Flying Pikachu Is Trending on a $2 Million Sale and Morpeko ex Jumped 49%. Here's Why.

There are two completely different clocks running in the Pokemon market this week, and each one moved a card. One is a slow squeeze on a 2009 secret rare that nobody is printing more of, accelerated by the single biggest private sale the hobby has ever seen. The other is a two-week-old chase card that fell off a cliff at launch and just bounced hard enough to top every gainer list in the UK. Neither move means what the headline number says it means, so let's go through both.

What's hot: Flying Pikachu (Rising Rivals #113/111)

On July 22 a 1998 CoroCoro Comics Promo Illustrator Pikachu graded BGS 9 changed hands privately for $2 million, which Sports Illustrated logged as the top TCG sale of the week. That number did what every record sale does: it dragged the word "Pikachu" into every feed at once. It also landed six weeks before the 30th Celebration set arrives on September 16, an expansion where every booster pack is guaranteed to contain one of 30 different Pikachu illustrations, each by a different artist. Attention plus a Pikachu-saturated release equals people going back through old Pikachu variants looking for the ones that were already scarce.

Flying Pikachu 113/111 is the one they found. TCGplayer flagged it in their July 28 spikes column as nearly gone from the marketplace, and the data backs that up. As of today the TCGplayer holofoil market price is $172.70, up 36.8% over 30 days, with the lowest listed copy at $115 and the direct-low at $140. That is a thin, tightening board. PriceCharting's blended ungraded figure reads $116.18, which is a lagging loose-copy average rather than a live near-mint ask, so treat the $115 to $172 range as the real spread and not as two contradictory prices.

The graded ladder is where this gets interesting. Live PriceCharting today: Grade 8 $472.48, Grade 9 $623.60, Grade 9.5 $745.50, PSA 10 $1,527.46. That is a 2.45x step from a 9 to a 10, which is tight by modern standards, and it means the PSA 9 is not the consolation prize it usually is. Against a $172.70 raw copy, even a 9 is roughly 3.6x before fees. Most of the cards we cover have a brutal cliff between the two grades, so this one is a genuine exception to the usual PSA 9 versus PSA 10 math.

Flipper's angle: grade it, but understand what you are betting against. The 2009 Platinum-era print has the failure modes you would expect, edge wear on the yellow border and holo scratching across that balloon-heavy sky, so the gem rate is not friendly. The bigger risk is the calendar. Only a handful of the 30 Pikachu illustrations in 30th Celebration have been revealed so far, and Flying Pikachu is not among them. If it shows up in that set, the run stalls the same way reprint announcements have knocked original printings around all year. Submitting now also means your slab likely returns near or after the September 16 release, which is exactly the turnaround-window risk we broke down earlier this month. If you already own a clean copy, this is a good week to send it. If you are buying at $172 to grade, you are paying for a run that already happened and taking reprint risk on top.

Biggest gainer: Morpeko ex (Pitch Black #117/084)

Monster Card Corner's movers table for the week ending July 26 put Morpeko ex on top at plus 49.0%, from GBP 48.64 to GBP 72.48, a GBP 23.84 gain in seven days. TCGplayer called out the same card in its own weekly column, noting the NC Empire illustration has now eclipsed the artist's previous high-water mark. Two independent trackers, same card, same week. The move is real.

The context is not what plus 49% suggests. Pitch Black released July 17, which we covered when Mega Darkrai ex was still a week out. This Special Illustration Rare traded around $193 in the English presale window and then did exactly what new-set chase cards do: it fell. Cardrake still shows it down 32.6% over 30 days even after the bounce. So the biggest gainer of the week is a card that is deeply negative on the month. It did not break out. It found a floor and lifted off it.

Live PriceCharting numbers today: Ungraded $116.28, Grade 9 $161.88, Grade 9.5 $178.00, PSA 10 $618.23. US market listings sit around $130. That PSA 10 is a 5.3x multiple on raw, which looks appetizing until you notice the Grade 9 at $161.88 barely clears the raw price once you subtract grading and selling fees. This is a pure gem-rate bet, and it is a gem-rate bet on a card whose PSA population is two weeks old. That comp is built on a handful of early submissions and it will soften as pop grows, which is the same trap we mapped in the PSA 10 multiplier post.

Flipper's angle: this bounce is an exit, not an entry. Pitch Black is still being bulk-opened. Every prior set we have tracked through this window says supply, not popularity, sets the price for the first six to ten weeks, which is the whole argument in our piece on what happens when new set chase cards drop. A 49% recovery inside an active supply wave is the market testing whether the floor holds, not a signal that the launch value is coming back. If you pulled one, list it into this strength. If you are grading, do it because you have a visually flawless copy and a long horizon, not because $618 is on the screen today.

Scoring the calls we already made

Two bullish calls from June 18 are close enough to their review date to grade honestly, and both missed the same way. We called N's Zoroark ex SIR (Journey Together #185) bullish at $52.42 raw with a $180.06 PSA 10. Today it reads $46.43 ungraded and $149.99 in a 10. We called Darkrai VSTAR (Crown Zenith #GG50) bullish at $117.36 raw with a $369 PSA 10. Today it reads $94.44 ungraded and $315 in a 10. The raw legs held up better than the graded legs in both cases, which is a pattern we have now written down four separate times: when you go bullish on a card that has already spiked, the raw price tends to stall and the PSA 10 comp is the part that quietly bleeds. Neither call was catastrophic. Both were wrong.

What both moves tell you

Flying Pikachu is being bid on scarcity plus a headline. Morpeko ex is being bid on a supply wave finally slowing down. Those are opposite mechanisms, and they should be traded in opposite directions. Scarcity plus attention rewards patience and punishes chasing, so the play there is to check what you already own rather than buy the top. A post-launch bounce rewards selling into strength, because the supply is still coming.

One concrete thing to do this week: go through any Platinum-era bulk you have and look for a 113/111 in the bottom right corner. Rising Rivals sat in binders for fifteen years as a forgettable set, and a lot of those copies are still sitting raw with people who have not looked at a price in a decade. Then run whatever you find through Flipr against both the raw and the PSA 9 comp, because on this particular card the 9 is worth grading for, which is rarer than it sounds.