Alakazam ex 201/165 Value: the PSA 9 Sells for Less

Alakazam ex 201/165 from 151 asks $74.50 on our daily tape and its PSA 9 sells for a median $72.00 across 285 verified sales, both read September 23 2026. The slab is worth 3.36% less than the ungraded card. That is not a data error and it is not rare: 559 of the 4,696 products in our graded-ladder cohort that carry both figures have a PSA 9 sold median below their own raw ask, and the share rises with registry depth from 4.6% on thin lines to 44.0% on lines holding 40,000 slabs or more. This card has 40,265.

This is one of 143 products in the 5,879-card cohort carrying a sold median at every recorded grade. Read the bottom half of it rather than the top: three of the seven rungs sell for less than the raw ask, and a fourth is level with it.

The PSA 10 fetches 4.44 times the PSA 9 and 2.97 times the CGC 10, the widest cross-grader gap of the five cards in this series and comfortably above the 2.50x median across our 143 full-ladder products. The BGS 9.5 outsells the CGC 10 by 1.81x, the half-point result from the half point again. But the rung a submitter actually risks is the PSA 9, and at 285 verified sales it is the deepest tape on the card, deeper than the PSA 10's 241.

Take every cohort member carrying both a PSA 9 sold median and a raw ask on September 23 2026. There are 4,696. On 559 of them, 11.90%, the PSA 9 sells for less than the ungraded card asks. The median ratio across all 4,696 is 2.71x, so the typical card is nothing like this one. What separates them is registry depth, and the ladder is monotone at every step.

The rows sum to 4,696 and the bands are closed intervals. The mechanism is supply: a line holding 40,000 submissions has produced tens of thousands of nines, and a grade that common cannot carry a premium over a card anyone can buy raw. The same relationship read from the PSA 10 side is does a big PSA population lower the price, and the grade-by-grade version is which PSA grade actually trades. Alakazam ex 201/165 sits in the bottom band with 40,265 slabs and a ratio of 0.97x.

The margin is small and it moves. On September 23 2026 the ask was $74.50 and the PSA 9 $72.00, a gap of 3.36%. On September 22 the ask was $72.79 against the same $72.00, a gap of 1.09%. A reader checking this next week may find the sign reversed, and the finding that survives is the ladder above, not the single card's margin on a single day.

151 holds 207 English products on our tape and seven of them are special illustration rares. Alakazam ex 201/165 is fifth of the seven by ask and fifth by registry depth. It is also the only one of the seven whose PSA 9 sells for less than its own raw ask.

The five Pokemon cards in that table cluster tightly: their gem rates run 27.4% to 29.7% and their PSA 9 ratios run 0.97x to 1.12x. The two trainers, which are cheaper raw and far less graded, carry the only real PSA 9 premiums among the seven. Across the wider set the picture is different: of the 59 English products in 151 carrying both a PSA 9 sold median and an ask, ten run ratios above 10x, every one of them a card asking $2.20 or less, where a slab's floor price swamps the raw one. The English and Japanese versions of 151 are compared directly in Japanese 151 versus English 151, and the way a set's value concentrates in cards like these is the set inside the set.

Against the wider catalog the registry is the 57th deepest of the 20,805 products with an unshared reading, and inside 151 it is the fifth deepest of 176. The premium percentile of 19.4 is the lowest of the five cards in this series, which follows from the registry percentile of 99.1 being the highest. That is the whole relationship, stated twice on one card.

Twelve products in our catalog are named Alakazam ex or Alakazam EX after folding, and they run from $0.83 to $183.60 raw. Three sit in 151 itself. One row in the table below has its registry withheld: Alakazam ex 065/165 shares a PSA registry line with another product, so no population figure can be attributed to it, and the rule that catches it is the same one that clears the card this article is about.

Two further Japanese rows, XY10: Awakening Psychic King 080/078 and 088/078, carry no price on the day and are named here rather than shown as blanks. The SVP promo at 050/225 has a working set screen at [SVP Black Star Promos](/research/set-screen/svp%20black%20star%20promos).

We hold four registry readings for this card, from August 17 to September 22 2026, a span of 36 recorded days, the longest of the five cards in this series. The line went from 39,480 submissions to 40,265, a gain of 785 slabs, about 21.81 a day and 1.99% of the standing population; 134 came back tens, a marginal rate of 17.1% against a lifetime 28.7%. Our recorded PSA 10 median fell 2.46% over the 26 recorded days from August 28 to September 23, from $327.89 on 229 verified sales to $319.82 on 241. The daily ask tape starts two days later, on August 30, and over its own 24 days the ask rose 4.11% from $71.56 to $74.50.

That PSA 10 series carries one reading we will not treat as a price. On September 17 and 18 2026 it records $104.00 on 239 verified sales, against $307.46 on September 16 and $237.46 on September 19. The median is recomputed each reading over the comps our provider surfaces that day rather than over a fixed pool, so the pool underneath it can change composition without the card doing anything; that is a data property worth publishing rather than smoothing away. Across the whole graded tape the PSA 10 median is unchanged on 90.6% of 67,275 adjacent-day pairs, but when it moves it moves a median 8.14% in a day, against 2.08% for the ask.

No 2025 figure appears in this article for this card, and that is deliberate. Its weekly per-card series holds 22 readings beginning August 30 2026 and ending September 20 2026: it lost its earlier history to a refresh fault that has since been fixed and cannot be undone. Four of the five cards in this series have a series reaching back to January 27 2025 and this one does not, so it gets no long-window claim at all.

The shared-line detector flagged 883 of 24,385 population keys, including Alakazam ex 065/165 in this card's own set and name group, and did not flag this card. The grade-by-grade pooling ratio, recorded sales per graded copy against a declared bar of 1.0, passes with room: 241 verified PSA 10 sales against 11,560 recorded tens is 0.02, and 285 verified PSA 9 sales against 20,344 recorded nines is 0.01. Both absolutes are printed. The companion assertion drops any median dated before the daily tape begins, which across the 66 products this series links removes one row, and none of this card's seven.

The raw price is an ASK and every graded price is a SOLD median, which is exactly why the headline comparison needs care: a $72.00 PSA 9 against a $74.50 ask compares a transaction to a listing, and if the ask is optimistic the true gap is smaller or absent. The 559 of 4,696 figure inherits the same asymmetry, which is a reason to read the ladder across bands rather than any single row. No fee, postage, wait or failure rate appears in any multiple here. The registry is a count of submissions our provider records, not a count of cards in existence.

The claim is that a PSA 9 stops paying for itself as the registry deepens, and that this card is on the far end of that curve. A recompute of the 4,696-product population returning a flat or non-monotone share across the five registry bands would overturn it. A recompute in which this card's PSA 9 sits above its raw ask would not overturn the ladder, only the single-card illustration, and the margin is 3.36% on the day, so that is a live possibility a reader should expect. Related card studies: Mewtwo & Mew GX SM191, Special Delivery Charizard, M Charizard EX from Evolutions, Magikarp & Wailord GX. Era-level gem rate work: Diamond & Pearl era card prices.

Sources: the `cards` catalog, `price_history`, `graded_snapshots` and `population_snapshots` in production, read on day 20719, September 23 2026. The card is resolved by NAME AND NUMBER: Alakazam ex, number 201, set 151, catalog id sv03.5-201, TCGplayer product id 517047. A folded same-name sweep across all 62,388 products, stripping accents, apostrophes, the gender signs and the provider's trailing number suffix, returns twelve products; ten carry a price on the day and are tabled, two Japanese rows do not and are named in prose. RAW is an ASK, the day-20719 `price_history` reading; the same card read $72.79 on day 20718 and both are printed where the margin depends on which day is used. GRADED figures are SOLD medians over verified completed sales with the count beside them, latest `graded_snapshots` row per grade across both keyspaces with the fresher winning. REGISTRY is `population_snapshots`, latest reading per key, September 22 2026 for this card; the latest day differs per card across this series. Gem rates pass `gemRateIsTrustworthy()`. Line sharing is tested by `sharedRegistryKeys()` over all 24,385 population keys, which flagged 883 keys affecting 788 products, including sv03.5-065 whose registry is therefore withheld above, and did not flag this card; and by the grade-by-grade pooling ratio described below. Two assertions run over the graded rows this series prints, and they do not cover the same rows. STALENESS: on every product this module prints a graded figure for, and after the fresher-keyspace rule, any median dated before day 20695, the first day of the current daily tape, is dropped, because the never-refreshed catalog-id keyspace holds rows old enough to invert against their own neighbouring grade. That assertion runs on all 258 graded rows the 66 products this module links carry, at every grade and every grader, and removes exactly one, a CGC 10 dated day 20694 on a card whose graded figures are not printed here, leaving 257. The cohort below is built WITHOUT that gate: applied across the whole catalog it drops nine PSA 10 medians, leaving 8,684 products with a PSA 10 median on two or more sales and a cohort of 5,871, 4,183 English and 1,688 Japanese, and no rank printed in this series moves by more than seven places. POOLING RATIO: recorded sales at a grade divided by the registry count at that grade. This is NOT an impossibility test, and calling it one would be wrong: `graded_snapshots` counts SALES and one slab can sell more than once, so a ratio above 1 is evidence that a graded key is pooling another product, not a physical contradiction. The declared bar is 1.0. `population_snapshots` records a per-grade count at PSA 10 and PSA 9 only, so the ratio is computable on 114 of those 257 rows and on no BGS or CGC row at all; the highest of the 114 is 0.94, 29 PSA 10 sales against the 31 tens on the Wizards-era Eevee's line, and only three exceed 0.5. THE COHORT: 62,388 products after deduplicating 63,600 catalog rows on the TCGplayer product id, 1,212 rows collapsing; 44,400 carry a day-20719 ask, 20,805 an unshared registry reading, 18,239 a trustworthy gem rate, 8,693 a PSA 10 sold median on two or more verified sales, and 5,879 carry all four, 4,191 English and 1,688 Japanese. THE PSA 9 POPULATION is the 4,696 cohort members that also carry a PSA 9 sold median; the five registry bands are closed intervals and their product counts sum to 4,696. Percentile is the share of the cohort strictly below this card's value; medians are upper-middle on even samples. The volatility figures use every adjacent-day pair in the PSA 10 graded tape (67,275 pairs on 9,048 keys) and every adjacent-day pair in `price_history` days 20714 to 20719 (261,184 pairs on 52,474 products), the later window chosen because days 20704 to 20713 are partial. The weekly per-card series `ppthist:517047` holds 22 readings from August 30 2026 to September 20 2026 and lost its earlier history to a known refresh fault, so no window claim longer than the daily tape is made for this card. Not financial advice.