Phantasmal Flames Meowth pop report: the census sorts by price

Published November 4, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is October 23, 2026

Rank the thirteen illustration rares in Phantasmal Flames by what a raw copy costs, then rank the same thirteen by how many have been mailed to PSA. The top three arrive in the same order both times.

Meowth 106/094 is first on both lists. The Phantasmal Flames Meowth pop report puts the card at a 48.1 percent gem rate, twelfth best of the thirteen, so whatever the queue was sorting on, it was not the odds.

Thirteen rows inside seven points, and one of them took a third of the pile

33,278 submissions, 16,023 Gem Mint 10s, 13,064 nines and 3,347 eights, with 838 copies landing below that. PSA added 3,391 grades last period on a +12% thirty day trend. The English set went on sale November 14, 2025.

Bulbapedia's expansion page says Phantasmal Flames shipped thirteen illustration rare Pokemon, and the dataset carries exactly thirteen rows at that rarity, so the group being counted is the group the set printed. Measured inside the same pull as the figures above, those thirteen pool to 49.76 percent on 106,657 grades, and the individual rates run from 44.91 percent on the Yamper at 099 to 52.35 on the Paldean Wooper at 102. Meowth lands twelfth in that line. It also holds 31.2 percent of every grade in the tier, 1.68 times the Piplup at 098 behind it, and 10.42 percent of all 319,430 grades in the set. Only two prints anywhere in Phantasmal Flames have taken more, and both of them are Mega Charizard X ex.

So why this Meowth, out of thirteen cards separated by seven points?

The census is a price list wearing a pop report

Here is the tier by TCGplayer market price on November 4, 2026: Meowth at $14.43, Piplup at $10.96, Wigglytuff at $4.86, then nine cards packed between $3.63 and $1.57. Here is the same tier by submissions: Meowth at 33,278, Piplup at 19,822, Wigglytuff at 9,943, then everyone else. PriceCharting's ungraded column, read the same morning, agrees on that top three and on its order at $13.68, $10.75 and $5.69.

Put a number on the agreement. Rank the thirteen by price against rank by census and the two orderings line up at a Spearman rho of 0.846. Swap price for gem rate and the same comparison collapses to 0.137, which is the statistical version of a shrug.

Two more sets in the Mega Evolution block repeat it. Perfect Order's eleven illustration rares read 0.900 on price against census and minus 0.255 on gem rate against census; Chaos Rising's eleven read 0.900 and 0.109. In all three sets the dearest card in the tier is also the most submitted one, and in two of the three it sits below its own tier's median gem rate. The Perfect Order Clefairy census noticed that shape inside one set. Across three sets the ranks hold it up.

Causation stays murkier than the measurement. A card graded in volume picks up price support from its own graded market, so the two figures feed each other, and these are prices from one day in November against a census that took a year to fill. What the ranks do rule out is the flattering story, that submitters read pop reports and pick the cards most likely to come back a 10. Thirteen rows, and the gem rate ordering carries almost no information about the volume ordering.

A Japanese deck product had this drawing a year earlier

Uninori signed the illustration, and Bulbapedia files the card under its original text, the Shrouded Fable Meowth at 048/064 that sui drew. Follow that entry and the supply history falls out: the Phantasmal Flames print is a reprint of Japanese SV-P promotional card 192, a Full Art Meowth that shipped inside the Generations Start Deck Special Battle Set from November 22, 2024. Phantasmal Flames is the first English product anyone can open and find it in, which is a reasonable reason for it to lead its tier on price.

That Japanese promo sits in the data as well. It reads 17,798 grades at 81.67 percent against the English print's 48.1 percent, the same drawing reaching PSA in two very different conditions. The Ascended Heroes Mega Gengar ex census measured a 21 point version of that same gap. This one runs wider, and a card handed out one per deck product rather than pulled from a pack is only part of why.

The illustrator's first published Pokemon card was the Temporal Forces Grotle at 011 in 2024, and Uninori had been entering Pokemon's TCG illustration contests as early as 2018. A Pokemon.com piece on that year's artist debuts described the style as evoking the manga and anime art of the 1990s. Bulbapedia's trivia supplies the setting: the houses and flowerbeds behind the Meowth are Cerulean City.

Sixty dollars chasing a ninety seven dollar card

Thirty PSA titled sales of the 10 cleared between October 30 and November 4, 2026 at a $97.50 median. Twenty three PSA 9 sales from October 28 to November 4 medianed $30.00, and twenty two PSA 8 sales from September 29 to October 31 medianed $22.75, all three taken after dropping the CGC, TAG and ACE rows mixed into the same listing titles. PriceCharting's algorithmic PSA 10 column reads $99.98 against that $97.50 tape.

Run the whole census at those prices. The ladder sits at 48.19 percent tens, 39.29 percent nines, 10.07 percent eights and 2.45 percent at a 7 or lower, which returns $61.47 of expected card against $76.18 of raw copy plus fee. A loss near $15 before any selling fee, and nearer $24 once the usual 15 percent comes off. A hit does pay, at $97.50 gross against $76.18 spent. The gem rate that would make an average submission break even, with misses landing on the $30.00 nine, is 68.4 percent gross and 88.3 percent after fees, and the best card in this tier is the Paldean Wooper at 52.35.

PSA Standard was $59.99 at a $1,000 maximum insured value and 70 to 80 business days when psacard.com was read on November 4, 2026, with Priority at $79.99 and 50 to 60 days and Value still paused. Seventy to eighty business days of waiting on a card whose raw tape has printed a lower monthly median every month since June is the part that compounds against you.

One figure in the table is behind the prose. It takes PriceCharting's ungraded column at $16.19 from the site's November 4 price pull, while a direct read of that same column hours later returned $13.68 and thirty raw sales between November 1 and 4 medianed $12.88. A cheaper raw copy improves the margin by about three dollars and leaves the conclusion where it was.

Buy the one somebody else already paid for

The graded market finished thirty of these tens in the six days to November 4 at a $97.50 median, every one of them already through the fee and the queue. Paying that beats joining it at a 48.1 percent hit rate. For a copy you are grading anyway, this is a borderless print inside a thin silver frame, so centering gets judged against that frame line rather than a card border, and the four corners of the frame are where white flecking shows up first on a card this new. Check those before anything goes into an envelope. The guide to low pop cards covers what a census this size does and does not tell you, and every row quoted here stays live in the BetterPop gallery.

Sources

• Population figures: GemRate PSA population data, pull dated October 1, 2026; the tier rates, rank correlations, set shares and Japanese comparison were all computed inside that same snapshot.
• Card history, illustrators, Japanese print and the Cerulean City note: Bulbapedia, Meowth (Shrouded Fable 48), Phantasmal Flames (TCG) and Uninori, all read November 4, 2026.
• Prices: PriceCharting, Meowth #106 Pokemon Phantasmal Flames, grade columns and sold tape read November 4, 2026 and filtered to PSA titled rows. Tier market prices for all thirteen illustration rares in Phantasmal Flames, Perfect Order and Chaos Rising from TCGplayer's own product price feed, same date.
• Grading fees and turnaround: PSA pricing, read November 4, 2026. Standard $59.99 at a $1,000 maximum insured value and 70 to 80 business days, Priority $79.99 at $1,500 and 50 to 60 days, Value paused at $39.99.