Shadowless Charizard pop report: 58 tens, and that is the whole story

Published August 15, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is August 13, 2026

Out of 14,766 Shadowless Charizards graded in PSA's history, 58 have come back Gem Mint 10. Not fifty eight hundred. Fifty eight. That is a 0.39 percent gem rate, the worst of the three English Base Set prints, and it is the entire reason this stamp-free middle child outprices cards with a hundred times its fame at the top grade.

Where all those submissions ended up

The August 13, 2026 census: 14,766 graded, 58 tens, 854 nines, 1,527 eights, 264 Authentic. Around 84 percent of every submission lands at PSA 7 or below. The pop added 211 grades last period, so a quarter century in, copies are still crawling out of closets and into submission boxes. The 10 column barely notices.

For the family context: the unlimited print runs 104,121 grades for 488 tens (0.47 percent), and the stamped 1st Edition gems at about five times the Shadowless rate. Yes, the print famous for scarcity gems easiest of the three. More on that inversion below.

What does shadowless even mean?

The earliest Base Set sheets had no drop shadow along the right edge of the artwork window. Per CGC's variant documentation, shadowless sheets ran through the second limited print run before the shadow was added for unlimited. A Shadowless card is that early layout without the 1st Edition stamp; a 1st Edition card is the same shadowless plate with the stamp. The scan on this page shows the layout, stamp included, which makes it a decent identification reference: cover the stamp with your thumb and you are looking at a Shadowless.

The artwork under all three prints is the same Mitsuhiro Arita painting, three years older than the English card itself; it debuted on Japan's Expansion Pack in October 1996. Arita's fuller story is in our 1st Edition Charizard pop report, since that is the print the record sales chase.

Why does it gem five times less often than 1st Edition?

The factory treated both prints identically: same 1999 WotC holofoil that scratched in the shrink wrap, same print lines, same sheet cuts drifting outside PSA's roughly 55/45 centering window. What differed is what happened after the packs opened. The community account, and it is an account rather than a documented study, is that 1st Edition product was recognized and hoarded almost immediately, while stamp-free shadowless copies looked ordinary and got played. Whatever the mechanism, the output gap is measured, not guessed: 0.39 percent here against 2.2 percent on the stamped print.

The ladder from raw to ten

That raw line buys a played copy; recent dated solds ran $895 to roughly $1,000 in early August 2026 for unremarkable examples. A copy with a genuine shot at the 58 club looks nothing like $988, and the market knows it, which is why PSA 7s sell for around $3,000 and PSA 8s for $5,400 and up. The ceiling is real: a PSA 10 took $45,322 at Goldin on February 23, 2025, down from the $75,600 eBay peak of February 2021. And the fee is Super Express because even the modest outcomes on this card blow past the cheaper tiers' insured maximums.

So what do you do with one?

Almost certainly not for the 10. Fifty eight tens in 26 years is not a target, it is a lottery jackpot with a 0.39 percent ticket. The submission case here is the 8 and 9 lines, which clear the fee comfortably on any honest copy, and the identification case is everything: the difference between shadowless and unlimited is one drop shadow and about a 10x price ladder. This card is the textbook example of the first pattern in our guide to low pop Pokemon cards: submitted constantly, refuses to gem. Its opposite, a card that gems seven times out of ten and still holds a premium, is the moonbreon pop report. Both rows, and the ladder between them, sort live in the BetterPop gallery.

Sources

• PSA population via the GemRate pull of August 13, 2026; figures refresh with each site build
• PriceCharting: Charizard [Shadowless] #4 and its dated solds, read August 15, 2026; Goldin sale of February 23, 2025
• CGC: Pokemon Base Set variants (shadowless print run documentation)
• PSA grading standards (Gem Mint 10 centering tolerance)
• Artist credit verified on the card scan; artwork history via Bulbapedia's Expansion Pack print table