Japanese Promo Card Prices: 21 Families Counted

The Japanese promo families are the largest block of summed ask in our catalog carrying no set link from any published article. Twenty-one of them hold **2,094 cards**, and on 2026-09-23 the 1,244 of those that carry a live price ask **$72,051.63** between them. The number that separates this block from the English eras beside it is not the total. It is the floor: the median priced Japanese promo asks **$17.10** against 45 cents for the median Sun & Moon era card, and only **21 of 1,244** ask under a dollar. There is essentially no bulk here.

Of the 2,094 products, **850 carry no ask on the evaluation day**. That could be a bad day rather than a real absence, so we tested it: every one of the 850 has a TCGplayer product id, and only **34 of them have a single row anywhere in the 25-day tape**, which runs from 2026-08-30 to 2026-09-23. 816 have never been priced in the window at all. So the $72,051.63 is the ask on 1,244 cards, stated as such everywhere below, and it is a floor on the block's value rather than its total.

Every family is listed, in order of summed ask, with no floor and no top-N window. The shares sum to 99.9% after rounding each to one decimal.

One family is 37.3% of the block. SM-P alone asks $26,901.90, more than the next four families combined, and it holds 38 of the 144 cards in the whole block priced at $100 or more. The largest families by card count are not the largest by value: S-P holds 340 cards and 6.8% of the value, and BW-P holds 236 and 3.4%.

Every English set census we publish has a long cheap tail. This block does not have one, and that is the most useful thing about it for a buyer. Below is the whole priced population by price band, with the share of cards and the share of value in each.

The two ends are the same size and one of them holds 29.9% of the money. 67 cards, 5.4% of the priced block, hold half its value. That is less concentrated than the English eras beside it, where 52 of 2,659 Sun & Moon cards and 61 of 1,949 Diamond & Pearl cards carry half their era, and it is the shape you would expect from families whose members were handed out one at a time rather than printed into boosters: the value is spread across a hundred good cards rather than banked in five.

PSA has graded these cards heavily and our sold tape has barely caught up. **308 of the 1,244 priced promos carry a PSA 10 sold median** on two or more recorded sales, and 355 carry a recorded sale at any grade, which leaves 889 with a live price and no recorded graded sale at all. The median PSA 10 premium over the raw ask, across those 308, is 5.65 times. Where a trustworthy gem rate exists on 50 or more submissions, 280 cards, the median rate is **62.9%**, which is the Japanese end of the split Hard to Gem measured across the whole registry.

One of the ten dearest cards in the block, Corrected Illustrator Pikachu, has no recorded sale at any grade at all, and a second, Shining Mew, has only a PSA 9 at $2,350.00 over 5 sales against 19,448 registry lines and 633 recorded tens. We checked every grade our tape carries, not only the two PSA grades this study reports. An $824.99 ask with a five-figure registry and no ten ever selling on our tape is the shape that 14,466 cards with a price and no sale measured on the English catalog. That study's gate is English sets with 60 or more priced products and a recorded release date, which excludes every family here, so this block is outside it rather than covered by it.

Registry depth is the other half of the story and it needs a warning. The column below counts PSA registry LINES, not slabs, and several products can share one line. Pikachu - 020/M-P holds 332,353 of them, the deepest we have ever recorded on any card in either language; The most graded cards in Pokemon published the same line at 329,337 and named the collision problem in detail.

850 of the 2,094 cards have no price and 816 of those have never had one in the 25-day tape, so every total here is a floor and the per-family shares are shares of the priced part. Asks are quotes on one Western marketplace in US dollars, for cards that mostly have to be imported, and they are not sales. The registry column counts lines, not slabs, so no per-family sum of it is printed and the deepest-line table names the collision risk inline rather than hiding it. Sold medians exist for 308 cards and the premium figure is computed only over those; the other 936 priced cards are not zeros, they are unrecorded. We do not know how many copies of any of these cards were printed, and nothing here should be read as a scarcity claim.

Take the same 21 set names on any complete day of the ask tape and recompute the median and the sub-dollar count. If the median priced promo comes back under $5, or if more than a hundred priced promos ask under a dollar, the no-bulk claim is wrong. If a later import prices most of the 850 silent cards and they arrive cheap, the median falls and this study's central contrast with the English eras weakens; that is the most likely way it breaks.

Population: every `cards` row whose `set_name` is one of the 21 Japanese promo families named in the table above, 2,094 rows on 2026-09-23. Deduplicating on TCGplayer product id collapses 0 rows in this population; every row carries a `jat-` marketplace id. Prices are asks from the daily card tape `price_history` on epoch day 20719, 2026-09-23, a complete day carrying 52,378 priced products; the partial days 20704 to 20713 are not used. Population is PRODUCTS, not catalog rows: one row per TCGplayer product id where present, else the catalog id, ties broken to the lexicographically smallest catalog id. Graded figures are SOLD medians from `graded_snapshots`, latest day per card and grade, read across both the catalog-id and the product-id keyspaces and taking the fresher row, then dropping any surviving median dated before day 20695, the first day of the current daily graded tape, and quoted only where the sample is 2 or more. PSA figures are REGISTRY LINES from `population_snapshots`, latest day per key; many products share one line, so no per-set sum of them is printed. Medians are upper-middle on even samples. The set-value series `sethist2:` is not used anywhere in this study, so a /set/ page's own "Full Set" figure will not match these sums: that is two instruments, not an error. Unpriced test: of the 850 products with no ask on day 20719, all 850 carry a product id and only 34 have any row in the whole 25-day tape (2026-08-30 to 2026-09-23), so 816 are unpriced rather than dropped by the evaluation day. Gem rates use `gemRateIsTrustworthy()` from @cardapp/core/server, which rejects a recorded zero that the rest of the row contradicts, and are restricted to 50 or more submissions: 280 cards qualify. SHARED-KEY TEST: A recorded sold count above the registry's own count at a grade is NOT an impossibility: `graded_snapshots` counts SALES and `population_snapshots` counts graded COPIES, and a slab that resells is counted twice on one side and once on the other. What the ratio measures is recorded sales per graded copy, and only a large ratio is evidence that the graded key is pooling another product onto this card. The bar applied here is a DECLARED one, 2 recorded sales per graded copy, not a physical limit. A card is also dropped when two or more sales are recorded at a grade and the registry line records no copies at that grade, because the denominator is then unusable and our feed does not distinguish an absent grade breakdown from a real zero. WHAT THE TEST COULD BE RUN ON, because a test that cannot run is not a pass: 336 of the 1,244 priced cards carry a PSA 10 or PSA 9 sold median at the two-sale bar, and 205 of those 336 also carry a `population_snapshots` row, so the test is evaluable on 205 and not evaluable on 131, which hold a sold median and no registry line at all. None of the 205 fails at either bar. The test was run over all 1,244 priced cards before any graded figure was computed and removed none of them, so the graded population here is the full 1,244; a stricter bar of 1 sale per copy would also have removed none. The same test removes 4 cards in Sun & Moon, 8 in Diamond & Pearl and 11 in the vintage Japanese census, against 4, 16 and 26 at a bar of 1. "No recorded graded sale" was checked across every grade our tape carries, PSA, BGS and CGC alike, not only the two PSA grades this study reports. No PSA population absolute is summed across cards, because many products share one registry line. EXCLUSIONS BY WAVE BOUNDARY: the ten English Black Star Promo families are not in this study and are the ground of are Black Star promos worth anything; the Japanese McDonald's set is the ground of McDonald's Pokemon cards value; two named English promo cards have their own studies, Mewtwo & Mew GX SM191 and Special Delivery Charizard. No Japanese set has a working page on this site, so Japanese set names here are plain prose while their CARDS are linked normally. There is no set-value series for any Japanese set and the set screen's catalog list filters to English, so both surfaces 404. We probed rather than assumed: on 2026-09-23 we fetched /set/ and /research/set-screen/ for SM-P: Sun & Moon Promos, CoroCoro Promotional Cards, SV2a: Pokemon Card 151, Expansion Pack, Pokemon VS, Split Earth and 金、銀、新世界へ..., and read the title back on each; all 404. One spelling is worse than a 404: `/set/ポケモンカード151` and `/research/set-screen/ポケモンカード151` both return 200 and render the ENGLISH 151 set, because the slug normaliser strips non-ASCII characters and leaves the string "151". Neither is linked from this study. Related: the most graded cards in Pokemon, hard to gem, Japanese slabs, cards with a price and no sale, and the companion censuses vintage Japanese Pokemon card prices, Japanese 151 vs English 151, Sun and Moon era card prices and Diamond and Pearl era card prices.