Snorlax 151 ETB promo pop report: the only plain card past 40,000

Published September 16, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is September 12, 2026

Thirty nine English Pokemon cards have passed 40,000 PSA grades. Thirty eight of them are a Charizard, a Pikachu, a Mew or a Mewtwo, an Eevee, one of the other Kanto starters, a Legendary, or a card carrying an ex, a V, a VMAX, a VSTAR, a GX or a Gold Star. The thirty ninth is a Basic Snorlax with 150 HP and no mechanic on it at all. At the September 12, 2026 pull the Snorlax 151 Elite Trainer Box promo pop report reads 11,586 Gem Mint 10s from 40,212 submissions, a 28.8 percent gem rate.

Nothing about the card asks for that.

Thirty eight chase cards, and this

40,212 graded. 11,586 tens, 21,432 nines, 5,064 eights, 5 Authentic and 2,125 sitting at PSA 7 or lower, with another 839 returned in the last reporting period against a 30 day trend of -25%.

Card 051 of the Scarlet and Violet Black Star Promos has an Ability called Voraciousness that recovers Leftovers from the discard pile, and an attack that hurts itself for 30. Drop its census into the 151 expansion's own table and it would rank fifth of 385 English rows, behind only the Charizard ex, Blastoise ex, Venusaur ex and Zapdos ex Special Illustration Rares and ahead of the Alakazam ex at 40,134. Those four are the cards the expansion was built to sell, led by the Charizard ex at 104,235 grades. This one came free with the box.

Where a Snorlax census comes from

Snorlax also appears inside the 151 expansion itself, as card 143. PSA has graded that one 101 times in its base print and 161 times as a reverse holo. Two hundred and sixty two copies, against 40,212 of the promo, on the same Pokemon in the same year.

The gap is how each card reached a collector. Card 143 had to be pulled. The promo sat in every box: The Pokemon Company's page for the Scarlet and Violet 151 Elite Trainer Box, launched September 22, 2023, lists nine booster packs and one full art foil promo card featuring Snorlax. The count above reads less like demand for a Snorlax card and more like a receipt for boxes opened.

Hold the illustrator steady and the same thing happens. GOSSAN signed four cards in the Scarlet and Violet Black Star Promos: this Snorlax, a Xatu at 134 grades across its two prerelease parallels, a Cetitan at 22 and a Porygon2 at 54. The other three total 210 between them. None of the three came in a box.

Nineteen boxes, nineteen promos

Widen it to the format. Nineteen promos in that set with at least 1,000 grades arrived one to a standard Elite Trainer Box, and their censuses run from 1,014 on the Temporal Forces Flutter Mane to 83,306 on the Prismatic Evolutions Eevee. Eighty two times the spread on cards that shipped identically.

If the name on the card set the number, the Paldea Evolved Pikachu promo would not sit at 21,108, which is roughly half of Snorlax. Pikachu is the most graded name in the hobby and its box promo lost to a sleeping bear. What does track is how much product moved: 151 is the most graded English Scarlet and Violet expansion in the dataset at 837,207 grades, 2.09 times the next one down.

That reading has a hole in it and it is worth naming. Destined Rivals is the second most graded expansion of the era at 400,964 grades, and its Elite Trainer Box promo, Team Rocket's Wobbuffet, has only 10,683. Box sales explain more here than the Pokemon does, but they do not explain everything, and a population census cannot separate the two cleanly.

Where the other seven in ten land

A 28.8 percent gem rate puts this card thirteenth of those nineteen, under a 33.76 percent median for the format. The failures are undramatic. 21,432 submissions stopped at a 9, which is 53.3 percent of everything sent in, and only 2,125 copies of 40,212 came back below an 8. Cards that leave a sealed box and go straight into a submission do not usually collect damage on the way. They get measured and found a fraction out.

Which fraction, on which copies, is the part the census will not say. Both 151 Elite Trainer Box promos are in the data, this plain one and a Pokemon Center stamped version at 6,502 grades and 25.38 percent, and three and a half points between them is thin ground for a theory. The Obsidian Flames Charmander, the nearest thing this card has to a sibling, splits the other way by more than fourteen. Two pairs, opposite results.

GOSSAN has two cards past 40,000

The illustrator credit reads GOSSAN on the card face. The Pokemon TCG API lists 61 English cards under that name and the catalogue is mostly ordinary: a Psyduck, a Cascoon, a Heracross, three separate printings of Black Belt's Training. Two of the 61 sit in the group this post opened with. One is this Snorlax. The other is Mewtwo VSTAR GG44 from the Galarian Gallery at 46,910 grades, which came out of the same Crown Zenith boxes this blog has already taken apart. Neither got there on the signature.

A dollar in March 2024

PriceCharting's monthly history, read September 16, 2026, puts the raw card at a $1.00 median in March 2024 and under $4.00 for that whole year. A PSA 10 charted $29.94 in the same month. For its first eighteen months this was a card people left in bulk boxes.

Both ends have since moved, and not evenly. Raw copies peaked at $28.44 in May 2026 and sit at $21.86. The ten peaked at $280.00 the same month and sits at $250.00, up 8.4 times from its trough while the raw card is up 21.9 times from its own. Realised sales agree with the quotes: twenty nine titled PSA 10 listings cleared a $249.99 median between August 23 and September 13, 2026, twenty six titled PSA 9 listings cleared $43.44, and fifty nine raw copies cleared $21.99 across four months.

Three dollars a card, and a twenty dollar spread

PSA's Standard tier costs $59.99 for an estimated 90 to 100 business days at a $1,000 maximum insured value, read off psacard.com/pricing on September 16, 2026, with Priority at $79.99 and the Value tiers still paused. A $250 slab sits well inside that insurance cap, so Standard is where this card belongs.

Take 15 percent off every sale for fees and for shipping a slab. A guaranteed ten returns $212.49 against $81.98 of cost. Weight the payouts by the grades this census actually hands back and that collapses to $85.09, a profit of $3.11 a card, or 3.8 percent. Breakeven between a nine and a ten sits at 25.66 percent against a 28.8 percent lifetime rate. The margin is real, and it is three dollars wide.

Now put it next to what people paid for the raw card. Across those fifty nine sales the low was $13.00 on September 13 and the high was $34.06 on May 10. Buy at the low and the identical submission returns $12.10, up 16.6 percent. Buy at the high and it loses $8.96. The spread on the buy is roughly seven times the expected profit on the grade, which makes this a shopping problem wearing a grading problem's coat.

The recent rate is worse, and that is not this card's fault. Differencing the August 13 and September 12, 2026 pulls, PSA returned 839 copies and 121 of them were tens, a 14.42 percent month, at which a submission comes back about 28 percent underwater. Thirty seven of the thirty nine cards past 40,000 grades also came in below their own lifetime rate that window, so the group cooled together. The Mew ex out of the 151 Ultra-Premium Collection has the same problem from a far higher price.

Check the price tag before the card

At the rates above the trade turns over at a raw cost of $25.10. Eleven of those fifty nine sales cleared higher than that, so roughly one buyer in five paid a price this census cannot pay back, and forty eight paid one it can. That is the whole decision on this card, and it gets made before PSA ever sees it.

For what a count this size can and cannot tell you about the copy in your hand, start with our guide to reading a population report. To pull the live numbers on either 151 Elite Trainer Box Snorlax side by side, 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 39 card group past 40,000 English grades, the fifth place ranking inside the 151 expansion, the 262 grades on card 143, the nineteen Elite Trainer Box promos and their 33.76 percent median, the 837,207 and 400,964 expansion totals, and the 839 grade window were computed from that pull and the August 13, 2026 pull held beside it
• PriceCharting: Snorlax #51, Pokemon Promo, price table, dated sold tape and monthly history read September 16, 2026. Medians use titled PSA rows only: four rows carrying CGC or ACE grades were dropped from the grade 9 block, one PSA 10 sale naming the Pokemon Center print was dropped as a different card, and one raw row was a two card lot
• PSA pricing, read September 16, 2026, giving Standard at $59.99 for 90 to 100 business days and $1,000 maximum insured value, Priority at $79.99, and the continuing Value pause
• The Pokemon Company's Scarlet & Violet 151 Elite Trainer Box page, read September 16, 2026, for the September 22, 2023 launch, the nine booster packs and the single Snorlax promo
• The GOSSAN credit, the 150 HP, the Voraciousness Ability and the SVP EN 051 card number read off the card face, and the GOSSAN credit on Mewtwo VSTAR GG44 read off that card face; the catalogue of 61 English cards from the Pokemon TCG API artist records, read September 16, 2026