Shining Fates Charizard VMAX pop report: the card that gems, and still loses

Published September 19, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is September 17, 2026

Three out of every four copies mailed to PSA come back a Gem Mint 10, and submitting one still loses money. At the September 17, 2026 pull the Shining Fates Charizard VMAX pop report puts SV107 at 36,598 tens from 48,978 submissions, a 74.7 percent gem rate that no other English card with a census this size can match. The arithmetic underneath it wants a gem rate of 85.4 percent.

Why the Shining Fates Charizard VMAX pop report reads like a win

9,538 copies stopped at a PSA 9, which is 19.47 percent of everything ever sent. Another 1,743 came back an 8 and 1,097 landed below that, so only 5.80 percent of this census failed to reach a 9. Thirty nine English cards in the dataset have passed 40,000 grades, and ranked by gem rate this one sits first, 12.88 points clear of the Celebrations Birthday Pikachu behind it.

The recent window says the same thing. GemRate's thirty day gem rate on this row is 67.0 percent, which is also the highest in that group of thirty nine, so the lead is not an old census flattering itself.

Worth saying plainly, because it cuts the other way: 67.0 is well under the lifetime 74.7. Only three of the thirty nine rows are currently running above their lifetime rate, and this card's 7.72 point drop is the exact median of the cohort. The slide belongs to everybody. The level is what belongs to the card.

Not even the best card in its own subset

Shining Fates carries a 122 card Shiny Vault, and the Vault grades better than the set it came in. Pooled across every English row, the Vault returns 69.76 percent Gem Mint against 56.09 percent for the main set, on 86,513 grades and 40,699 grades respectively.

Inside that Vault the Charizard is unremarkable. Ten Shiny Vault rows have cleared 1,000 grades, and four of them gem better: Lapras VMAX SV111 at 77.82 percent, Ditto VMAX SV119 at 75.87, Toxtricity VMAX SV113 at 75.14 and Eternatus VMAX SV122 at 74.95. Whatever makes these cards easy to grade is not doing anything special for the Charizard.

What the Charizard has is demand. SV111 has been graded 2,610 times. This one has been graded 48,978 times, eighteen times more often, on a subset where every card came out of the same packs.

Hold the Pokemon still and the same pattern holds. Four English prints named Charizard VMAX have passed 3,000 grades. The three that came out of booster packs finish within 5.24 points of each other, SV107 at 74.7, Darkness Ablaze 020 at 72.06 and the Champion's Path secret 074 at 69.48. The fourth, the promo out of the Sword and Shield Ultra-Premium Collection, gems 21.36 percent.

What the publisher actually called them

The Pokemon Company International announced the set on February 19, 2021, and described it in its own media alert as over 100 Shiny Pokemon on beautiful etched cards, including nine Shiny Pokemon V and seven Shiny Pokemon VMAX. Etched is the publisher's word, not a collector's.

It is also a word that explains less than it looks like it should. The etched Charizard VSTAR from the 2022 Ultra-Premium Collection gems 15.35 percent. Same treatment by name, a sixty point gap in outcome. Something about how these particular sheets were cut and finished seems to be doing the work, and the census cannot see far enough into the factory to say what.

The studio that also drew the Mew

The credit line reads Illus. aky CG Works. The shiny Charizard is black and violet rather than orange, rearing up through a wall of flame with white sparkles scattered across the frame, and the art runs to all four edges. The same studio drew the hyper rare Mew ex inside Scarlet and Violet 151, card 205, which is a useful reminder that a credit here is a company rather than a person.

The premium the market never paid

A PSA 10 of this card sold for $1,416 in March 2021, its first month on the shelf. It bottomed at $151.97 in May 2024 and thirty sales since September 8, 2026 cleared a $242.50 median, so the top grade trades 82.8 percent below where it opened. Those thirty sales spanned eleven days, which is what a population of 36,598 does to liquidity.

Here is the part that matters more than the level. Take the twenty seven cards in that forty thousand grade group with a full PriceCharting ladder, and the harder a card is to gem, the more the market pays for the top grade. Rank correlation between gem rate and the PSA 10 to PSA 9 multiple comes out at minus 0.855.

This card is the extreme end of it. At PriceCharting's quoted figures on September 19, 2026, a PSA 10 fetches 1.84 times a Grade 9, the narrowest multiple of all twenty seven. The XY Evolutions Charizard, which gems 1.12 percent of the time, pays 40.15 times. The relationship is a tendency rather than a rule, and the 1999 Base Set holos are the ones that break it, because their PSA 9s are scarce and expensive in their own right.

Why the best odds still lose money

One line above needs a caveat. The raw figure is PriceCharting's quoted ungraded value as of the most recent data pull, and on September 19 that quote read $125.00 while fifty nine actual sales between July 23 and September 14 cleared a $129.99 median. The quote had been trailing its own tape and moved about 25 percent in five days, so treat the margin shown as the optimistic version.

Run it at the tape instead. PSA opened a service level called Standard on September 14, 2026, at $59.99 a card, capped at $1,000 of insured value and estimated at 90 to 100 business days, and a PSA 10 here sits comfortably under that ceiling. Card plus fee is $189.98. Selling a slab on eBay with postage costs somewhere near 15 percent, so a Gem Mint 10 at $242.50 nets about $206.

That is the ceiling. A guaranteed 10, no risk at all, clears $16.14.

Weight all four outcomes by the census and a submission returns about $178 against $190 of cost, a 6.2 percent loss, and at the 67.0 percent recent rate it loses 10.7 percent. Breakeven wants 85.4 percent. The best grading odds in the entire cohort come up 10.7 points short, and the reason is the number in the section above: when almost everyone can hit a 10, a 10 stops being worth much more than a 9.

Own one without making one

If a copy is sitting in a binder, leave it there or sell it raw. A PSA 9 is the second most likely outcome at nearly one in five, and a 9 returns roughly $97 net against $190 of card and fee, which is a real loss on a card you could have sold intact for $130.

If what you want is the slab, buy the slab. Finished PSA 10s change hands most weeks near $242 and arrive without five months of waiting, and at a 1.84 multiple over the 9 you are paying about as little for a top grade as this hobby asks anywhere. That is the whole trade here, and it is a decent one.

Reading a census next to a price is the habit that makes the difference, which is what our guide to population reports and what they actually measure is for. Compare this row against its own subset in the BetterPop gallery, or start from the cards where PSA 10s are genuinely scarce if scarcity is the point.

Sources

• PSA population via the GemRate pull of September 17, 2026; every token above refreshes with each site build. The 19.47, 3.56 and 5.80 percent grade shares, the 67.0 percent thirty day gem rate, the thirty nine card English 40,000 grade cohort and its median trailing gap, the Shiny Vault and main set pooled rates, the ten Shiny Vault rows past 1,000 grades, the four Charizard VMAX prints and the minus 0.855 rank correlation across twenty seven priced rows were all computed from that pull and the matching price layer
• The Pokemon Company International, New Pokemon Trading Card Game: Shining Fates Expansion Released, media alert dated February 19, 2021, read September 19, 2026, for the release date and the etched cards description
• PriceCharting: Charizard VMAX #SV107 Pokemon Shining Fates, price table, sold tape and monthly history read September 19, 2026. Units on the monthly series were confirmed as dollars by checking the last point of all six grade series against the live price table on the same page, which matched to the cent. One $8.65 row was dropped from the ungraded tape before taking its median
• PSA service levels, fees and turnaround, read September 19, 2026, for the $59.99 Standard fee, the $1,000 maximum insured value, the 90 to 100 business day estimate and the continued pause on Value services
• Illustrator credit, card number and copyright year confirmed on the card scan itself. The aky CG Works credit on 151 number 205 read from the Pokemon TCG card database, September 19, 2026