Special Delivery Charizard pop report: the box did the damage

Published August 29, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is August 13, 2026

The Pokemon Center published a warning about this card before a single copy shipped, and it still explains the Special Delivery Charizard pop report better than anything printed on the card. The promotion FAQ told buyers it would arrive in a plastic sleeve with a piece of material to stabilize it, packed loose in the order box, and advised them to look under the box's flaps in case it had slid down there. PSA has graded 32,069 copies since. 4,534 came back Gem Mint 10.

The Special Delivery Charizard pop report, sorted by grade

Card SWSH075 in the SWSH Black Star Promo series, English print, the copy PSA labels as a 2022 Pokemon Center release. At the August 13, 2026 pull the census stands at 4,534 tens from 32,069 submissions, a gem rate of 14.1 percent.

The rest of it stacks up in one place. A single column, the 9, holds 18,209 of them, more than half of every Special Delivery Charizard PSA has ever handled. Another 6,953 landed at 8, 2,355 came back 7 or lower, and 18 returned Authentic with no grade attached.

A census that piles onto the 9 is not strange by itself. The Prismatic Evolutions Umbreon does the same thing on a 2025 card pulled from booster packs by the hundred thousand. This one reached the same result without ever sitting in a pack, a binder or a trade folder. Warehouse to one owner, once.

Submissions are cooling rather than stopping, with 414 fresh grades last period against a 30 day trend of -32%. Worth remembering throughout that a gem rate counts submissions, not printed cards, and nobody outside Pokemon knows how many codes were issued.

The box it arrived in

A booster pack is a sealed wrapper inside a sealed box inside a sealed case, so by the time a collector touches one the card has already been protected three times over. This card had a courier.

Read that FAQ answer again and notice what it concedes. A stiffener means Pokemon Center expected bending. Packing it loose beside plush toys and mugs means they expected it to move. The note about the flaps means they already knew copies were ending up wedged in a corner of the carton. Corner impact and fine whitening along the blue back are what that produces, and those are the defects that hold a card at 9 instead of dropping it to a 6.

Take that as the best available explanation rather than a proven one. PSA never publishes why an individual card missed a grade, and a plausible mechanism is not a measured one.

Three cards, twelve points apart

The Pokemon Center ran this idea three times: Special Delivery Pikachu SWSH074 with orders around the Canadian store launch in November 2020, Special Delivery Bidoof SWSH177 in 2021, this Charizard in 2022. All three traveled in a customer's order box, and their gem rates still refuse to agree. At the August 13, 2026 pull the Pikachu sits at 9.79 percent on 14,421 grades, the Bidoof at 22.17 percent on 4,677, and this Charizard between them at 14.1 percent. Twelve and a half points, on cards that shared a shipping channel and a design brief.

So the carton is a factor, not a verdict.

What it costs shows up against the rest of the series. The Champion's Path Charizard V, another SWSH Black Star Promo, arrived sealed in its own pack inside an Elite Trainer Box and gems at 56.30 percent across 90,529 grades. Sealed is no guarantee either, as the Ultra Premium Collection promos show at 15 to 22 percent.

A code, three countries, and a July weekend

The card carries a 2020 copyright line and was revealed that November, then sat unreleased. In May and June 2021 copies began turning up in United States Pokemon Center orders by accident, which PokeBeach confirmed on June 2, 2021. That leak left a mark on the paperwork: CGC offers an "Inadvertent Early Release" label for cards that escape ahead of their date, so a small group of these Charizards sits in a differently labeled slab.

The real distribution was a lottery dressed as a giveaway. Registration opened July 11, 2022 to anyone 18 or older with a mailing address in the United States, Canada excluding Quebec, or the United Kingdom. Entrants got a code by email, then spent at least $20 or £20 at the matching regional store to have the card dropped into the cart. Codes ran out in three days. Six weeks earlier Pokemon had already banned it from the 2022 World Championships, alongside the Pikachu and the Bidoof, because some Sword and Shield cards "were not distributed worldwide." A promo built to celebrate a store launch, ineligible in the only tournament that mattered that year.

Nobody signed the art. The credit reads "Illus. & Direc. The Pokemon Company Art Team", genuinely printed on the card rather than a database placeholder, in a series where almost every card names one illustrator. What that unnamed team drew is a joke about postage: Charizard in flight over a pale blue grid, red mail satchel across its chest, the Pokemon Center's own Pikachu riding between the wings in a delivery cap.

Six dollars underwater at a nine

PSA's Value services were still paused when their pricing page was read on August 29, 2026, so Regular at $79.99 is the way in, insured to $1,500 and quoted at 70 to 80 business days.

A 9 hands your money back and keeps six dollars for the trouble. That is what 18,209 submissions already found.

Run the whole census instead of the top row. Weight every grade by how often it happens, price it off the August 2026 sold tape, then dock 15 percent for eBay fees and shipping a slab, and an average submission returns about $444 against $291 laid out. Breakeven sits near a 4.6 percent gem rate against the 14.1 percent this card runs, so it clears, in the same shape as the Celebrations Greninja: ugly odds, positive arithmetic, the whole return in one uncommon outcome.

Two warnings underneath that. Regular insures to $1,500 while the result you are paying for has sold between $1,825 and $2,561 since July 19, 2026, so the tier will not cover its own best case. And 70 to 80 business days is four months holding a card you already bought, on a PSA 10 that peaked at $2,228.67 in May 2026 and read $2,096.10 on August 29, 2026. That same line sat at $205.50 in August 2024 against $38.18 raw, so a Gem Mint copy worth five raw ones two years ago is now worth close to ten.

If one is still in its sleeve

Sealed copies are their own small market and a disappointing one. Between August 20 and August 24, 2026, sleeved examples sold at $177.11, $186.40, $230.50 and $231.50, bracketing the $211.00 to $215.00 loose Near Mint copies fetched on TCGplayer that week. The sleeve pays almost nothing. A galaxy swirl in the foil is the exception, at $304.00 and $337.00.

Screening a loose copy, skip the centering ritual. Nothing published establishes a centering bias on this promo, so check what the shipping route predicts instead: the four corners for impact, and the blue back along every edge for the fine whitening a card collects sliding around inside a carton. Clean on both and the margin above is a bet you can price. Anything less and the finished slab is the cheaper way to own one. Every figure here refreshes from the live census, which sorts against the rest of the SWSH promos in the BetterPop gallery.

Sources

• PSA population via the GemRate pull of August 13, 2026; every population figure above refreshes with each site build
• PriceCharting: Special Delivery Charizard #SWSH075, graded price table, dated eBay and TCGplayer solds, and the monthly price series read August 29, 2026; the chart scale was checked against the live price table on the same page and reads in dollars. The PSA 10 comp is the median of 16 dated PSA 10 sales from July 19 to August 24, 2026. The PSA 9 comp is the median of 8 dated PSA 9 sales from August 6 to August 17, 2026, taken separately because PriceCharting's Grade 9 figure of $252.14 pools BGS and CGC nines, which sell lower
• Pokemon Center Special Delivery Charizard promotion FAQ, read August 29, 2026, reproducing the official promotion FAQ hosted at pokemon-sdchpromotion.promo.eprize.com, for the packaging answer quoted above, the eligibility regions, the $20 and £20 redemption thresholds, the July 11 2022 opening and the December 31 2022 code expiry
• 2022 Pokemon TCG World Championships card restrictions, read August 29, 2026, for the ban on SWSH074, SWSH075 and SWSH177 and the reason given
• PokeBeach, June 2, 2021, for the accidental United States shipments; an established outlet's reporting, not a company statement
• CGC Cards grading FAQ, read August 29, 2026, for the Inadvertent Early Release designation
• PSA pricing, read August 29, 2026, for the paused Value services, the $79.99 Regular fee, the $1,500 insured maximum and the 70 to 80 business day estimate
• The illustrator credit, the 2020 copyright, the yellow border and the artwork description were read directly from the SWSH075 card scan on pokemontcg.io; the November 2020 reveal is Bulbapedia's account and is not independently confirmed here
• Gem rate comparisons against Special Delivery Pikachu, Special Delivery Bidoof and the Champion's Path Charizard V computed from the BetterPop dataset at the August 13, 2026 pull