Grading Phantasmal Flames Pays on 1 Card in 10, and It's a Mega Charizard X ex

Pull Mega Charizard X ex #125 from a pack of Phantasmal Flames and you're holding the one card in the set whose grading sums come out easy. Of the 10 cards from the set with enough graded sales to work out an expected value, it's the only 1 that beats a raw sale after fees, and it beats it comfortably, in a month when a full run of the set at TCGplayer market prices got 10.4% cheaper. The other Mega Charizard X ex, the Mega Hyper Rare with the most expensive slab of the lot, falls short, and so do the cheap illustration rares that look so tempting in a PSA 10 case.

Most of the set spent the month doing nothing much. The typical card ended flat, and the 96 cards that started under $1 drifted both ways without any conviction, 26 down and 17 up. The slippage was higher up. Of the 8 cards priced between $5 and $20 on October 14, 7 got cheaper, Piplup #98 and Rotom ex #126 among them, and every one of the 3 cards that started at $20 or more fell too. The cards from $1 to $5 landed in between with a typical drop of 6.3%. The $5 to $20 shelf is the one a grading order gets built from, and it's the one that lost ground.

Two versions of Mega Charizard X ex carry most of the set's weight. The Special illustration rare at #125 gave up $69.39 a copy and finished at $565.48, and the Mega Hyper Rare at #130 ended at $184.96, down 12.1%. Neither had a bad afternoon so much as a bad month, each one shaving a little off at a time, which is the sort of decline you only catch when you look again weeks later. With 86.6% of the set's value sitting in its five most expensive cards, the binder sags whenever they do, and that's how a run that cost $1,033.82 on October 14 ended up at $926.33. The rest of the set hardly registered: of the $109.04 that falling cards gave up between them, 91.3% came out of just five.

Grading #125 is the easy call. It forgives you. PSA has graded 59,502 copies and 59.8% of them came back 10s, which sell for $1,580.00, and a copy that misses and lands a 9 still sells for $660.00, more than the raw card. Send in an average raw copy and it's worth $815.74 once the grading fee and eBay's cut come out, while selling it raw on eBay would clear $490.15. The Mega Hyper Rare has the priciest slab on the list and the worst odds of reaching it. A PSA 10 goes for $2,228.50, but only 9.8% of graded copies got there and 34.9% came back below a 9, so the same sums leave a submission $36.36 short of just selling the card. Meowth #106 is a smaller version of the same trap, with a $124.50 PSA 10 against a $13.91 raw card and 48.4% of graded copies getting a 10. It comes up $8.86 short.

The Mega Hyper Rare has the priciest slab on the list and the worst odds of reaching it.

The cheap cards are where the temptation lives, because a PSA 10 Piplup #98 at $99.99 looks like a windfall next to a raw copy at $9.90. It still trails a raw sale by $16.16. Dawn #118 is worse off, $38.28 behind on a card that costs $5.48 raw, and Rotom ex #126, Mega Lopunny ex #128 and Mega Sharpedo ex #127 all lose to the raw sale despite gemming more often than the big Charizard. Mega Charizard X ex #109 gets nearest. It's $3.29 short. Those sums treat any copy that grades below a 9 as worthless, which is harsh on cards this cheap, so their real gap is smaller and may not exist. The #125 is the only card here I'd want in a grading order, and the rest look better left raw.

Population: Phantasmal Flames, 130 English cards with a TCGplayer market price on both October 14, 2026 and November 12, 2026. Every move compares a card to itself on the same TCGplayer product, first day against last, before anything is ranked or summed; a set total is never compared across days. Prices are TCGplayer market prices for the flagship printing, read from our daily price file. Graded figures are sold medians from our graded comps, PSA population counts come from our daily registry snapshot, and the expected value counts the PSA 9 outcome as well as the PSA 10, net of the grading fee and selling costs. The expected value sits beside the raw price less the same eBay selling fee, so the two compare like with like. It counts copies that grade below a 9 at nothing and leaves out shipping to PSA and back. Angle: whether grading pays: PSA 10 and PSA 9 sale prices against the raw card, the gem rate, and the expected value after fees.