The deepest registries in Pokemon do not belong to chase cards. They belong to promos that come free with a purchase: the MEP Black Star program averages 38,076 slabs per tracked card, the top of our registry-depth table. People grade what is easy to gem and free to acquire, and the modern promo pipeline is both by design.
The economics of grading a free card
A sleeved promo arrives pack-fresh by construction, which pushes gem rates toward the 53% modern average and above; a $20 fee against a $50-150 PSA 10 is a fine trade at scale, and scale is what a with-purchase promo has. The MEP Mega Charizard X rides the same mania as its pack-pulled sibling with a fraction of the acquisition cost, which is exactly why its registry is the one growing at handout speed. The Grading Throughput Index counts the result: promos are a structural share of the ~44,000 slabs a week our cohort records.
The program also produced our catalog's strangest recent entry: the Worlds 2026 stamped Pikachu, a card so new that no database anywhere listed it when a reader's scan failed. We seeded it into our own catalog from his photograph, fingerprint, embedding and all, and it now identifies with high confidence. The registry for it currently reads near zero. Given everything above about this program, check back in a month.
Registry depth from daily PSA population snapshots per the Print-Run Archaeology methodology (per-set averages over tracked cards, which skew toward each set's most-graded prints); throughput from the linked index. The mep-093 seeding is documented in our catalog history. Not financial advice.