Phantasmal Flames Mega Charizard X ex pop report: the nine loses money

Published September 17, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is September 12, 2026

A PSA 9 of this card sells for less than an ungraded one. On PriceCharting's tape, read September 17, 2026, twenty eight titled PSA 9 sales cleared a $700.00 median while fifty nine raw copies cleared $770.00. Which is the odd thing about the Phantasmal Flames Mega Charizard X ex pop report, because the card grades well: at the September 12, 2026 pull it holds 31,649 Gem Mint 10s from 52,980 submissions, a 59.7 percent gem rate.

Six in ten. On a Charizard.

Fifty thousand submissions, and where they landed

52,980 graded. 31,649 tens, 18,081 nines, 2,492 eights, 8 Authentic and 750 at PSA 7 or lower, with 3,530 more returned in the last reporting period against a 30 day trend of -21%.

Nine English Special Illustration Rares have passed 40,000 grades. Eight of them gem between 22.44 and 40.12 percent, a group that includes the 151 Charizard ex at 27.40 percent on 104,235 submissions and the Obsidian Flames Charizard ex at 22.44 on 57,543. This is the ninth, and the fifth largest census of the lot.

Nothing here fails loudly, and that matters for what follows. 2,492 copies stopped at an 8 and only 750 of 52,980 came back a 7 or worse, so 6.13 percent of everything submitted landed at an 8 or below. Almost nothing arrives damaged. It either measures inside tolerance or it stops one rung short.

Four prints, and the gold one is a trap

Phantasmal Flames printed Mega Charizard X ex four times in English, all of them 360 HP Stage 2 cards carrying the same Inferno X attack. Three behave: at the same pull the Double Rare base card gems 46.56 percent on 15,330 grades and the Ultra Rare 57.27 percent on 36,133.

The fourth is card 130, the Mega Hyper Rare, and it gems 10.22 percent on 18,877 grades.

It fails at both doors, which is unusual. Of those submissions 10,575 stopped at a 9, or 56.02 percent of the census against 34.13 percent here, and another 6,372 landed at an 8 or below, 33.76 percent against the 6.13 above. More stop short and far more arrive hurt, on a card that came out of the same booster packs in the same weeks.

The tier agrees. Seven English Mega Hyper Rares now carry at least 300 grades each, spread across Phantasmal Flames, Mega Evolution, Ascended Heroes, Perfect Order and Chaos Rising, and not one clears 30.21 percent. Card 130 is both the biggest census in that group and the worst rate in it. The physical difference is easy to see and harder to prove: card 125 has a silver frame on all four edges, while 130 is gold from corner to corner with no frame at all, so it carries nothing to absorb a nick or disguise a fraction of misalignment. That is the reason collectors who submit these in volume tend to give, and a population count cannot confirm it.

Why the Phantasmal Flames Mega Charizard X ex pop report flatters this card

Line up every English Charizard Special Illustration Rare by year and the gem rate climbs the whole way: 27.40 percent for the 151 print in 2023, 22.44 for the Obsidian Flames print that same year, 40.12 on 40,970 grades for Paldean Fates in 2024, and 59.7 for this one in 2025. It reads like a card that got easier to grade.

It is not a card. It is a calendar.

Take the median gem rate of this rarity in each English expansion, counting rows past 1,000 grades, and the list sorts almost cleanly by release date. Perfect Order runs 73.58 percent and Chaos Rising 71.28, with Phantasmal Flames at 64.42 and Mega Evolution at 63.48, while the 2023 sets sit thirty and forty points lower: 151 at 28.57, Obsidian Flames at 26.19. Put the card back inside its own expansion and it stops being remarkable. Phantasmal Flames has five of these, and Mega Charizard X ranks fourth, behind Mega Sharpedo ex at 64.87 percent, Mega Lopunny ex at 64.48 and Rotom ex at 64.42.

What it does own is volume. Card 125 alone holds 17.45 percent of all 303,613 English grades in the expansion, and its four prints together hold 40.62 percent.

danciao signed three cards like this

The credit on the card face reads Illus. danciao, and the Pokemon TCG API lists eight English cards under that name, starting with a Twilight Masquerade Brute Bonnet in May 2024. Three are Special Illustration Rares: the Black Bolt Zekrom ex, the Ascended Heroes Mega Gengar ex and this one, gemming 61.70, 63.50 and 59.7 percent, a band under four points wide. Tempting, and worth little, because all three sit in 2025 and 2026 sets whose whole rarity tier gems in the sixties. What the credit does settle is that the other three prints in this set are signed takuyoa, so danciao's version of this Pokemon exists nowhere else in English.

Twenty seven hundred dollars in November, eighteen fifty now

PriceCharting's monthly history, read September 17, 2026, begins in November 2025, the month the expansion launched. A PSA 10 charted $2,730.50 then, fell to $1,814.60 by December, climbed to a $2,824.50 peak in April 2026 and sits at $1,855.00, which is 34.3 percent off that high. Thirty titled PSA 10 sales between September 7 and September 14, 2026 cleared a median matching that quote to the dollar. The raw card ran $690.00 to a $573.18 December trough to a $922.20 April peak and now quotes $754.65, down 18.2 percent.

The 9 moved differently. It charted $895.00 in November 2025, two hundred dollars above the raw card, and it has printed below the raw card at each of the last three monthly points. The whole band under Gem Mint now sits beneath an ungraded copy: $660.00 at a 7, $671.00 at an 8, $695.00 at a 9, against $754.65 ungraded. Missing on this card does not merely cost the fee. It costs the card.

Where the fee lands on an eight hundred 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 17, 2026, with Priority at $79.99 for 70 to 80 days and the Value tiers still paused. A raw copy near $755 declares inside that cap, so Standard fits, and a faster tier changes none of the arithmetic below.

Take 15 percent off every sale for fees and slab shipping. Against $829.99 of cost a guaranteed ten returns $1,576.75, up 90.0 percent. Weight the payouts by the grades this census actually hands back and that settles at $1,179.83, a profit of $349.84 a card, or 42.1 percent. Breakeven sits at 24.25 percent against a 59.7 percent lifetime rate, so the trade clears by roughly thirty five points, and the trailing thirty day rate of 59.0 percent barely touches it at 41.3 percent. Only two of the 38 English cards past 40,000 grades are grading above their lifetime rate at this pull, the Oricorio ex promo and the Mega Charizard X ex promo, both out of the same era as this card. Of every row in that group whose lifetime rate clears 10 percent, nothing else is holding this close.

So the odds are good and the stake is the problem. The 34.13 percent that come back a 9 return $595.00 against $829.99 spent, which is $234.99 gone on one card, and nothing about a nine is visible beforehand. Card 130 makes the point from the far side: raw at $253.02 with a $2,344.98 ten, its breakeven is 4.69 percent against a 10.22 rate, so a card that gems once in ten also clears. Nine failures priced at roughly the raw card get paid for by one ten worth nine times it. A ten on card 125 is worth 2.46 times a raw copy; a ten on card 130 is worth 9.27 times one. The market has read both pop reports.

Price the nine before you mail it

Decide what you would take for a 9 on this card today and check it against what you paid, because that number settles a third of these submissions and the gem rate settles the rest. Buy near the $600.00 low on that sold tape rather than the $1,050.00 high and the same envelope becomes a different trade.

For what a count this size can and cannot say about the copy in your hand, start with our guide to reading a population report. To put all four Phantasmal Flames Mega Charizard X prints side by side with live numbers, open the BetterPop gallery.

Sources

• PSA population via the GemRate pull of September 12, 2026; every figure in the data blocks above refreshes with each site build
• The nine Special Illustration Rares past 40,000 grades and their 22.44 to 40.12 band, the four Phantasmal Flames prints of this card, the seven English Mega Hyper Rare rows and their 30.21 percent ceiling, the expansion medians by release year, the five Phantasmal Flames rows in this rarity, the 303,613 expansion total and the 40.62 and 17.45 percent shares were computed from that pull; the trailing thirty day rates and the 38 card comparison come from the September 14, 2026 pull held beside it
• PriceCharting: Mega Charizard X ex #125, Pokemon Phantasmal Flames, price table, dated sold tape and monthly history read September 17, 2026, with the card 130 quotes read off the matching page the same day. Medians use titled PSA rows only: two CGC 9 sales were dropped from the grade 9 block and one listing naming a PSA 8 was dropped from the ungraded block
• PSA pricing, read September 17, 2026, giving Standard at $59.99 for 90 to 100 business days and a $1,000 maximum insured value, Priority at $79.99 for 70 to 80 days, and the continuing Value pause
• The Pokemon Company International media alert of September 3, 2025, for the November 14, 2025 launch, the five Special Illustration Rare cards in the expansion, and the sale of the set in booster packs as well as boxes
• The danciao credit, the 360 HP, the Inferno X attack and the PFL EN 125/094 card number read off the card face, along with the takuyoa credit and the gold printing on card 130; the catalogue of eight English cards from the Pokemon TCG API artist records, read September 17, 2026