The Commons That Are Not Bulk: 315 Set Commons Are Worth $5 or More, and Every Skyridge Common Is One of Them

Bulk is the box of commons nobody sorts. Bulk's Hidden Floor measured the bottom of that box and found that twenty-five years of attrition lifted the worst WotC cards to $2.34 while the worst modern cards sit at seven cents. This piece is about the top of the same box: the commons that a sorter would pull if they knew what to look for. We took every English card with the catalog rarity Common from a regular set, 5,153 of them with a recorded market price, and ranked them. Most are bulk. A few hundred are not, and they cluster in ways that are easy to remember.

Of 5,153 English set commons with a recorded price, 733 are under ten cents, 2,593 (50.3%) are under a quarter and 3,736 (72.5%) are under fifty cents. The ninetieth percentile is $2.44. All 5,153 together are worth $9,015 at market, 2.0% of the $444,871 that every priced English card in our catalog sums to, on 24% of the cards. That is bulk. The rim is the last percentile: the ninety-ninth percentile common is $31.39, 897 commons (17.4%) are worth a dollar or more, 315 are worth $5 or more, and six are worth $100 or more. Uncommons look the same: 4,686 priced, median $0.28, 323 at $5 or more, one above $100.

Twenty cards, three sources. Eleven are from Skyridge, Aquapolis and Expedition Base Set, the three e-Reader sets of 2002 and 2003, printed at the low point of the game's popularity and never reprinted; the usual explanation is that few packs were bought, which the price data is consistent with but cannot prove. Seven are basic energy cards from Call of Legends and HeartGold SoulSilver, the holographic basic energies that came one to a pack. Two are Delta Species Dittos, a set within a set of ten Ditto commons and uncommons, nine of which are worth $50 or more. Inside the e-Reader rows the species effect is visible too: a Psyduck, a Pikachu, a Snorlax and a Magikarp lead sets whose other commons are cheaper, the same force The Casting Premium measured at the other end of the price list.

The surprise in this table is the last row. Base Set, the most famous set in the game, has commons with a median of 97 cents; only two of its 38 priced commons reach $5. Its value sits in its holos. Skyridge's commons carry a median of $25.31, twenty-six times Base Set's, and the whole run of 73 sums to $2,378, more than the commons of the next four sets combined. Print-Run Archaeology read registry depth as a print proxy; the price of a common is arguably a cleaner one, because far fewer commons are graded for the premium. A common is rarely worth $25 unless there are very few of them.

The wall is at 2014. WotC commons have a median of $1.65 and 31.8% of them are $5 cards. EX-era commons have a median of 94 cents. From XY onward the median is 24 cents or less, the ninety-ninth percentile Scarlet & Violet common is 32 cents, and exactly five commons from the main-line sets of the last twelve years have reached $5: Azurill from Cosmic Eclipse at $9.65, Alolan Vulpix from Ultra Prism at $6.36, Pikachu from Unified Minds at $5.54, Pikachu from Furious Fists at $5.46 and Charmander from Dragon Majesty at $5.06. The most valuable Scarlet & Violet common is a Metang at $4.26, and the most valuable Mega Evolution common is 43 cents. The one modern exception is the 2016 Generations Radiant Collection, a small side set whose commons behave like an older era: 12 of its 41 are $5 cards, led by Espurr at $23.70 and Charmander at $21.26. The plain reading is that modern main-line print runs are large enough that scarcity never reaches the common slot, and the launch curve does the rest; the data shows the wall, not its cause.

We compared each set's most valuable common with the median price of its holos and rares. In 39 of 121 sets the common wins, and energy is usually why. In HeartGold SoulSilver the $56.21 Darkness Energy is 5.5 times the set's median holo of $10.18, and nine commons beat that median; in Call of Legends the ratio is the same 5.5x and seven commons clear it; in Black & White a $7.52 Water Energy beats the $1.48 median holo and nine commons do. The holo basic energies were one per pack and, on the evidence of what survives, mostly went into decks rather than binders. Twenty years later they are the set's most valuable commons.

Against a $0.24 median for all commons, a Bulbasaur common has a median of $4.78, a Squirtle $3.94, a Pikachu $3.54 with 20 of its 44 set commons at $5 or more. The starters and the mascot are the one thing that lifts a modern common at all: four of the five post-2014 commons above $5 are a Pikachu, a Charmander or an Alolan Vulpix. Painter or Pokemon found the creature explains 40% of a card's rank; in the common slot, where the art is small and the rarity is nothing, it is close to the whole story.

The graded tape on commons is thinner than the raw one: English set commons carry 1,131,524 PSA slabs across 4,909 registry lines, 30.2% of them tens, and 787 commons and uncommons in this universe have a PSA sold median on three or more sales, 280 of them a PSA 10 median. Where they do, the multiple is the hard-to-gem one: a Psyduck that gems 58 times in 550 attempts sells as a PSA 10 at 6.0 times raw, a Skyridge Snorlax at 14.2 times, an Expedition Squirtle at 15.5 times, and a Furious Fists Pikachu worth $5.46 raw sells as a PSA 9 at $188.49, 34.5 times raw; the likely reason is that a modern common is rarely submitted unless it is already clean, which the sample sizes here cannot confirm. None of these are grading recommendations; the fee is a fixed cost and the registry counts above include lines whose PSA 10 count our provider has never recorded, which we print as absent, not zero.

Universe: English cards in our catalog whose catalog rarity is Common (or Uncommon where stated), from regular sets with a printed total of 60 or more, excluding sets whose names mark them as promos, kits, decks, collections, box sets or event products (that name filter also removed Legendary Collection and Team Magma vs Team Aqua, about 68 commons between them); 5,153 commons and 4,686 uncommons with a recorded market price. The 1,024 English promo and kit cards labelled Common were measured separately and excluded (see the callout). Market price is the median of our recorded daily TCGplayer market price for the flagship printing over the eleven daily buckets to 2026-09-14; reverse holo and first edition printings are not separate rows here. Era follows the set prefix. Per-set and per-species rows require the stated minimum count; species groups match on the card name with any parenthetical suffix removed. The set comparison takes each set's most valuable common against the median price of its holo, ultra, secret and illustration rares, over 121 sets with at least 10 priced commons and 5 such rares. PSA sold medians are the latest snapshot in our graded tape with three or more verified eBay sales; registry counts are the latest PSA population snapshot per card, and a PSA 10 count of zero is treated as unrecorded. Illustrator names come from the catalog and are blank for energy cards. Recorded prices for thin cards can rest on very few sales and move on one relisting. Not financial advice.