Mega Greninja ex PSA 10 Price Fell 42% in Two Months

On August 3 we ran the grading math on seven Pokemon cards and told readers that Mega Greninja ex from Chaos Rising was the one genuinely worth sending to PSA. The number behind that call was a break-even gem rate of 20.6%, meaning you only had to pull a PSA 10 on one card in five for making the slab to beat buying a finished one. Two months later the raw card has fallen from $226.89 to $142.16, the PSA 10 has fallen from $693.60 to $400.79, and anybody who mailed a copy in that week is probably still waiting on it.

Every price in this post came off PriceCharting on October 5, and the August numbers came off the same site on August 3, so this is one source scored against itself. We are going through all three of the grading calls we published that day because one of them cost real money and the reason is worth writing down.

What Mega Greninja ex is worth right now

Here is the full grade ladder for the Special Illustration Rare, number 116 from Chaos Rising, as of October 5.

Grade	Price
Ungraded	$142.16
PSA 9	$147.57
PSA 9.5	$342.07
PSA 10	$400.79

The structure we liked in August is still there. A PSA 9 sells for slightly more than a clean raw copy, which is unusual and is exactly what makes a submission safe, because a miss still returns most of your money. In August that gap was $32.54. Today it is $5.41.

Rerun the same break-even formula on today's prices and the card still looks like a submission. It needs a 39.9% gem rate to beat buying the slab, and over the last 30 days PSA actually awarded a 10 to 64% of the copies it graded. On paper the trade is alive. The person who took it in August is still down.

3,176 new slabs came back in a single month

This is the part we did not price in. PSA has graded 6,935 English copies of Mega Greninja ex 116 in total: 4,770 of them are PSA 10s and 1,841 are PSA 9s. Of that entire lifetime population, 3,176 grades landed in the last 30 days alone. Nearly half of every graded copy that exists arrived in one month.

It was not just this card, either. Chaos Rising came out on May 22, and across the whole English set PSA has graded 26,971 cards, 16,944 of which came back in the last 30 days. Almost two thirds of a set's graded supply hit the market inside four weeks.

That is what a submission wave looks like from the other side. Everyone who opened the set in late May mailed their best pulls to PSA in June, PSA worked through them together, and they all came home together. The gold Mega Hyper Rare, number 122, tells the same story from a different angle: 2,047 copies graded, 1,086 of them in the last month, and only 502 PSA 10s against 1,133 PSA 9s. Collectors chasing that one are hitting the top grade about a quarter of the time, which is why it still sells for $792.27 in a 10 against $146.18 raw.

A break-even gem rate is a photograph of one afternoon's prices. The thing most likely to move those prices on a four month old set is the pile of submissions your own card is sitting in.

The other two calls from that post

The same August post made two "buy the finished slab instead" calls. Both of those held up, and the cheaper one held up by a lot.

Card	PSA 10 on Aug 3	PSA 10 on Oct 5	Change
Mega Greninja ex (Chaos Rising #116)	$693.60	$400.79	down 42.2%
Darkrai VSTAR (Crown Zenith #GG50)	$300.95	$245.25	down 18.5%
Giratina VSTAR (Crown Zenith #GG69)	$650.00	$551.85	down 15.1%
N's Zoroark ex (Journey Together #185)	$146.62	$143.58	down 2.1%

N's Zoroark ex was the one we said absolutely not to grade, because at a 99.0% break-even it needed a perfect record to pay. Buying the PSA 10 on August 3 would have cost you 2.1% over two months. Submitting a raw copy instead, at the 40% gem rate PSA has run on that card lately, would have cost you closer to 47%. That call was right by a wide margin and the ranking is the reason.

Darkrai VSTAR ended up roughly a coin flip. We said buy the slab at a 49.2% break-even, the slab fell 18.5% to $245.25, and a submission made the same day would have landed within a point or two of that same loss once you account for the $95 in fees and shipping.

Why the ranking was right and the trade still lost money

Walk through what actually happened to someone who followed the Mega Greninja advice. They bought a raw copy at $226.89, paid about $95 all in for grading and shipping, and were out $321.89. Sixty three days later a PSA 10 sells for $400.79, which nets about $348.69 after a marketplace cut, so a hit returns $26.80 of profit. A PSA 9 sells for $147.57 and nets about $128.39, so a miss loses $193.50. Weight those by the real 64% gem rate and the average outcome is $269.38 back on $321.89 spent, a loss of roughly 16%.

Now compare that to the alternative we were arguing against, which was buying a finished PSA 10 on August 3 for $693.60 and watching it fall to $400.79. That is a 42% loss. Grading was the better of the two paths by 26 points, and it still lost money.

So the post answered the question it set out to answer and left a bigger one unanswered. "Which path is cheaper" and "does either path make money" are two different questions, and in August we only wrote up the first one. That is on us. We saw the same pattern a few weeks later when Evolving Skies PSA 10 prices fell while raw copies held, and it is the same lesson told backwards: the grade premium is the first thing to go when graded supply arrives.

What we are checking before the next grading call

The fix is small and we are adding it to the pre-submission routine, and it is the kind of check the Flipr profit calculator should be doing for you rather than leaving to a spreadsheet.

Before trusting a break-even gem rate on any card from a set released in the last six months, pull the grades added in the last 30 days from the pop report and compare them to the card's lifetime total. If the last month is a large share of everything ever graded, the PSA 10 price in your calculation is about to be renegotiated by several thousand new slabs, and whatever number you get out of the formula is already stale. On a card where 46% of the population arrived in four weeks, that is not a rounding error. Reading the pop report this way takes about a minute and it would have flagged Mega Greninja ex in August.

The second thing we are adding is a direction check. PSA currently quotes 90 to 100 business days on its new Standard tier at $59.99 and 70 to 80 business days on Priority at $79.99, read off psacard.com on October 5. Value services are still paused. Four to five calendar months is a long time to be unable to sell a card, and the gap between those two tiers is the smaller of the two risks you are taking.

If a card's raw price has fallen in each of the last two months, the submission is a bet that it stops falling while you cannot touch it. Mega Greninja ex was that bet in August, we did not say so, and we are saying so now.