The Most Graded Cards in Pokemon: a Japanese Promo Pikachu Has 329,337 PSA Slabs and Nothing Else Is Close

Ask a collector which Pokemon card PSA has graded the most and the answer is usually Base Set Charizard. It is not even the deepest English line. Our daily registry snapshots cover 24,174 cards and 29,412,136 PSA slabs, and the top of that table is a Japanese promo Pikachu with 329,337 slabs, then the Felt Hat Pikachu, then a with-purchase Mega Charizard X whose line gained 5,371 slabs in a single provider refresh in late August. Charizard is fourth among distinct lines. This piece walks the top of the registry, the velocity behind it, and the data problems that had to be cleared before any ranking was honest.

The registry is a steep pyramid. Of the 24,174 provider lines we snapshot, 8 sit at 100,000 slabs or more, 29 sit between 50,000 and 100,000, 639 between 10,000 and 50,000, 3,547 between 1,000 and 10,000, 6,920 between 100 and 1,000, and 13,031 have fewer than 100 slabs. The 676 lines at 10,000 or above hold 15.7 million of the 29.4 million, which is 53.5% of every PSA-graded copy we can see, concentrated in 2.8% of the cards. That concentration is the same shape the population growth tax and the basement of the registry found from other angles: a small number of modern chase cards and promos are graded at industrial scale, and the long tail is barely graded at all.

Read the gem-rate column against the slab column and the registry splits into two businesses. The promo and modern-chase lines gem at 42 to 60 percent: the Felt Hat at 42.6%, the MEP Mega Charizard X at 48.0%, Charizard V at 56.3%, the Classic Collection Charizard at 59.0%. The likeliest reading is that those registries are deep because grading them is a trade that works, the mechanism Everyone Grades the Freebies laid out for the MEP program. The vintage lines are deep for the opposite reason. Base Set Charizard has 105,288 slabs and 490 tens, a 0.5% gem rate; Base Set Blastoise is 0.7%; Evolutions Charizard, a 2016 card, is 1.1%. The plausible explanation is that people grade those to authenticate and to hold rather than to gem, so the registry reads as a census of surviving copies rather than a production line of tens.

Depth tells you what was graded. The per-day column tells you what is being graded now, and it reorders the table. Among the lines in the tables above, the fastest by that arithmetic are all 2025 and 2026 product: the MEP Mega Charizard X ex at 298 a day (one refresh, see the callout), the Japanese Pikachu 020/M-P promo at 268 a day, the Japanese M2 Inferno X Mega Charizard X at 146 a day, and the English Phantasmal Flames Mega Charizard X ex at 130 a day. Deeper in the registry, below the depth cut of these tables, several Mega Evolution era lines move faster still: the Ascended Heroes Mega Gengar ex added 5,231 in 22 days, about 238 a day, on a registry of only 19,879. The vintage giants crawl by comparison: Base Set Charizard at 49 a day on its 105,288, Charizard V at 11 a day, Evolutions Charizard at 11 a day. A registry that adds 11 copies a day to 90,689 is growing 0.4% a month, which is the closed-registry condition The Registry Is Closed described for Dark Charizard, now visible at ten times the scale.

The Japanese lines we track are fewer, and several of them are deeper than anything in English. The Pikachu 020/M-P promo has 329,337 PSA slabs, 2.8 times the Felt Hat, with 288,362 of them PSA 10s, an 87.6% gem rate, and it is still adding 268 a day. Every Japanese line in the top twelve gems between 74.9% and 91.2%, against 0.5% to 74.8% for the English table above. Japanese print quality and centering are the usual explanation offered for the gem rates; whatever the cause, a card that tens nine times in ten is cheap to grade at scale, which is consistent with registries this deep.

Summed by set, as the provider reports the lines and before any collision dedupe, the two deepest registries are the SVP Black Star Promo program at 887,865 slabs over 215 tracked cards and 151 at 883,747 over 179. Dedupe the lines at 10,000 slabs and above by the collision rule below and the order flips: 151 at 850,019 edges the SVP program at 823,452, and Paldean Fates loses more than half its summed depth (472,269 to 230,929) because six of its lines are one Mew ex registry counted six times. Behind the top two sit the SWSH promo program, then four Japanese sets, then the Crown Zenith Galarian Gallery at 564,857 over 70 cards, which is 8,069 slabs per card, 3.7 times the per-card depth of Destined Rivals. The Japanese sets carry the highest per-card depth by a wide margin, which is at least partly an artefact of coverage: we track few of their cards and mostly the ones that get graded. Terastal Festival ex averages 22,524 slabs per tracked card.

Our population feed keys the PSA registry by TCGplayer product, and for a meaningful number of products it returns the same registry line for two or more cards. The tell is a pair of lines whose totals and PSA 10 counts agree to within a percent: Base Set Charizard appears three times: the Base Set card, the Shadowless card, and the Base Set 2 card. Both of the latter were remapped this week. The Base Set 2 line read 24,290 through 2026-09-08 and 105,294 by 2026-09-09; the Shadowless line read 14,838 with 58 tens on 2026-09-03 and 105,145 with 489 tens on 2026-09-10, which means it previously carried its own registry of about 14,800 and now mirrors the Base Set line. Nothing in the grading of either card explains a jump of that size in a day. The Felt Hat appears twice. Four other Paldean Fates cards share a line with Mew ex. Two Phantasmal Flames double rares share one. The tables above keep one line per such cluster and count the larger; the band counts in the second section and the set table are provider lines, which is why the bands say 8 above 100,000 while the distinct count is 5. This is a provider defect to fix upstream, and until it is fixed every registry-depth ranking built on this feed, ours included, will over-count clustered lines if it does not dedupe them.

Source: our daily PSA population snapshots (24,174 provider lines keyed by TCGplayer product id) as of 2026-09-12, using the most recent snapshot per line, taken between 2026-09-06 and 2026-09-12 for all but one line; PSA 10 fallbacks reach back to 2026-09-03. Slab totals and PSA 10 counts are the provider's pass-through of the PSA registry; a PSA 10 count of zero on the latest snapshot is treated as absent, not zero, and the most recent snapshot carrying a count is used instead (the rule in The Gem Rate Curve). Recent growth is the latest total minus the total at the nearest snapshot at least 14 days earlier, or the earliest snapshot when none is that old, spans 15 to 29 days, expressed per day; lines with a single snapshot print n/a. A per-day figure is arithmetic over the window and can hide a single-step provider refresh, as the MEP line shows. Collision rule: two lines whose totals agree within 1% and whose PSA 10 counts agree within 1.5% are counted once, keeping the larger; the Base Set 2 Charizard line is excluded as a provider remap. The headline slab total, the band counts, and the set table count provider lines without dedupe; the deduped set figures quoted in the prose apply the rule to lines at 10,000 slabs and above only. Set sums cover the 22,935 lines that match a catalog set; 1,239 do not and are excluded from the set table only. The headline PSA 10 total applies the zero-as-absent rule. Japanese card names are translated from the catalog's Japanese names. Registry depth per card is the provider's figure and is not a print-run estimate; see Print-Run Archaeology for what it can and cannot say about supply. Not financial advice.