A gem rate is usually quoted as an average, and the average is the least interesting number in it. Across the 5,325 cards where PSA has graded at least 500 copies, 24,950,782 submissions have produced 13,137,791 tens, a rate of 52.7%. Underneath that, 133 cards gem less than one percent of the time and 702 gem more than eighty. Those are not two tails of one distribution so much as two different products that happen to share a grading scale, and the clearest evidence is not the rate at all. It is which grade the market bothers to trade.
The hard end, named
These are the cards where a submission is close to a lottery ticket. Every figure is a recorded PSA registry count against our own price tape, and the rate is simply tens divided by total submissions.
The hardest cards to gem, 500 or more submissions
| Card | Set | PSA 10s / submissions | Gem rate | Raw | PSA 9 median |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rayquaza C | DP Black Star Promos | 1 / 1,314 | 0.08% | $471.25 | $3,875.00 (5 sales) |
| Typhlosion | Neo Genesis | 4 / 4,270 | 0.09% | $199.78 | no recorded sales |
| Lugia | Neo Genesis | 15 / 12,323 | 0.12% | $518.99 | $18,534.12 (16 sales) |
| Mew δ | POP Series 5 | 2 / 1,649 | 0.12% | $149.59 | no recorded sales |
| Venusaur | Wizards Black Star Promos | 9 / 5,439 | 0.17% | $295.68 | $527.50 (33 sales) |
| Ampharos | Neo Revelation | 2 / 1,147 | 0.17% | $77.67 | $2,008.62 (24 sales) |
Lugia is the one worth sitting with. Twelve thousand three hundred and twenty three people have sent one to PSA. Fifteen have received a ten back. We hold no recorded PSA 10 sale for it at all, and we do hold sixteen PSA 9 sales at a median of $18,534.12. The grade that almost never happens has no market, and the grade that usually happens carries five figures.
The easy end, and why it is cheap
The easiest cards to gem, English, 500 or more submissions
| Card | Set | PSA 10s / submissions | Gem rate | Raw | PSA 10 median |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rillaboom VMAX | Rebel Clash | 616 / 698 | 88.3% | $12.34 | $59.49 (24 sales) |
| Lapras VMAX | Sword & Shield | 1,534 / 1,778 | 86.3% | $21.20 | $50.00 (6 sales) |
Send one Rillaboom VMAX and the expected number of submissions to get a ten is one. The card costs $12.34 raw and $25 to grade, and the PSA 10 sells for $59.49 across 24 recorded sales. That is a real margin and it is also the reason the card is cheap: nearly nine hundred people have already done it.
The market trades a different grade at each end
Sort the pool by gem rate and look only at whether a sale exists, ignoring price entirely. On the 100 hardest cards, 10 carry a recorded PSA 10 sale and 82 carry a recorded PSA 9 sale. On the 100 easiest, 74 carry a PSA 10 sale and 25 carry a PSA 9. The same inversion holds across the wider bands: of the 133 cards under a one percent gem rate, 15% have a ten on the tape and 83% have a nine.
Cards with a recorded sale at each grade
This is not a pricing effect, it is a supply effect. A card that gems fifteen times in twelve thousand attempts cannot support a liquid PSA 10 market because there are almost no PSA 10s, so the nine becomes the thing people actually buy and sell. Anyone valuing a vintage holo off its PSA 10 comp is valuing an object that changes hands a few times a decade.
What chasing one actually costs
Expected submissions to obtain one ten is simply the inverse of the gem rate. For Lugia at 0.12% that is 822 copies. At $25 a submission the fees alone come to about $20,550, and the 822 raw copies at $518.99 each come to more than $420,000. Nobody does this, which is the point: on a card this hard the only route to a PSA 10 is to buy one from the fifteen that exist, and our tape has not recorded one selling.
Two earlier studies sit next to this one and answer different questions. Hard to Gem pooled 17,730 registries to show the decade decides, and that Japanese cards gem at roughly twice the English rate. Easy Grades Are Cheap Grades showed the PSA 10 premium falling from 24.7x to 3.8x as gemming gets easier. This one names the cards at the ends and asks what it would cost to chase them.
Pool: every card where our recorded PSA registry snapshot carries 500 or more total submissions, which is 5,325 cards holding 24,950,782 submissions, of which 3,757 are English and 1,568 Japanese. Gem rate is recorded PSA 10 population divided by total population from the latest snapshot per card. Rows that cannot support a rate are excluded by the same trust rule the card pages use: a zero-ten reading is refused when the population exceeds 100, when PSA 9s are recorded, or when our own sold tape holds PSA 10 sales for the card, because a card that has sold as a PSA 10 demonstrably has PSA 10s whatever the registry says. Prices are the recorded TCGplayer market for raw and the verified eBay sold median for each grade, with the sale count shown beside every median. Expected submissions is the inverse of the gem rate and assumes each submission is independent, which overstates the odds for anyone submitting copies from the same source. Counted 2026-09-21; the registry is a snapshot and moves.