Magikarp & Wailord GX 161/181: $882 and 77 Comps

Magikarp & Wailord GX 161/181 from Team Up asks $882.13 and its PSA 10 sells for a median $4,275.00 across 77 verified sales, both read September 23 2026. It is the third most expensive of the 196 English cards we price in the set and the second most expensive of the 106 English tag-team cards that clear our graded-ladder gates. Its PSA 10 premium of 4.85x sits at the 22nd percentile of that 5,879-product cohort, against a median of 12.35x. The card that explains why is the promo version of the same artwork, which gems 0.69% of the time and has no recorded PSA 10 sale at all.

This card is not one of the 143 cohort members carrying all seven recorded grades. We hold three: PSA 10, PSA 9 and CGC 10. The other four rungs are absent rather than zero, and on a card with 77 lifetime PSA 10 sales that absence is itself information about how thinly it trades in a slab.

The PSA 10 fetches 3.47 times the PSA 9, narrower than the 4.21x median across the 4,696 cohort members carrying both grades, and 1.52 times the CGC 10, narrower again than the 2.50x median across our full-ladder products. The CGC figure rests on four sales and is printed with that count rather than dropped; it is not a market price, and the catalog-wide version of the comparison it gestures at is is a CGC 10 worth a PSA 10.

Eight products in our catalog are named Magikarp & Wailord GX after folding for accents, apostrophes and the provider's number suffix. Three are English cards in Team Up, one is an SM Black Star Promo, and four are Japanese cards from SM9: Tag Bolt. The promo is the one that changes how you read this card.

One further Japanese row, SM9: Tag Bolt 099/095, carries no price on the day and is named here rather than shown as a blank. Japanese set names are unlinked prose on this site because Japanese sets have no page of any kind; their cards link normally.

SM166, the promo, has 1,443 recorded submissions and ten tens. Its only graded row on our tape is a PSA 9 at $1,973.00 on 27 verified sales, which is 46% of what the Team Up card's PSA 10 fetches and 1.60 times what its PSA 9 fetches. That is the hard-card pattern named in fifteen tens from 12,323 tries: where the ten almost never happens, the market trades the nine and prices it accordingly. The promo's PSA 9 row passes the same test we apply everywhere here, 27 verified sales against 168 recorded PSA 9s on the line, so the rate is printed as recorded. The promo family itself is are Black Star Promos worth anything, and the English era both cards sit in is Sun & Moon era card prices.

Inside its own set it is third of 196 English products by ask, behind Latias & Latios GX at $3,910.42 and Gengar & Mimikyu GX at $2,020.10. Inside the 106-card English tag-team population it is second by ask, 24th by verified PSA 10 sales and 64th by premium, and second rather than third because Latias & Latios GX is not in that population at all: its PSA registry line is one of the 883 our shared-line detector flags, so it fails the cohort's unshared-line gate and its population figure is withheld in the table below. The set totals $11,467.87 across those 196 cards on the day-20719 ask tape; the set page prints a different number from the separate `sethist2` index, and the two instruments are not reconciled here.

Our graded tape is keyed two ways, by catalog id and by TCGplayer product id, and this card has rows under both. The catalog-id key sm9-161 was last written on August 10 2026 and holds a PSA 10 median of $3,892.50 on 63 verified sales. The product-id key 183964 was written on September 23 2026 and holds $4,275.00 on 77 sales. Preferring the catalog id would have quoted this card 8.9% low on a figure that is nowhere marked as stale. Every graded number in this series takes the fresher of the two keyspaces, per grade, and this card is the reason the rule is worth stating.

We hold three registry readings for this card, from September 7 to September 21 2026, a span of 14 recorded days. The line went from 4,414 submissions to 4,467, a gain of 53 slabs, about 3.79 a day and 1.20% of the standing population; 19 of those 53 came back tens. Nineteen of fifty-three is too thin to state as a rate and is printed as the two counts instead. Our recorded PSA 10 median rose 1.39% over the 26 recorded days from August 28 to September 23, from $4,216.29 on 72 verified sales to $4,275.00 on 77. The daily ask tape starts two days later, on August 30, and over its own 24 days the ask rose 4.58% from $843.49 to $882.13. This is the one card of the five where both series rose. The weekly per-card series runs 120 readings from January 27 2025 to September 22 2026, from $314.23 to $882.13, a rise of 180.7%, with its high of $1,014.68 on January 26 2026; the card is 13.1% below that high.

The shared-line detector flagged 883 of 24,385 population keys and did not flag this one, nor the promo's. The grade-by-grade pooling ratio, recorded sales per graded copy against a declared bar of 1.0, passes: 77 verified PSA 10 sales against 2,280 recorded tens is 0.03, and 35 verified PSA 9 sales against 1,235 recorded nines is 0.03. Both absolutes are printed. The same ratio on the promo passes at the only grade it has tape for, 27 PSA 9 sales against 168 recorded nines, which is 0.16 and the fifth highest of the 114 rows this series can compute it on. The companion assertion, that no printed median predates the daily tape, removes one row across the 66 products this series links and none of this card's.

The raw price is an ASK and every graded price is a SOLD median, so 4.85x divides a listing by a transaction. 77 lifetime PSA 10 sales is a real tape but a thin one for a card at this price, and four CGC 10 sales is not a market. No fee, postage, wait or failure rate is in any multiple here. The registry window is 14 recorded days and 53 slabs, which supports a growth figure and does not support a gem-rate drift claim, so none is made. Where a card at this price actually trades, as opposed to what it asks, is the subject of the liquidity ledger.

The claim is that this card sits in the top 1% of the cohort by price and the bottom quarter by premium, and that the promo of the same artwork is a fundamentally different grading product. A recompute placing 161/181 outside the top five of Team Up by ask, or above the cohort median by premium, would overturn the first. A PSA 10 sold median appearing on SM166 at a rate consistent with a 0.69% gem rate would overturn the second. Related card studies: Mewtwo & Mew GX SM191, Special Delivery Charizard, M Charizard EX from Evolutions, Alakazam ex from 151.

Sources: the `cards` catalog, `price_history`, `graded_snapshots` and `population_snapshots` in production, read on day 20719, September 23 2026. The card is resolved by NAME AND NUMBER: Magikarp & Wailord GX, number 161, set Team Up, catalog id sm9-161, TCGplayer product id 183964. A folded same-name sweep across all 62,388 products, stripping accents, apostrophes, the gender signs and the provider's trailing number suffix, returns eight products; seven carry a price on the day and are tabled, one Japanese row does not and is named in prose. RAW is an ASK, the day-20719 `price_history` reading. GRADED figures are SOLD medians over verified completed sales with the count beside them, latest `graded_snapshots` row per grade across BOTH keyspaces with the fresher row winning. This card is the case that rule exists for: its catalog-id key sm9-161 last wrote on day 20675, August 10 2026, at a PSA 10 median of $3,892.50 on 63 sales, while its product-id key 183964 wrote on day 20719 at $4,275.00 on 77 sales, and only the latter is used. REGISTRY is `population_snapshots`, latest reading per key, September 21 2026 for this card; the latest day differs per card across this series. Gem rates pass `gemRateIsTrustworthy()`; the September 14 reading on this card records an absent PSA 10 breakdown and is excluded, so the growth window runs September 7 to September 21. Line sharing is tested by `sharedRegistryKeys()` over all 24,385 population keys (883 flagged, 788 products affected, neither this card nor smp-SM166 among them; sm9-170 IS among them, so its registry is withheld in the Team Up table and it is absent from the tag-team population) and by the grade-by-grade pooling ratio described below. Two assertions run over the graded rows this series prints, and they do not cover the same rows. STALENESS: on every product this module prints a graded figure for, and after the fresher-keyspace rule, any median dated before day 20695, the first day of the current daily tape, is dropped, because the never-refreshed catalog-id keyspace holds rows old enough to invert against their own neighbouring grade. That assertion runs on all 258 graded rows the 66 products this module links carry, at every grade and every grader, and removes exactly one, a CGC 10 dated day 20694 on a card whose graded figures are not printed here, leaving 257. The cohort below is built WITHOUT that gate: applied across the whole catalog it drops nine PSA 10 medians, leaving 8,684 products with a PSA 10 median on two or more sales and a cohort of 5,871, 4,183 English and 1,688 Japanese, and no rank printed in this series moves by more than seven places. POOLING RATIO: recorded sales at a grade divided by the registry count at that grade. This is NOT an impossibility test, and calling it one would be wrong: `graded_snapshots` counts SALES and one slab can sell more than once, so a ratio above 1 is evidence that a graded key is pooling another product, not a physical contradiction. The declared bar is 1.0. `population_snapshots` records a per-grade count at PSA 10 and PSA 9 only, so the ratio is computable on 114 of those 257 rows and on no BGS or CGC row at all; the highest of the 114 is 0.94, 29 PSA 10 sales against the 31 tens on the Wizards-era Eevee's line, and only three exceed 0.5. THE COHORT: 62,388 products after deduplicating 63,600 catalog rows on the TCGplayer product id; 5,879 carry an ask, a PSA 10 median on two or more verified sales, a trustworthy gem rate and an unshared registry line. THE TAG-TEAM POPULATION is the 106 cohort members whose English name contains an ampersand and ends GX, ex or EX. Percentile is the share of the cohort strictly below this card's value; medians are upper-middle on even samples. The Team Up total of $11,467.87 is a same-day sum of `price_history` over the 196 English products we price in the set, a different instrument from the `sethist2` index the set page prints. The weekly per-card series is `ppthist:183964`, first reading January 27 2025, last September 22 2026. Not financial advice.