh card down. Difference the August 13, 2026 pull against this one and 55,588 of these were graded in between: the Japanese rows returned 92.70 percent on 35,125 fresh submissions, the English rows 70.61 percent on 20,463. A gap of 22.10 points, against 22.16 across the full lifetime of both tiers. The cards being mailed in last month are grading exactly like the cards mailed in first.

The damage is identical and the near misses are not

Here is where the 0.59 percent from earlier earns its keep. Across the seven English cards, the share landing at a 7 or below runs 0.49 to 0.68 percent. Across the seven Japanese ones it runs 0.17 to 0.40. Both are rounding errors. Whatever separates these two censuses, it is not that English copies show up bent, scratched or chewed, because by that measure the two piles are nearly the same pile.

The entire difference lives one rung from the top. 26.70 percent of the English Mega Gengar census stopped at a 9, and across all seven English cards the 9 column runs 23.18 to 31.04 percent. The Japanese equivalents run 5.83 to 7.50. Between three and a half and five times as many cards arrive intact, undamaged, and still measure wrong at whatever tolerance separates a 9 from a 10.

So the honest reading is narrow. Something upstream of the collector is putting English copies fractionally outside the band, most plausibly the cut and the centering, since that is what gets judged at that boundary on a card with a thin metallic frame and no white border to hide behind. A population count cannot go further. It cannot separate a factory tolerance from a submitter who screens harder before mailing. The direction is not new, and the Charizard ex 151 census pointed the same way on identical artwork. What the Mega Attack Rare tier adds is a comparison that is finally clean, seven ways over.

Three things that would have been easier answers

Not the illustrator. Three artists signed these seven: Saboteri drew Froslass, DOM drew Eelektross, Diancie and Dragonite, and Taiga Kasai drew Hawlucha, Gengar and Scrafty. Kasai's three land at 69.23, 70.30 and 74.05 percent; DOM's three at 69.04, 69.05 and 73.07. They interleave completely, and every one of them is twenty points under its own Japanese counterpart anyway.

Not the rarity being cursed. Ascended Heroes also printed two Mega Hyper Rares, and those have taken 10,873 grades for a pooled 19.95 percent, which the Phantasmal Flames census already pinned on the gold printing that runs corner to corner with no frame at all. The Mega Attack Rares came out of the same packs in the same weeks and gem three and a half times better. A rarity tier is not a verdict; a border is a mechanism.

And not this card being special. It is the biggest of the seven, holding 40.17 percent of the tier's grades and 8.91 percent of all 269,675 English grades in the expansion, yet its 20.81 point gap is only the fifth widest of the seven. Froslass has the smallest census, the worst English rate and the largest gap.

Taiga Kasai drew it twice, and the type is in the wrong alphabet

The credit on both card faces reads Illus. Taiga Kasai, and the Pokemon TCG API lists eighteen English cards under that name, starting with a Greninja promo in November 2019. Three are Mega Attack Rares, and they run consecutively: 268, 269, 270.

The two prints share one artwork, and the only thing that moves is the lettering. The English copy carries Void Gale down the left side in enormous yellow Japanese katakana. The Japanese copy carries VOID GALE across the same space in enormous yellow Latin capitals. Each print shouts the attack in the other country's alphabet, which is the visual conceit of the whole rarity and a design joke you can confirm by laying the two prints out together. The copyright lines settle the order: 2025 on the Japanese card, 2026 on the English one.

Seventy percent is not the number that decides this

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 October 2, 2026, with the Value services still paused. A raw copy near $41 declares far inside that cap, so Standard is the tier and the faster ones only subtract.

The table above is before selling costs, so take 15 percent off every sale for fees and shipping. A guaranteed ten returns $135.36 against $100.99 of cost, a gain of 34.0 percent. Weight the payouts by the grades this census actually returns and the expected value settles at $106.90, which is a profit of $5.91 a card, or 5.9 percent. Breakeven sits at 64.1 percent against a 70.3 percent lifetime rate and a 70.65 percent rate over the trailing window, so a card that gems seven times in ten clears the trade by about six points.

Six points is thin because the fee is larger than the card. $59.99 of grading is aimed at a $41 object, and there is no consolation prize: twenty nine titled PSA 9 sales between September 20 and October 1, 2026 cleared a $47.00 median while thirty raw copies over the last four days of September cleared $41.00. A nine returns six dollars more than an ungraded copy and costs sixty to obtain. Hold every price on this page still and substitute only the Japanese gem rate, and the same envelope returns $126.85 instead of $106.90. Twenty one points of centering is worth $19.95 a card.

The raw price is falling underneath all of it. TCGplayer's recorded sales run $88.48 on May 13, 2026 down to $38.75 on September 30, a drop of 56.2 percent in four and a half months. That cuts both ways, lowering the cost of a submission while warning that a $159.25 ten has room to follow the raw card down. Liquidity is not the issue, with PriceCharting counting roughly eight PSA 10 sales a day.

The finished ten undercuts the gamble

At a six point cushion and a fee that outweighs the card, submitting raw English copies is a narrow bet wearing a wide one's clothes, while a finished PSA 10 near $159 asks you to risk nothing. If what you actually want is the card in a ten, buy one. If what you want is the odds, card 230 is Kasai's identical art out of a Japanese pack, and it gems nine times in ten.

For what a count this size can and cannot tell you about the copy in your hand, start with our guide to reading a population report. To line up all seven Mega Attack Rares against their Japanese twins with live numbers, open the BetterPop gallery, and for the other half of this expansion's census see the Ascended Heroes Elite Trainer Box promo.

Sources

• PSA population via the GemRate pull of September 20, 2026; every figure in the data blocks above refreshes with each site build
• The seven matched pairs and their gaps, the Japanese and English tier bands, the 282,150 and 59,816 grade totals, the confidence intervals on all seventeen rows, the 64 English rows past 20,000 grades and this card's fourth place among them, the two Mega Hyper Rare rows at 19.95 percent, and the 269,675 expansion total were computed from that pull. The trailing window figures come from differencing the August 13, 2026 pull against it, 55,588 grades in total
• PriceCharting: Mega Gengar ex #269, Pokemon Ascended Heroes, price table, dated sold tape and sales volume read October 2, 2026. Medians use titled PSA rows only, so CGC, BGS, TAG and ACE sales were dropped from the graded blocks: PSA 10 is thirty sales from September 28 to October 1, PSA 9 is twenty nine from September 20 to October 1, and the raw median is thirty eBay sales from September 27 to September 30. The TCGplayer recorded sales run from May 13 to September 30, 2026
• PSA pricing, read October 2, 2026, giving Standard at $59.99 for 90 to 100 business days and a $1,000 maximum insured value, Priority at $79.99, Express at $199.00, and the continuing pause on Value services
• The Pokemon Company, Mega Evolution Ascended Heroes, read October 2, 2026, for the expansion name and the January 30, 2026 release date
• The seven Mega Attack Rare cards, their numbers, their illustrators and the Taiga Kasai catalogue of eighteen English cards come from the Pokemon TCG API records for set me2pt5, read October 2, 2026. The 350 HP, the Shadowy Concealment ability, the Void Gale attack, the Illus. Taiga Kasai credit, the 269/217 and 230/193 card numbers, the katakana and Latin attack lettering, the thin metallic frame and the 2026 and 2025 copyright lines were read off scans of both card faces