Unova Victini Illustration Collection pop report: one grade holds six copies in ten

Published September 23, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is September 20, 2026

One grade holds 59.75 percent of this card's entire census. At the September 20, 2026 pull the Unova Victini Illustration Collection pop report reads 19,588 PSA 9s against 7,132 Gem Mint 10s, out of 32,781 submissions. Rank every English card in the dataset with 20,000 or more grades by how much of its census sits in that one grade, and only a single row finishes higher.

The card is Victini #208, the promo out of a box that launched on August 1, 2025. Thirteen months later PSA is still taking 748 of them a reporting period.

The Unova Victini Illustration Collection pop report, grade by grade

133 English rows have passed 20,000 PSA grades, and their median parks 39.07 percent of a census in a 9. Victini #208 parks 59.75 percent there, behind only the Prismatic Evolutions Super-Premium Collection Eevee ex #174 at 60.13 percent. Third place, the Surging Sparks Latios #203, sits at 57.79.

The failures are not damage. 929 copies, 2.83 percent of everything submitted, came home below an 8, and 5,130 more stopped at an 8. Put 7,132 tens next to 19,588 nines and the top two grades hold better than four copies in five. These cards arrive at PSA in good order. They just will not clear the last step.

Why no big census fills a 9 the way it fills a 10

A 10 is open at the top. Everything clean enough goes in, and there is no grade above it pulling copies back out. A 9 is a slice with a floor and a lid, so a copy has to land inside a narrow band to be counted there at all. That asymmetry turns up the moment you go looking for it.

Across all 258 rows in the dataset past 20,000 grades, in any language, the widest single grade share in a 9 is that Eevee ex at 60.13 percent. Tens are a different animal. The Japanese Mega Dragonite ex #232 puts 93.06 percent of its 38,193 grades into one, and 139 of those same 258 rows send more copies to a 10 than the best nine share anywhere manages. Victini #208 sits about as close to the far end of the nine as a card with this many submissions gets.

Read it as a tendency, not a law. Drop the cut to 10,000 grades and six rows clear 60.13 percent, the widest a Japanese 151 Pikachu #025 reverse holo at 80.10 percent of 10,331. What seems to hold the very large censuses under sixty is that a print run long enough to draw 20,000 submissions is never uniform enough to funnel copies into one slice. That is a reading, not a finding.

The shape that peaks right where this card sits

Victini's position near the top is arithmetic rather than character, and the arithmetic is visible. Take the 749 English rows past 5,000 grades and group them by gem rate. Cards gemming under 10 percent average 21.11 percent of their census in a 9. The 10 to 19 band averages 45.22. The 20 to 29 band peaks at 52.07. Then it falls away: 42.69 across the 40s, 29.96 across the 60s, 21.26 across the 70s, and 6.90 for the two rows gemming above 90.

One hump, one peak. Victini's 21.8 percent gem rate sits inside the peak band. Cards that gem badly leak copies downward into 8s and 7s; cards that gem well pull them up into 10s. Only in the middle does the 9 get to keep both ends.

Which is where this promo gets awkward. Nineteen English Illustration Rare rows have passed 20,000 grades, their median nine share is 53.63 percent, and sixteen of them sit between 49.91 and 57.79. Victini #208 is not an Illustration Rare. It outgrades every one of them into the 9 anyway.

Amelicart drew it, and the box shipped three of them

The credit on the face reads Illus. Amelicart. Victini sits in long grass on a clifftop, sun low over the water, the Unova hills washed pink and rust behind it. Basic, 80 HP, V-Force for 120, regulation mark I, copyright 2025. The art runs to all four edges with the card text set straight on top of it, which is the Illustration Rare layout, and Pokemon's own blurb for the box calls it "an illustration rare-style foil promo card" while the contents list further down the same page calls it a full art. The publisher cannot decide either.

That contents list repays a second read. One box carried a full art foil Victini, a premium parallel foil Victini, an oversize Victini, two Black Bolt packs, two White Flare packs and a code card. The oversize card has its own census row: 573 grades at 65.10 percent gem, a little over 43 points clear of the card this page is about. Same illustration, same carton, same buyer. Hold that loosely, because 573 submissions against 32,781 means the oversize copies mailed in were picked, and PSA houses a jumbo in different plastic.

Amelicart's English catalogue runs to eleven cards. One is the Bibarel GG25 from the Crown Zenith Galarian Gallery, which puts 52.33 percent of its 1,030 grades in a 9. Two cards is not a pattern, but it is the same band.

Sixty dollars against a twenty four dollar outcome

PriceCharting's tape, read September 23, 2026, puts a raw copy at a $13.00 median across 57 filtered sales since June 19, a titled PSA 9 at $24.25 across 28 sales since August 15, and a PSA 10 at $253.00 across 30 sales since August 10. The live price table agrees within a dollar at every grade. A 10 fetches 10.4 times what a 9 fetches.

PSA's Standard tier, checked live on September 23, 2026, runs $59.99 at 90 to 100 business days with $1,000 of insured value, and Value services remain paused. Card plus fee is $72.99. Net of a 15 percent haircut a Gem Mint 10 returns $215.05, a $142.06 profit, and that number is the entire reason anybody mails this card. A 9 returns $20.61. Roughly six times in ten you spend $72.99 and receive $20.61.

Weighted by the card's own census the submission returns $61.88, down 15.2 percent, and it needs a 27.41 percent gem rate to break even against the 21.8 percent it runs. The recent window is worse. Differencing the August 13 and September 20 pulls gives 942 new grades and 118 new tens, a 12.53 percent rate that GemRate's own thirty day figure puts at 13.0. At that rate the submission returns $44.79, down 38.6 percent. Those same 942 grades landed 63.59 percent in a 9, wider than the lifetime share.

Buying cheaper does not rescue it either. Breakeven arrives at a $1.89 raw copy, and the cheapest of those 57 recorded sales was $7.50.

Buy the outcome, not the odds

Leave your copy raw unless the centering is genuinely good, because the likeliest result is a $24 slab that cost $73 to produce. If you want the 10, buy the 10. At $253.00 it costs less than the expected price of manufacturing one, and somebody else has already absorbed the 9. The Umbreon ex Prismatic Evolutions census lands on the same answer from a card forty times the price, and the First Partner Charmander gets there gemming 84 percent of the time and still losing to the fee. New to the vocabulary? Start with how a population report is built, then watch this row move in the BetterPop gallery.

Sources

• GemRate PSA population data via the BetterPop dataset, September 20, 2026 row pull; cohort ranks, gem rate bands and grade share figures computed across all 110,641 rows on September 23, 2026.
• PriceCharting, Victini #208 Pokemon Promo, price table, monthly series and sold tape read September 23, 2026. All six monthly series were checked against the live table and read in dollars. Sold medians exclude two card lots, a played copy, one TAG 9 and one CGC 9.
• Pokemon.com, Unova Victini Illustration Collection product page, launch date and contents, read September 23, 2026 via the Internet Archive because the live page renders empty.
• PSA, grading service pricing, read September 23, 2026.
• Illustrator credit, HP, attack text, regulation mark and copyright line read from the card face of SVP EN 208.