Mega Lucario ex Premium Poster Collection pop report: the best of the ten

Published November 10, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is October 23, 2026

This card was never inside a booster pack, and it gems better than any of the other nine English cards that share its rarity treatment. At the October 1, 2026 pull the Mega Lucario ex Premium Poster Collection pop report reads 16,264 Gem Mint 10s from 21,125 submissions on MEP Promo 033, a 77.0 percent gem rate.

Ascended Heroes put seven Mega attack rares in its packs. Japan had printed ten, and the three left over went out one to a box instead.

The Mega Lucario ex Premium Poster Collection pop report, grade by grade

21,125 graded. 16,264 tens, 4,546 nines, 225 eights and 89 copies at a 7 or lower, with 8,112 more returned in the last reporting period against a 30 day trend of +30%. That last figure is 38.4 percent of the entire census arriving at once.

Only 0.42 percent of the count sits below an 8. The box reached shelves on March 20, 2026, so this census is not a record of what happens to a card over years in a binder. It is close to a direct readout of what the press handed over.

Seven on the checklist, ten in the wild

Mega attack rare arrived in Japan first, inside the MEGA Dream ex subset, where ten cards carried it at numbers 223 through 232. Bulbapedia's Ascended Heroes description counts seven of them in the English set, and the dataset finds exactly seven rows to match it, 265 through 271.

The missing three are Mega Charizard X ex, Mega Gardevoir ex and Mega Lucario ex. They were never cut. They lost the rarity symbol, picked up a black star, and went out one to a box: Charizard X in the Mega Charizard X ex Ultra-Premium Collection on November 14, 2025, then Gardevoir and Lucario in the two Ascended Heroes Premium Poster Collections on March 20, 2026. Each poster box held one promo, ten Ascended Heroes packs, a code card and a double sided poster measuring 26.875 by 39 inches with that same promo blown up across it.

So the English tier is seven cards on the checklist and ten in the wild. The seven have already been measured against their Japanese twins. This is what the other three did.

The three that left the packs did not agree

First, fourth and last. The seven that stayed in the packs finish inside 8.66 points of each other. Add the three that left and the English group spreads across 28.71 points. In Japan, where all ten were pulled from packs, the same ten illustrations finish inside 1.90 points, 91.08 to 92.98, on censuses running from 15,014 to 84,075.

That is not a small numbers effect, and the check runs the wrong way for one. The narrow group holds the thinnest row in the comparison at 3,027 grades, while the wide group's smallest row carries 15,552. Sample size pushes bands apart, not together, so if this were noise the seven would be the scattered ones.

It is not submission volume either. Rank the seven by census and by gem rate and the two orders correlate at minus 0.357, so inside that group the more heavily graded cards come back slightly worse, not better. Census and quality are separate questions here, which is the whole reason a raw count needs reading rather than quoting.

The tidy conclusion would be that escaping the booster pack is worth points. The Charizard X print at the bottom of that table never saw a pack either, and it gems 48.3 percent across 120,829 submissions. Three cards left the packs through three different doors across two different years, and they landed at the top, in the middle and at the floor.

Which reads less like a benefit and more like the loss of a constraint. A booster pack is one process run over a whole expansion, so the seven inside it get the same sheets, the same collation and the same handling, and they finish bunched. A promo is decided product by product: its own press run, its own insert, its own buyer. The Ascended Heroes Elite Trainer Box from six weeks earlier carried a promo too, and that one gems 12.71 percent. Nobody should be surprised when three such decisions disagree.

Two boxes, one shelf date, four and a half points

Gardevoir and Lucario are the cleanest pair in the group. Same product line, same March 20 shelf date, same contents down to the pack count, sold as two boxes a buyer picked between. They land 4.56 points apart, this card at 77.0 percent against the Gardevoir's 72.4.

On 21,125 and 15,552 grades that gap is roughly ten standard errors wide, so whatever is behind it, it is not sampling. Lucario has also taken 1.36 times as many submissions, which is the part a pair of separate boxes can actually tell you, because the supply decision was made by shoppers rather than by a collation table.

One difference is visible on the cards. Lucario was rendered by 5ban Graphics and Gardevoir by Saboteri, two hands with two approaches to the same pop art layout. Whether that is the mechanism or a coincidence sitting next to it, the population count cannot say.

5ban Graphics rendered five of the seven prints

The credit on the card face reads Illus. 5ban Graphics, beside regulation mark I, the MEP EN set code, the number 033 and a black star, over a 2026 copyright line. Stage 1, 340 HP, evolves from Riolu, Aura Jab for 130 and Mega Brave for 270.

Bulbapedia lists seven prints of this card text, and 5ban took five of them: the Mega Evolution regular print, the Mega hyper rare, MEP Promo 012 out of the Mega Lucario ex Figure Collection, this promo, and the Japanese Mega attack rare it copies. The other two went out of house, the ultra rare to takuyoa and the special illustration rare to Atsushi Furusawa. 5ban is a studio building 3D renders rather than an illustrator at an easel, which is why its work shows up across a whole rarity rather than on one card.

The attack name running across the art in oversized green katakana is not a Japanese import slipping through. Pokemon swapped the alphabets on purpose for this rarity, so the English card carries Japanese attack text and the Japanese card carries English.

Sixty dollars of fee against a fifty three dollar ceiling

PSA's Standard tier costs $59.99 for an estimated 70 to 80 business days at a $1,000 maximum insured value, read off psacard.com/pricing on November 10, 2026, with the Value services still paused. Thirty titled PSA 10 sales between November 4 and November 10 cleared a $52.50 median, and 31 titled PSA 9 sales going back to September 1 cleared $21.94.

Take 15 percent off every sale for fees and for posting a slab. Weight the outcomes by the census this card actually returns and a submission is worth $38.55 against $69.58 of cost, a loss of $31.03, or 44.6 percent.

Now the line that closes the argument early. A Gem Mint 10 nets $44.62 and the Standard fee alone is $59.99, so a copy handed to you for nothing still loses $15.37 to grade. There is no gem rate that fixes that, not at 77.0 percent and not at 100.

The consolation grade is why. A 9 nets $18.65, barely a third of the fee, and 4,546 submissions have already landed there. The raw card is falling too: thirty TCGplayer Near Mint sales from June 13 to November 5 run a $12.45 median, while the ten most recent of them, September 21 onward, run $9.59.

If the poster box is still sealed

Leave it sealed, or open it for the poster and the packs and put the promo straight into a sleeve. At this fee the card cannot pay for its own grading at any outcome, and that is true of the best gemming Mega attack rare in English, which should tell you how the other nine look. If you want it in a holder, finished PSA 10s traded between $41.00 and $80.83 in the first ten days of November and somebody else has already paid for the misses. To see how a count this clean compares with a genuinely thin one, read what a small PSA 10 number actually proves, and to watch all ten of these rows move together, open BetterPop's own browser.

Sources

• GemRate PSA population data via the BetterPop dataset, October 1, 2026 row pull. The ten card Mega attack rare group, the 8.66, 28.71 and 1.90 point bands, the minus 0.357 rank correlation and the standard errors on the Lucario and Gardevoir gap were computed across all 111,891 rows on November 10, 2026.
• Bulbapedia, Mega Evolution TCG Series merchandise, read November 10, 2026, for the March 20, 2026 release and contents of both Premium Poster Collections and the November 14, 2025 Ultra-Premium Collection.
• Bulbapedia, Ascended Heroes (TCG) and MEGA Dream ex (TCG), read November 10, 2026, for the January 30, 2026 English release, the seven card rarity count, the ten Japanese Mega attack rares and the deliberate alphabet swap.
• Bulbapedia, Mega Lucario ex (Mega Evolution 77), read November 10, 2026, for the seven prints and their illustrator credits.
• Pokemon.com, Premium Poster Collection product gallery, read November 10, 2026, for the two product names and the stated contents.
• PriceCharting, Mega Lucario EX #33 Pokemon Promo, price table and sold tape read November 10, 2026. Medians use titled PSA rows only: BGS, CGC and Ace slabs were dropped from every grade block, and the raw figures come from the TCGplayer Near Mint rows rather than the Ungraded column.
• PSA, grading service pricing, read November 10, 2026.
• Illustrator credit, HP, attack text, regulation mark, set code, card number and copyright line read from the card face of MEP EN 033.