Breakdown: All 975,662 of PSA's 1,000,000 Pokémon Cards

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I decided to write a little tool last night to scrape PSA’s website to extract all entries related to Pokemon.

Here are the results, separated by set: Google Sheets.

In total there are 975,662 Pokémon cards graded. Why is this number lower than PSA’s claimed 1,000,000? Probably because this excludes graded packs and third-party cards like Topsun, Bandai, Topps, etc, and PSA’s database might not be 100% up to date (although I did get a PSA submission back 2 days ago and those entries are present).

Do I believe that Hidden Fates Charizard to be the 1,000,000th card PSA has graded? It’s unlikely. I imagine PSA did this as it’s an iconic modern card - something which the next few sets likely won’t have.

Trivia

  • 7,472 cards have received half grades (i.e. PSA 8.5).
  • 1,833 cards have received a qualifier (e.g. OC for off centre).
  • Base Set accounts for 16.83% of all Pokémon cards graded.
  • There are almost as many English Base Set Charizards graded (15,513) as there are Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish cards graded combined (15,555).

Top 6 Most Popular Sets

  1. 164,654 - English Base Set
  2. 43,011 - Japanese Pokémon Song Best Collection CD
  3. 35,600 - English Fossil
  4. 33,980 - English Team Rocket
  5. 32,753 - English Jungle
  6. 24,460 - English XY Evolutions

I’ll stop with the stats here so you guys can have some fun with the numbers.

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I think it’s interesting. I remember a few years ago some of us theorized that XY Evolutions would bring a large segment of new and old collectors back into the franchise. I wonder if the fact that the top sets we see (where you have WOTC era for the first ones and the XY Evolutions as the last) are indicative of that growth/interest.

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Why are there 2 of ex Crystal Guardians

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I knew Base is the bread and butter, but somehow this stat still surprised me.
But 164,654 out of 975,662 Pokémon TCG cards, now that’s a lot of volume!
That’s anywhere from 6.750814 to 7.40943 metric tons worth of Base set.

I wonder just how many of these were graded by @garyis2000 .
I’m thinking easily over half of these, right?

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Ah, well spotted. One of those was supposed to be EX Dragon Frontiers. I’ve corrected that.

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This was surprising to me, too. It means that statistically for every 100 cards submitted to PSA, 17 of those are likely to be base set and 1 of those is likely to be a Base Set Charizard of some sort. I guess a lot of people have their childhood collections and when PSA 3 unlimited Blastoises sell for between $25 and $30 it makes sense to have them graded.

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@melchior,About 30k but many jumped on the bandwagon immediately thinking they’d make a quick buck.

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well this is just amazing