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Obsidian Flames Charizard ex pop report: the worst gem rate in its whole rarity tier

Published September 2, 2026 ยท Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is August 13, 2026

Forty nine English Special Illustration Rares have passed ten thousand PSA submissions. This one finishes last. At the August 13, 2026 pull the Obsidian Flames Charizard ex pop report reads 12,843 Gem Mint 10s from 56,867 grades, a 22.6 percent gem rate.

Nobody else in the tier is down here

Special Illustration Rare is a Scarlet and Violet era rarity, and at the August 13, 2026 pull the English cards in it with ten thousand grades or more ran from 22.6 percent at the bottom to 66.99 percent at the top, held by Mega Absol ex from Mega Evolution. Forty four points of spread inside one rarity tier.

That range matters because of an argument this blog made last week. The Blastoise ex 151 pop report found all seven Scarlet and Violet 151 Special Illustration Rares landing between 26.57 and 29.90 percent despite a 7.8 times spread in submissions, and read that ceiling as a property of the print tier rather than of any card. Obsidian Flames will not cooperate. Its own six run from 22.6 percent on Charizard to 31.20 percent on Eiscue ex, out of one set and one print run. The tight 151 band was a 151 fact.

Volume does not rescue the theory either. The Charizard ex 151 census holds 102,881 grades against this card's 56,867 and gems 27.58 percent, five points better on eighty percent more submissions. Rank correlation between submission count and gem rate across the whole group: minus 0.24. Each printing gets its own row here, which is what a pop report counts and why merging them ruins the number.

Four Charizards from the same packs

Obsidian Flames printed this Charizard four times. Bulbapedia's record lists a regular print at 125/197, a full art ultra rare at 215/197, this Special Illustration Rare at 223/197, and a gold etched hyper rare at 228/197. Same Pokemon, same packs, same three years of sleeve time. At the August 13, 2026 pull their gem rates go 41.64 percent, 35.28 percent, 22.6 percent and 26.27 percent, in that print order. The plain bordered card gems nearly twice as often as the one everybody opened packs for.

It gets louder at the bottom of the census. On the regular print and the full art, roughly one submission in seven comes back PSA 8 or worse. On the Special Illustration Rare and the gold hyper rare it is closer to one in four. Whatever those two decorated prints share costs about ten points of grade distribution against a bordered sibling out of the same wrappers. No plant publishes its cut tolerances, so read that as a shape in the census and not a finding.

The copies that never reach a nine

11,664 copies have come back PSA 8 and 3,531 at PSA 7 or lower, against 56,867 total. About a quarter of everything mailed in, and the highest such share in the group.

That separates two very different failures. A card capped by centering alone piles at PSA 9 and leaves a thin tail underneath. This one has the pile, 28,819 nines, and the fat tail as well. A quarter of these arrive with something a grader does not need a ruler to see.

Then the trailing number, which is the one that should stop a submission. GemRate's thirty day gem rate for this row read 9 percent at its August 28, 2026 pull, against the 22.6 percent lifetime figure, on 744 grades returned inside that window.

Before calling that a defect, look at the neighbours. The same window took 13.5 points off the 151 Charizard's trailing rate, 12.9 off its Venusaur and 12.8 off its Blastoise, while the 2025 and 2026 cards in the tier from Mega Evolution and Destined Rivals held flat or improved. This is happening to 2023 prints as a class. The reading that fits is supply rather than standards: three years in, the copies still going to PSA are the ones nobody was in a hurry to send first.

Egawa's crystal, and the renders around it

AKIRA EGAWA drew this one, credited on the card face under the art and named as the Charizard ex illustrator in The Pokemon Company's own set preview. The other three Obsidian Flames Charizards are 5ban Graphics, the studio behind most of the era's full art renders, so the Special Illustration Rare is the only one of the four with an individual hand on it.

He put Charizard mid roar inside a shattered Terastal shell, wings breaking into faceted panels of red and green and violet, and the illustration runs to all four edges. Pokemon.com's writeup of the Scarlet and Violet redesign confirms the era swapped the old yellow border for a thin grey one on the cards that still carry a border. This print carries none, so there is nothing on it to absorb a trim that lands a millimetre off. The set arrived on August 11, 2023 built around the Terastal mechanic, and this Charizard was most of its pitch.

TwicebakedJake reviewed the set in launch week, three years before any of this census existed, and asked whether one Charizard could carry it. The submission counts answered.

Nine percent against a fifteen percent breakeven

Grading mathAmount
Raw copy (live PriceCharting ungraded)$109
PSA grading, Regular service$80
PSA 10 sale (as of September 2, 2026, PriceCharting sold tape)$741
PSA 9 sale (as of September 2, 2026, PriceCharting sold tape)$143
Margin if it gems+$551
Margin at PSA 9-$47

PSA listed Regular service at $79.99 on September 2, 2026, with a $1,500 maximum insured value and an estimated 70 to 80 business day turnaround. Value tiers are still paused, and a 10 clearing in the seven hundreds fits Regular, so that is the fee and about four calendar months is the wait.

PriceCharting's realised tape, read the same day, puts thirty PSA 10 sales between August 4 and September 1 at a $740.50 median, thirty PSA 9 sales since August 13 at $142.50, and sixty raw sales since June 18 at $109.50, all of them close to the site's own quoted values. Weight those payouts by the census distribution, take 15 percent off each for eBay fees and shipping a slab, and breakeven lands between a 14 and a 16 percent gem rate depending on what the raw copy cost you. The lifetime 22.6 percent clears that. Nine percent does not.

The nine is where it hurts. At $142.50 it does not cover the raw card and the fee, so a miss is about $47 down before eBay takes a cut and closer to $68 after, and misses are what happens to roughly half of everything submitted.

What a clean copy is worth doing

Clearing that bar pays better here than anywhere else in the tier. PriceCharting's PSA 10 at $772.50 against its Grade 9 at $142.11 on September 2, 2026 is 5.4 times, and no other card in the group reaches five. That gap is why this one keeps drawing submissions the odds do not support.

Prices have moved the other way, and helpfully. The PSA 10 sits 2.5 percent under its May 2026 high of $792.50 and is up 53 percent on the year from $504.44 last August, while raw has given back 20 percent from its own May peak of $122.15. The spread widened while the odds got worse.

So screen for the cut before anything else. With art running to the trim line, an off center copy shows as an uneven band of crystal top against bottom, and a dark full bleed face turns edge whitening into a white line nobody has to look twice for. Leave the corners until last. A copy that passes both and has never left its sleeve is a live submission at that 14 to 16 percent breakeven. One bought off eBay as a raw near mint gets planned against the 9 percent, and you find out in January.

Otherwise it is a $110 card, and the slab you want is already for sale at $772. The rest of the tier sorts by gem rate in the BetterPop gallery.

Sources

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