XY124 Pikachu EX pop report: the likeliest grade is a 7, and the 7 pays

Published October 30, 2026 · Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is October 23, 2026

The likeliest grade on this card is a 7, and a 7 sells for more than twice what a raw copy costs. Both halves of that sentence are true at the same time, which is what makes the XY124 Pikachu EX pop report worth reading slowly.

Most cards we have written up here punish the submission at the grade they are likeliest to return. This one pays at the grade it is likeliest to return.

The XY124 Pikachu EX pop report, rung by rung

9,668 graded, 62 Gem Mint 10s, 612 nines, 1,729 eights, 16 Authentic, and 7,249 copies finishing at a 7 or lower, which is 74.98 percent of everything ever mailed in. The gem rate is 0.64 percent. PSA returned 393 more last period on a +14% thirty day trend.

The October 1, 2026 ladder is where the shape lives. 2,544 copies sit at PSA 7, 1,884 at 6, 1,715 at 8 and 1,134 at 5. The seventh rung is the tallest one on the card, and 482 copies have come back a PSA 1. For a card pulled out of a sealed retail box in 2016, that is a census you would expect from a 1999 holo that spent a decade in a shoebox.

That comparison is not loose. Of the 2,348 cards in the data with a full grade ladder past 3,000 submissions, 1,395 peak at a 10 and 717 peak at a 9. Thirty one peak below an 8, and above 10,000 grades there are six, all of them Wizards holos printed between 1999 and 2000. Drop the bar to 9,000 and two more arrive, both from the XY era: a 2013 Legendary Treasures Mew EX at 9,470, and this Pikachu at 9,254.

One Pikachu, four printings, and only two of them broke

Bulbapedia files this card and three others as the same Pikachu EX, which hands over a control nobody had to build: Iron Tail and Overspark, 130 HP, printed twice in English and twice in Japanese across 2015 and 2016, by two illustrators.

Read it by illustrator and the regional split does not wobble once. Ariga's drawing gems 3.971 percent in English and 66.713 in Japanese. Mizutani's drawing, the one in the picture above, gems 0.665 and 63.597. Same art, same attacks, roughly a hundred times apart.

The second comparison is hiding inside it. Going from the regular print to the Full Art costs 3.1 points in Japan, 66.713 down to 63.597, which is noise. The same move in English takes 3.971 down to 0.665, a six fold collapse. Whatever the Full Art treatment does, it does not do this on its own, because the Japanese Full Art shrugs it off.

Nor does the damage sit where a printing tolerance would put it. When the Mega Attack Rare tier opened a twenty one point gap between its English and Japanese prints, both censuses arrived in identical condition and the whole difference lived one rung from the top, which pointed at the cut. Here the English copies are 74.2 percent below an 8 against the Japanese 5.6. These are not near misses. They are creases.

One tidy explanation was tested and does not survive. Across 352 English rows from 2013 to 2016 past 500 grades, Full Art cards pool to a 15.544 percent gem rate and everything else to 15.590. By damage they separate cleanly, 34.66 percent below an 8 against 21.26, with the medians agreeing at 39.93 against 24.59. The Full Art tier does not grade worse. It arrives worse.

Megumi Mizutani drew it for a box with a toy in it

The Pikachu EX Red & Blue Collection was the fourth and last of the Red & Blue Collections, sold from September 14, 2016 as part of the Pokemon 20th Anniversary run. Both regional versions carried four Generations booster packs, this promo and a code card; North America added a sculpted Pikachu figure and Europe added a Jumbo copy of the card, which is its own row in the data at 78 grades.

Mizutani put Pikachu mid lunge with Jolteon crouched at the left and Electabuzz rearing up behind, lit by its own electricity. Inside the same week the same illustration went into Expansion Pack 20th Anniversary, the Japanese release English collectors know as Evolutions, as a secret rare at 094 out of 087, 1st Edition only, sold in booster packs. English never got it in the set at all.

So one drawing reached Japanese buyers as a pack pulled secret rare and reached everyone else as the loose promo in a toy box. That proves nothing by itself. It is the shape of a difference a population count can see and cannot explain.

Every rung from the 6 up beats the fee

Those are gross figures, so take 15 percent off any sale for fees and shipping. PSA Standard runs $59.99 at a $1,000 maximum insured value and 70 to 80 business days, read off psacard.com on October 30, 2026, which is the tier a $250 raw card declares into.

Now walk the whole ladder instead of the top of it. Against a $309.99 cost to buy and grade, the PSA titled tape nets a 6 $339.57, a 7 $496.82, an 8 $1,113.50 and a 9 $4,296.75. Everything from the sixth rung up clears, and those rungs hold 73.67 percent of the census. Weight all ten outcomes by how often this card actually returns them and the expected value is $1,198.79 against $309.99 spent.

Strike the Gem Mint 10 out of that calculation and it still returns $755.87. Strike the 9 as well and it returns $471.71. Pay $500 for a clean copy and count no ten at all, and it clears by 35 percent. There is no version of this arithmetic where the fee is the problem, which is the reverse of the Champion's Path Charizard, where the fee outruns the card.

Two cautions, because the top of that table is doing real work. The $77,777 is the middle of three sales, $75,100 on September 10, $77,777 on September 15 and $83,000 on September 24, 2026, which is a thin tape even with PriceCharting's own estimate landing within five percent at $74,162.11. It is also a new price: tens cleared $750 to $1,000 in March 2022, $1,550 in May 2024, $8,000 in February 2026 and $15,000 in July. Second, that $250 raw figure is the middle of 37 eBay sales since September 1, and in the last week of October alone raw copies cleared $150, $229.95, $250, $300, $353, $355 and $500. On a card where condition decides everything, a blended median is not a price you can go and pay.

So why is nobody rushing?

If the trade is this good, submissions should be stampeding. They are not. The weekly trend ran 107.8 cards a week across the first eight weeks of the series and 76.0 across the last eight, so the flow is drifting down while the Gem Mint price went up roughly ten times. PSA has not awarded this card a 10 since August 26, 2026.

The likeliest reading is that the ladder and the census feed each other. Clean copies are genuinely scarce, which lifts every grade above raw, which makes it worth slabbing a creased one, which drags the census further toward the bottom and makes the top look scarcer still. A population count cannot pin the direction of that loop.

What to do with the copy in your binder

Check the corners and the surface before anything else, because a 7 instead of an 8 costs $725 here and an 8 instead of a 9 costs $3,745. If it is visibly played, send it anyway; the 6 and the 7 both pay. If you want the card rather than the gamble, a PSA 8 near $1,310 is the cheapest honest copy of it. And if you are buying raw to submit, pay up for a clean one instead of chasing the $250 median, because that median mostly describes the copies that come back 5s. For what a count this size can and cannot tell you, start with how to read a population report, and all four printings stay current side by side in the BetterPop gallery.

Sources

• Population figures: GemRate PSA population data, pull dated October 27, 2026. The grade ladder, the four printing table, the 2,348 row peak analysis, the 31 censuses peaking below an 8, the 352 row Full Art comparison and the weekly grading trend were computed from the October 1, 2026 snapshot.
• Card text, illustrators, printings and set relationships: Bulbapedia, Pikachu-EX (XY Promo 84), XY TCG Series merchandise and Evolutions (TCG), read October 30, 2026. The merchandise article dates the collection to September 14, 2016; the card article gives September 16 for the Full Art print.
• Prices: PriceCharting, Pikachu EX #XY124 Pokemon Promo, graded and raw sold tape read October 30, 2026. All medians use PSA titled rows only, with CGC, BGS, SGC, TAG and ACE sales dropped: PSA 6 is 24 sales from August 26 to October 25, PSA 7 is 26 from August 28 to October 26, PSA 8 is 23 from September 27 to October 29, PSA 9 is 28 from July 24 to October 30, and the raw median is 37 eBay sales since September 1. The XY84 comparison prices come from the same site, read the same day.
• Grading fees and turnaround: PSA trading card grading services, read October 30, 2026. Standard $59.99 at a $1,000 maximum insured value and 70 to 80 business days, Priority $79.99 at $1,500, Express $199.00 at $2,500, Super Express $349.00 at $5,000, Premier $599.00 at $10,000, with Value services still paused.
• Card face details, including the Megumi Mizutani credit, the 2016 copyright and the Jolteon and Electabuzz background, were read off the card scan shown above.