One Card, 60% of a Set: Chase Share in 129 Sets

Ask which Pokémon set is one card in a trenchcoat and the answer comes back Evolving Skies, every time. It is not. We added up the asking price of every card we price in each of 129 English sets on September 22, 2026 and asked what share of that total sits in the single most expensive card. Umbreon VMAX is 28.0% of Evolving Skies, which ranks 33rd. The top of the list is Giratina V at 60.6% of Lost Origin, then Mega Charizard X ex at 60.3% of Phantasmal Flames and Lugia V at 53.3% of Silver Tempest. Two things need saying before the ranking: this is one day of ASK prices, not sales, and the measure is a share of a total that the same card is part of, so a set with a thin top end concentrates mechanically. The second does not survive the data. The first is conceded in part, with the comp record behind each top card printed so a reader can see which asks a trade actually stands behind.

Base Set at rank 10 is the entry most people would have guessed first, and 41.5% is a large number: Charizard asks $919.98 against $728.16 for the 96 Base Set cards outside the set's top five put together. It is still nine places below a 2022 set. The pattern across the top is a set with exactly one alternate-art or secret card that the market decided mattered, and a checklist behind it that nobody kept. Where the top five share runs far above the top card share, as in Champion's Path at 46.0% and 90.2%, the set is not one card, it is a five-card annex, which is the subject of The Set Inside the Set.

The bottom of this table is the more useful half. Skyridge holds the most valuable card in the bottom eight at $1,387.99, and it is the least concentrated set we measure, because the set behind it is worth $20,520 and 104 of its 178 cards ask $25 or more. Expedition Base Set is the same shape. These are the sets where the chase card is not the thesis, and they are also the sets where buying the chase card is the worst way to own the set. Cosmic Eclipse and Unified Minds are the modern version of the same thing: very large checklists with deep second and third tiers.

First objection: concentration is arithmetic. A set with a small total will always show a big top-card share. That is the obvious reading and the data does not support it. The rank correlation between a set's total priced value and its top-card share is +0.038 across the 129 sets, and between the number of priced cards and the top-card share it is -0.087. Neither is a relationship. The counterexamples are on both tables: Team Rocket Returns, which has no set page of its own to link, is a $10,931 set at 41.2%, and Cosmic Eclipse is a $6,503 set at 8.7%. Concentration is about the shape of a checklist, not its size.

Second objection: these are asks, and an ask on an illiquid alternate art is a number a seller made up. Half right. Seven of the twelve top cards carry a PSA 10 sold median backed by 25 or more verified eBay sales, which is a real trade record standing behind a real ask: Giratina V at 328 sales, Mega Charizard X ex at 1,991, Lugia V at 548, Mewtwo GX at 253, Gengar VMAX at 433, Charizard V at 395 and Charizard V at 109. Three of the twelve have no PSA 10 median at all on our three-sale floor, and those three are exactly the vintage ones: Mew ☆ δ, Charizard and Torchic ☆. They are also the three oldest cards in the twelve. Absent is not zero, it means fewer than three recorded sales, but it does mean the asks on ranks 6, 10 and 11 are less confirmed than the asks on ranks 1, 2 and 3. The remaining two of the twelve sit in between, on a median backed by fewer than 25 sales: M Charizard EX on 5 and Charizard GX on 22.

Third objection: this is the top-five concentration study again. It is not, and the difference is the point. What 56,000 Cards Say About How Sets Hold Value measured the top five and found them averaging 55.6% across 212 sets; Is a Pokémon Set Index Just Its Chase Cards found the top five holding 57.2% of the level but carrying only 45.6% of the move. Our top-five median here, 54.4%, agrees with both. What the single-card measure adds is the distinction between a set that is five cards and a set that is one: Phantom Forces at 35.7% and 90.1% is five cards, Silver Tempest at 53.3% and 66.2% is one.

Recompute the table on sold medians rather than asks. Where a graded sold median exists for both the top card and the rest of a set's top tier, the concentration ordering should survive; where it inverts, the ask on that top card is unsupported and the set belongs lower. We can only run that test today on sets where enough cards carry a PSA 10 median, which is a smaller and richer population, so the honest statement is that this study is an ask study and the check is available on part of it. The second test needs no new data at all: run it again in three months. If Lost Origin is still first and Evolving Skies still around thirty, the ordering is a property of the sets. If it moves twenty places, it was a property of one week.

As of `price_history` day 20718, which is 2026-09-22. Population as described in every study in this wave: English catalogue rows with a TCGplayer product id, one row per product id after collapsing 240 duplicate rows, priced on that day, in a set carrying a recorded release date and 60 or more such products: 129 sets, 18,698 products. Set total is the sum of those asks. Top-card share is the single highest ask divided by that total; top-five share is the sum of the five highest divided by it. Prices are TCGplayer market prices for the flagship printing and are ASKS. PSA 10 medians and their verified sale counts come from `graded_snapshots`, latest row per card and grade across both the card id and the TCGplayer id, exactly as src/server/card-facts.ts reads them; the cron writes a median only on three or more verified sales, so a card with no median has fewer than three recorded sales rather than none. The ranking is over all 129 sets and printed as two contiguous slices, ranks 1 to 14 and ranks 122 to 129; the full ordered list is in the scratch dump. Ties in the share are broken by the larger set total ranking first, and no exact tie occurs inside either printed slice; ranks 125 and 126 both print 8.7% but are 8.74% and 8.70% before rounding and are ordered on the value. Rank correlations are Spearman with tied ranks averaged, computed over all 129 sets. Sixteen of the 129 sets have no set page that renders their own card list, so they appear unlinked: fourteen EX-era sets have no page, `/set/dragon` renders Dragon Majesty's price series over EX Dragon's card list, and `/set/legendary treasures` pools the Radiant Collection. Every set and card link in this article was fetched and confirmed to render the set or card the sentence means, by card count and by named chase card, not by a 200 alone. Scripts: apps/web/scripts/rs-figures.mts, rs-extra.mts and rs-links3.mts; figures in apps/web/.scratch-reddit-sets/figures.json. Nothing here is investment advice.