Ken Sugimori's New Pikachu Points Back at Jungle #60, and a Prize Pack Charizard VMAX Jumped 81%. Here's Why.

On Tuesday, Pokemon revealed the first of the thirty Pikachu cards coming in 30th Celebration, and Ken Sugimori drew it. Sugimori also drew the Pikachu in Jungle back in 1999, which is why a lot of collectors spent this week looking up a card that costs about as much as lunch. The biggest percentage gainer on our price board went the other way: a Charizard VMAX worth over a thousand dollars that has exactly one copy listed for sale on TCGplayer. Two very different kinds of movement, and only one of them is happening in a market.

What's hot: Pikachu (Jungle #60/64)

30th Celebration arrives worldwide on Wednesday, September 16, every booster pack contains one of thirty different Pikachu illustrations, and PokeBeach reported on August 11 that the Sugimori version is labeled as the first Pikachu in the set. Wargamer covered it the same day and described the art as a rounder, chubbier Pikachu than the modern design, drawn the way he looked in the nineties.

Which old card the new one is quoting matters, because that is the card people go buy. Wargamer read it as a reimagining of the Base Set Pikachu, while PokeBeach and most of the collectors posting about it read it as the Jungle Pikachu. The card itself settles the argument. Pull up Jungle #60/64 and the credit line at the bottom reads "Illus. Ken Sugimori," and the art puts Pikachu in a patch of forest, which is the setting the new card recreates.

The attention is real and easy to measure. We read the three biggest Pokemon subreddits every day, and Thursday's pass pulled 331 posts, nine of which had Pikachu in the title. The reveal thread was one of them. So was a post titled "Pikachu was the best investment," and a couple of people asking what their old Pikachus are worth.

Now the prices, all pulled today rather than quoted from a summary. TCGplayer has the 1st Edition Jungle Pikachu at a $26.42 market price with the mid around $24.99, and the Unlimited print at $6.36. PriceCharting reads $22.14 blended ungraded for the 1st Edition and $2.99 for the Unlimited, and that $2.99 is a condition average across twenty seven years of played copies rather than anything you would pay for a clean one.

Then the graded ladder, which is where this card gets interesting. PriceCharting today has the 1st Edition at $69.75 in a Grade 8, $177.84 in a Grade 9, $224.86 in a 9.5 and $1,262.49 in a PSA 10. The Unlimited print runs $61.08 for a 9 and $520.30 for a PSA 10. Against raw, that is roughly 57x for the 1st Edition and about 174x for the Unlimited.

Do not read those multiples as free money. We wrote a whole post on why a huge PSA 10 multiplier is usually a trap, and this card is a textbook case: the market is pricing in a very low chance that any given raw copy comes back a 10. Look at what you are sending in. A 1999 common with a wide yellow border that shows every speck of whitening, a print run with famously loose centering, and twenty seven years of binder time. Those are exactly the two things that decide whether a card gems, and they are both working against you.

The honest angle for a flipper: at $6.36 the Unlimited copy is cheap enough that a submission is a lottery ticket you can afford. Card plus the $79.99 fee plus postage both ways runs about $101 all in, a PSA 10 nets roughly $450 after eBay takes its cut and a Grade 9 nets about $53, so you need to gem roughly one submission in eight before the math turns positive. On the 1st Edition at $26.42, the Grade 9 at $177.84 covers the fee comfortably on its own, which makes that the version worth pre-grading carefully. If you just want exposure to the anniversary, buying a slab someone else already gambled on is the cheaper way in.

Biggest gainer: Charizard VMAX (Prize Pack Series One #020/189)

This one topped our gainer list at plus 81.3%, moving from an $800 market price on August 8 to $1,450 on August 9. It has read exactly $1,450 every day since, which is the first clue.

The card is the Play! Pokemon Prize Pack Series One version of Charizard VMAX. Bulbapedia dates that series to November 9, 2022, handed out through organized play events, with each card keeping its original set number and carrying the Play! Pokemon logo as a stamp. So it looks like the Darkness Ablaze 020/189 in every way except the stamp on the lower right, and it never went through a retail booster.

Here is the second clue. We pulled the live listing board for it this afternoon, and there is one listing. One. A single near mint English copy at $2,999 plus $1.49 shipping, which is more than twice the price that got quoted as the market. PriceCharting is not seeing anything different: its blended ungraded figure sits at $1,287.50, with a Grade 8 at $1,063.50, a Grade 9 at $1,170 and a 9.5 at $1,287. It does not print a PSA 10 number at all, which usually means there has been no recent sale to print.

The rest of the category tells the same story, and this is the part worth your time. Seven Prize Pack products showed up in our top forty gainers this week. Glaceon VSTAR SWSH197 climbed 16.9% to $324.99 and has zero listings on TCGplayer right now. Galarian Zapdos 082/203 gained 14.9% and has ten listings, none of which is a near mint English copy. Galarian Articuno 063/203 quotes a $6.61 market while its cheapest near mint copy delivers at $26.50. Umbreon V 094/203 quotes $102.86 with the cheapest real copy at $110, then nothing until $171.

So is the move sustainable? It is not really a move. Prize Pack cards came out of event distribution and no retail product contains them, so the float has been fixed since 2022 and it only shrinks as copies go into collections. Boards that thin do not produce prices, they produce the last number somebody typed. This is the difference we drew in our post on arbitrage gaps between a spread you can trade and a spread that only exists in a database.

For a flipper the actionable read is the graded ladder, and it is unusual. A raw copy blends at $1,287.50 while a Grade 9 sells for $1,170 and a 9.5 for $1,287. Sending this card to PSA costs you money at every outcome except a 10, and there is no PSA 10 comp on the board to underwrite the attempt. That is the exact setup we covered in when a PSA grade makes your card worth less. If you already own one, leave it raw. If you are tempted by the $1,450 figure, understand that the only way to act on it today is to pay $3,000.

What both cards are telling you

Last week we wrote about a 2015 Primal Kyogre and a one dollar Metang as two opposite engines in a flat market. This week gave us a cleaner version of the same lesson. The Pikachu is attention arriving before price, on a card with a deep and liquid board where you can act at a real number whenever you decide to. The Charizard is a price arriving without a market, on a board with one seller and no sales.

One concrete habit to take from this: before you act on any market price, open the listing board and count the near mint English copies. Under five, treat the number as a rumor. It costs thirty seconds, and this week it is the gap between a card that blends at $1,287.50 and the $2,999 you would actually have to pay.

Both halves of this post are also calls we are putting on the record, and we will grade ourselves on them in a later post whether they land or not. On Jungle Pikachu we are bullish through the anniversary: by October 15 we expect the 1st Edition ungraded figure to be above today's $22.14, and the PSA 10 to hold above $1,100, because 30th Celebration creates thirty new Pikachu cards and exactly zero new copies of this one. On the Prize Pack Charizard VMAX we are cautious on the quoted price and mildly bullish on the underlying: by October 15 we expect PriceCharting's blended ungraded figure to be above $1,287.50 as the last copies get absorbed, and we expect the live board to still be under five near mint English listings. Buying at $2,999 today is not the way to express that.