XY Evolutions Charizard reverse holo pop report: the print that gems six times more often

Published October 6, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is October 1, 2026

Thirteen holo rares came out of XY Evolutions packs in 2016, and all thirteen gem better as the reverse foil than as the holo. Not most of them. Every one.

Charizard 11/108 is the one people look up. At the October 1, 2026 pull the XY Evolutions Charizard reverse holo pop report reads 2,120 Gem Mint 10s from 28,070 graded, a rate of 7.6 percent, while the holo rare out of the same packs sits at 603 tens from 53,950 at that same pull, or 1.12 percent. The print nobody calls the chase card gems 6.8 times as often.

The XY Evolutions Charizard reverse holo pop report, band by band

28,070 graded. 2,120 tens, 12,548 nines, 8,201 eights, 50 Authentic, and 5,151 copies finishing at PSA 7 or lower. PSA added 241 more last period on a thirty day trend of +13%.

Set those bands beside the holo rare's and almost nothing moves. The nine band here is 44.70 percent against the holo's 45.02. The damaged tail, everything at a 7 or lower, is 18.35 percent against 17.98. Both sit inside half a point.

The whole gap is a single trade. This print carries 6.4 points more tens and 6.3 points fewer eights, and every other rung is the same card twice.

That shape rules a lot out. A card that arrives beaten up loses grades at the bottom, which is what the 1999 Charmander census does. Nothing like that is happening here. Both Evolutions prints reach PSA in the same condition, and one of them turns a slice of its eights into tens.

All thirteen do it, and the cheap ones do it hardest

Charizard is not a special case inside its own set. Take each of the thirteen Evolutions holo rares against its own reverse print at the October 1, 2026 pull and the reverse wins thirteen times out of thirteen: 2.02 percent pooled across 108,258 grades on the holo side, 10.64 percent across 47,240 on the reverse.

The margins are not subtle. Hitmonchan 62/108 gems at 0.23 percent as a holo and 14.99 as a reverse. Clefairy 63/108 runs 0.49 against 24.41. Magneton 38/108, 0.26 against 13.45. Charizard's 6.8x is mid table in its own set.

That also disposes of the first objection, which is submission screening. A reverse Charizard sells for a fraction of the holo, so owners might look harder before paying a fee, and harder looking on its own lifts a gem rate. Except Hitmonchan, Magneton and Clefairy holos are worth close to nothing in any grade too, and they still come back at a quarter of one percent.

Put foil on a plain card and it runs the other way

This is the part that points at something physical. The same set printed reverse foils of its commons, uncommons and plain rares, cards carrying no foil at all in their standard version, and there the direction reverses. Five of those pairs have passed 500 grades on both prints, and the no foil version wins all five, pooling 29.06 percent against 13.35.

Pikachu 35/108 gems at 33.61 percent flat and 14.94 as a reverse. Charmander 9/108, 31.54 against 14.29. Mewtwo 51/108, 22.57 against 11.59.

So inside one set, one year and one pack: foil anywhere on the card costs about 16 points of gem rate, and foil in the illustration window costs about 27. Move it out of the window and 8.6 of those points come back.

The two Charizard prints are otherwise the same card. Same yellow border, same Mitsuhiro Arita picture, same 150 HP and the same Fire Spin for 200. What changes is where the reflective layer sits. On the holo rare it fills the illustration window while the border stays flat. On the reverse it fills the border and the text box and leaves the picture matte, which you can see on any copy as a shimmer that stops dead at the frame line. If centering on that yellow band were doing the damage, both prints would fail it together.

Why a reflective layer behind the picture should cost four times what the same layer around it costs is not something PSA or Pokemon has published, and the honest reading is that this belongs to the 2016 English sheets rather than to reverse foils in general.

No other set in the data behaves like this

Six Pokemon sets carry enough holo and reverse pairs to test, meaning at least three cards with 500 or more grades on both prints. XY Evolutions is the only one that sweeps.

Legendary Collection splits almost down the middle, reverse ahead on ten cards and behind on nine, pooling 2.30 percent holo against 2.76 reverse. EX Delta Species runs seven and five. Skyridge goes the other way outright, holo ahead on all six, 13.86 percent against 8.04. Reverse foils gemming better than holo rares is not a rule of the hobby. It is a thing this one set does.

Eighty three cards got the treatment and the chase cards did not

English XY Evolutions ran 108 numbered cards plus five secret rares, and 83 of the 108 were also printed as reverse foils: 33 commons, 28 uncommons, 9 plain rares and all 13 holo rares. The 21 EX and full art cards were left out, and so were the secrets. Being in that pool is why this census is half the size of the holo rare's own rather than a tenth of it. 28,070 submissions is a serious number for a print that has never been the one on the box.

Two thousand dollars of daylight between two estimates

PriceCharting's algorithmic value for a PSA 10 read $2,387.50 on October 6, 2026, against $188.75 for a 9, $95.00 for an 8 and $70.00 ungraded. PSA's Standard tier was $59.99 a card the same day, with a $1,000 maximum insured value and an estimated 90 to 100 business days, and Value services remain paused.

One real sale sits well above that estimate. Goldin sold a PSA 10 of this card for $4,271.22 on June 18, 2026, which is 79 percent clear of what the algorithm prints now. Refereeing the two from outside got harder this autumn, because PriceCharting stopped showing graded eBay prices to logged out readers some time after August 2026. Its raw tape still reads, and eleven dated sales of ungraded copies between September 22 and October 5, 2026 ran from $44.88 to $109.99.

Price it off the lower figure anyway and it works. A 7.6 percent shot at $2,387.50 carries about $180 of expected value against a $59.99 fee, which is the uncommon case where the odds alone cover the ticket before a single 9 is counted. The 9 itself, where 44.70 percent of submissions land, sells for $188.75 against roughly $87 raw and that fee, so it clears about $42 and postage eats most of that.

Start at the frame line

Screening this print is a different job from screening the holo. The foil runs around the border and through the text box, so that is where a pack scratch or a press line will show, and the matte picture in the middle will neither hide a flaw nor produce one. Lay the card flat, run your eye along the inside of the yellow band first, then along the four edges where the foil meets the cut. Judge it at the 8 to 10 line, because the census says that is the only place your copy is really being decided.

If the border holds up and the centering is honest, this is one of the few 2016 cards where the expected return beats the fee. The version of this picture most people mail in instead is a 1.1 percent gem rate, and the one that gems more than half the time is the 2021 Celebrations reprint. For what a count this size can and cannot tell you about the card in your hand, start with what these grade counts actually measure, and every Evolutions row sorts side by side in BetterPop's card browser.

Sources

• PSA population via the GemRate pull of October 1, 2026; every figure in the data block above refreshes with each site build
• The thirteen holo pairs, the five non holo pairs, the band by band comparison against the holo rare, the pooled set rates and the six set control were all computed inside that same snapshot, across 111,050 rows, on October 6, 2026
• PriceCharting: Charizard [Reverse Holo] #11, Pokemon Evolutions, graded values and the dated raw sales tape read October 6, 2026. The $4,271.22 Goldin result of June 18, 2026 is a dated auction row on the same page
• PSA service levels and fees, read October 6, 2026, for the Standard tier price, maximum insured value and turnaround, and for the paused Value tier
• The 196 card master set breakdown, 108 base plus 83 reverse foils plus 5 secret rares, and the rarity counts behind it, via Cardrake's XY Evolutions checklist, read October 6, 2026, and cross checked against the 83 reverse foil rows in the dataset
• The foil placement on both prints, the Arita credit, the 150 HP line and the Fire Spin text were read off photographs of the two cards