Sabrina's Gengar pop report: a PSA 1 sells for raw money

Published October 26, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is October 23, 2026

Twenty eight PSA 1 copies of this card changed hands between April 6 and October 18, 2026, at a $340.00 median. Raw copies on eBay across the same year cleared $338.75. A PSA 1 takes nothing off this card, which is the most useful fact in the Sabrina's Gengar pop report and the reason the rest of it reads the way it does.

Nobody is losing money by sending in a beaten copy. So nobody stops sending them.

More grades than any other card in Gym Heroes, and 34 tens

9,294 submissions, 34 Gem Mint 10s, 779 nines, 2,162 eights, and 6,299 copies finishing at PSA 7 or lower. That last figure is 67.77 percent of everything ever mailed in. PSA added 289 more last period.

Gym Heroes holds 266 rows and 154,403 grades in the October 1, 2026 data, and this one card is 6.0 percent of them. Narrow it to the fourteen unlimited holos the set printed and the split gets strange: Sabrina's Gengar is 18.4 percent of their 50,522 grades and 3.9 percent of their 869 tens. The next biggest unlimited holo census in the set belongs to Blaine's Moltres, at 5,074.

Across the whole dataset, 815 rows have taken 9,000 grades or more. Only seven of them gem worse than this one, and the company is familiar: the Neo Genesis Lugia, the Jungle Vaporeon and Kangaskhan, the Pokemon League Eevee, the Base Set 2 Charizard, the Fossil Dragonite and the Fossil Gengar.

This census does not stall at mint. It stalls at played

Sort the fourteen unlimited holos by the share that lands below an 8 and Sabrina's Gengar is first at 67.77 percent, against 51.8 percent pooled across the group. Sort them by the share that reaches a 9 and it is last at 8.4 percent, against 17.5 percent pooled. At the October 1, 2026 pull the row carried 294 copies at PSA 1, 1,146 at PSA 4 or lower, and 34 at the top.

Most hard vintage holos get to Mint and stop there. This one mostly never arrives.

Price the grades out and the behaviour stops being mysterious. On PSA titled sales through 2026 a PSA 2 medians $192.38, a 3 $265.00, a 4 $329.00, a 5 $375.00, a 6 $450.00 and a 7 $622.50. The whole bottom half of the scale trades inside the range raw copies already trade in. A Poor slab here gives back the raw price minus the fee, and that appears to be enough to keep the damaged copies flowing in. The unlimited Dark Charizard is the other census built mostly out of cards people played with, and it looks tame next to this one at 64 percent below an 8.

The stamped print is the control, and it answers the obvious objection

Look at the card and the physical explanation writes itself. Ken Sugimori put Gengar against a flat dark field with no scenery in it, so the holofoil window is one large uninterrupted surface and a scratch has no artwork detail to disappear into.

The 1st Edition print has exactly that surface, and it gems at 3.13 percent on 3,644 grades. Eight and a half times better. Only 25.0 percent of its grades land below an 8, against 67.77 percent here, and 38.7 percent of them reach a 9.

Some of that gap is just the stamp, which separates every paired Wizards print in the data and was measured across ten English sets on the Neo Genesis Lugia row at 2.1 to 4.4 times. Gym Heroes as a whole sits at 4.1. Sabrina's Gengar sits at 8.6, the widest of the fourteen pairs in its own set and well clear of second place, Lt. Surge's Magneton at 6.4. Same art, same foil, same year, same packs. What differs is who buys the copy and how carefully they look at it first.

One more date worth having. GemRate records the last Gem Mint 10 on this row as December 11, 2024. That field is live in this set rather than frozen: of the 44 Gym Heroes rows past 1,000 grades, 25 carry a 2026 date in it, including the 1st Edition Gengar at January 13, 2026. Only Blaine's Moltres, at October 15, 2024, has gone longer.

Wizards took the graveyard out

English Gym Heroes arrived August 14, 2000 as the sixth Wizards expansion, 132 cards, built by folding the Japanese Leaders' Stadium together with Challenge from the Darkness. Sabrina's Gengar came from the second of those, which had been out in Japan since June 25, 1999. The set introduced Owner's Pokemon, with the trainer's portrait tucked into the lower right corner over their Gym Badge, and dropped the Pokedex entry the Base Set frame carried.

Bulbapedia documents one change between the two releases. The Japanese card puts Gengar in a graveyard, tombstones and crosses behind it. The English card has none of that, and nothing replaced it, which is how the art window ended up as a dark rectangle with a Pokemon floating in it.

Why the fee is $79.99 and not $59.99

Standard service costs $59.99 and insures to $1,000, verified on psacard.com on October 26, 2026. The commonest outcome on this card is a PSA 8, and PSA 8s medianed $1,039.50 across fourteen sales between October 3 and October 23, 2026. The likely result clears the cheap tier's ceiling by forty dollars, so Priority at $79.99 and a $1,500 ceiling is the honest line, with 70 to 80 business days attached instead of 90 to 100.

The PSA 10 row is real money and a thin tape. Three copies sold in 2026: $13,600.00 on March 29, $23,335.00 on April 21, $29,999.99 on May 30, and nothing since. Nine sales between October 2021 and April 2024 ran $1,606.00 to $3,000.00, so the figure in the table is a two year climb rather than a steady price, and it rests on three results. The PSA 9 line is far better evidenced at thirteen sales and a $2,000.00 median between August 27 and October 14, 2026.

Those two rows describe two different people. Buying a Near Mint copy at $598 to send it in is a genuine bet, and a 6 or a 7 loses money on it. Grading the copy that has been in a binder since 2001 is barely a bet at all, because the floor under a Poor slab is the $340 the raw card was already worth. That asymmetry is the best available explanation for why 67.77 percent of this census sits below an 8.

Buy the eight, or look at the holo field before you pay anything

Want a slab rather than a lottery ticket? The PSA 8 is the card. It is the largest single grade in the census, it trades near a thousand dollars, and it is the best outcome this printing hands most submitters.

If you are sending one in, start on the yellow border rather than the holo. This card fails below an 8 far more often than it fails at the 9, and below an 8 is edge and corner territory, where a Gym Heroes border punishes you twice over: yellow shows white flecking at a glance, and the mauve card body underneath shows any nick that goes through. Sellers will tell you about the holo swirl, because 57 of the 339 copies sold in 2026 put it in the title. The pop report has no column for it. Populations this shape are worth understanding before you spend a fee on one, and a thin PSA 10 count is not the same thing as a scarce card. Every row quoted here is live in BetterPop's set browser.

Full Gym Heroes pop report

Sources

• Population figures: GemRate PSA population tracking, pulled October 1, 2026. Grade ladder, set pooling, the 815 row comparison and the last Gem Mint 10 dates computed on October 26, 2026.
• Dated sold prices by grade: PriceCharting, Sabrina's Gengar #14 Pokemon Gym Heroes, read October 26, 2026. Medians taken from PSA titled listings only, with CGC, BGS, SGC, TAG and ACE rows removed.
• Grading fees and service ceilings: psacard.com trading card grading page, read October 26, 2026. Value services paused, Standard $59.99 at a $1,000 maximum insured value, Priority $79.99 at $1,500.
• Set history, release dates, the Owner's Pokemon frame and the Japanese art difference: Bulbapedia, Gym Heroes (TCG), Gym Challenge (TCG) and Sabrina's Gengar (Gym Heroes 14), read October 26, 2026.
• Illustrator credit: the card face, confirmed against Bulbapedia's card entry.