A complete near-mint Base Set costs $2,218.19 at the asks our tape recorded on September 22, 2026, and Charizard alone is $919.98 of it. The other side of that arithmetic is the part nobody puts in a price guide: 69 of the 101 priced cards ask less than $5, and the median card in the set asks $2.53. This is the whole checklist, priced, with the graded numbers where we hold them.
Sixteen cards are the set, and one of them is most of it
Base Set shipped in January 1999 with 102 cards, of which sixteen are holo rares. Our catalogue prices 101 of the 102; the missing one is Machamp, which was distributed in the two-player starter deck and has no ordinary TCGplayer product line in our data. Of the $2,218.19 it costs to assemble the priced 101, the fifteen priced holos account for $1,935.50, which is 87.3 percent. The other 86 cards together come to $282.69.
Base Set asks by price band, September 22, 2026
| Ask | Cards | Share of the 101 |
|---|---|---|
| Under $1 | 28 | 27.7% |
| $1 to $5 | 41 | 40.6% |
| $5 to $20 | 17 | 16.8% |
| $20 to $100 | 12 | 11.9% |
| $100 and up | 3 | 3.0% |
By printed rarity the ladder is steep but not as steep as the holo split. The 31 cards marked Rare have a median ask of $19.07, the 32 Uncommons $2.44 and the 38 Commons $0.83. The Rare band carries $2,079.62 of the set's $2,218.19, and that is because the sixteen holos are printed as Rares.
Every Base Set holo rare, priced
The fifteen priced Base Set holo rares, with graded medians where we hold them
| Card | Ask | PSA 9 median | PSA 9 sales | PSA 10 median | PSA 10 sales |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4 Charizard | $919.98 | $1,500.00 | 19 | not recorded | 0 |
| 2 Blastoise | $229.70 | $875.00 | 13 | not recorded | 0 |
| 15 Venusaur | $177.74 | $552.49 | 16 | not recorded | 0 |
| 10 Mewtwo | $93.16 | $347.57 | 22 | not recorded | 0 |
| 14 Raichu | $69.45 | $284.09 | 12 | not recorded | 0 |
| 1 Alakazam | $68.44 | $375.00 | 18 | $3,022.35 | 6 |
| 3 Chansey | $64.71 | $158.49 | 11 | not recorded | 0 |
| 5 Clefairy | $51.67 | $185.00 | 4 | not recorded | 0 |
| 16 Zapdos | $49.88 | $163.12 | 21 | $1,499.99 | 3 |
| 6 Gyarados | $44.75 | $225.25 | 22 | $2,112.50 | 3 |
| 11 Nidoking | $39.36 | $211.25 | 18 | $1,749.99 | 4 |
| 12 Ninetales | $37.05 | $180.00 | 26 | $1,602.00 | 7 |
| 9 Magneton | $36.67 | $244.99 | 13 | not recorded | 0 |
| 13 Poliwrath | $34.87 | $149.25 | 12 | $976.89 | 4 |
| 7 Hitmonchan | $18.07 | $204.50 | 4 | not recorded | 0 |
The highest recorded Base Set 10 in our tape is Alakazam
Sixteen of the 101 priced cards carry a PSA 10 sold median in our tape and 45 carry a PSA 9 one. Among the sixteen, the highest is Alakazam at $3,022.35 on six verified sales, against a $68.44 raw ask. The pattern down that list is consistent: a Base Set holo in a 9 sells for single-digit multiples of the raw card, and in a 10 for something closer to two orders of magnitude, because the 1999 print run put almost nothing into a 10-grade condition.
Base Set cards with the highest recorded PSA 10 medians
| Card | PSA 10 median | Verified sales | Raw ask |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alakazam | $3,022.35 | 6 | $68.44 |
| Gyarados | $2,112.50 | 3 | $44.75 |
| Nidoking | $1,749.99 | 4 | $39.36 |
| Ninetales | $1,602.00 | 7 | $37.05 |
| Zapdos | $1,499.99 | 3 | $49.88 |
| Poliwrath | $976.89 | 4 | $34.87 |
| Pikachu | $565.00 | 13 | $14.07 |
| Impostor Professor Oak | $367.00 | 5 | $24.73 |
| Squirtle | $344.34 | 6 | $5.09 |
| Wartortle | $300.00 | 4 | $4.63 |
Pikachu is the row to look at twice. It is a common, it asks $14.07, and its PSA 10 median is $565.00 on thirteen verified sales, the deepest PSA 10 sample of any card in the set. A yellow border and a red cheek are worth more than most of the holos once a grader agrees the corners are clean.
Most of Base Set is a dollar card
Twenty-eight of the 101 priced cards ask less than a dollar. The cheapest are Potion at $0.37, Super Potion at $0.38, Bill at $0.41 and Gust of Wind at $0.46. The basic energies sit in the same band. If you found a shoebox in a loft, the realistic outcome is that the box is worth what the holos in it are worth and the rest is bulk, which is the same conclusion Bulk's Hidden Floor reached from the other direction.
What the set as a whole has done
Our Base Set index, which sums the market value of the checklist daily, read $1,292.19 on January 27, 2025 and $2,169.10 on September 20, 2026, across 326 recorded readings. That is a gain of 67.9 percent over the recorded span. Note that TCGplayer treats the shadowless printing as a separate product line, and our Base Set (Shadowless) index is a different series carrying much larger numbers; it last read $5,625.17 on July 20, 2026. A price you are quoted for a Base Set card means nothing until you know which of the three 1999 print runs it belongs to, which is the same trap The $479 Lie documents across vintage generally.
Population: the 102 cards of the English Base Set as our catalogue holds them, of which 101 carry a TCGplayer product id and a recorded price. Machamp 8/102 carries no product id in our data and is excluded from every total. Asks are the most recent daily market price recorded per product in our price_history table, dated September 22, 2026, and they are listing prices rather than completed sales. Graded medians are medians of verified completed sales from our graded_snapshots table read on September 22, 2026, with the sample size printed beside each; 'not recorded' means no verified sale landed in our window and must not be read as zero. Medians use the upper-middle value on even samples. Rarity bands use the printed rarity in our catalogue, under which the sixteen holo rares are marked Rare. The set index is the setinfo:v4 series for Base Set, 326 readings from January 27, 2025 to September 20, 2026; the shadowless series is a separate product line and its last recorded reading is dated July 20, 2026. TCGplayer lists the shadowless printing as its own product line, so the Base Set prices here come from the ordinary Base Set line and not from a shadowless or first-edition one. Nothing here is financial advice.