Pokemon GO Mewtwo VSTAR Price Jumped to $9.42 This Week, and Obsidian Flames Charizard ex Rose 25%

Three of the five biggest Pokemon card gainers on our board this week never actually moved. A Crown Zenith Zeraora VMAX showed up at plus 113 percent, a Pokemon GO Snorlax at plus 27 percent, and a sealed Stellar Crown box case at plus 100 percent, and all three fell apart the moment we compared them to the cheapest copy a person could actually buy. Two moves survived the check. Mewtwo VSTAR from the 2022 Pokemon GO set is the one we would call genuinely hot this week, and Charizard ex from Obsidian Flames put up the next biggest gain, though not for the reason its number suggests.

What's hot: Mewtwo VSTAR (Pokemon GO #031/078)

Mewtwo VSTAR from Pokemon GO climbed from $7.28 on August 19 to $9.42 on TCGplayer as of August 27, which is roughly 29 percent in eight days. We checked it three ways before believing it. The market price rose, the cheapest listing rose from $4.75 to $6.00, and the middle of the listings rose from $8.64 to $9.84. When all three move together you are looking at people buying cards. Zeraora VMAX is the counter example: its cheapest copy has been frozen at $1.75 for thirteen straight readings while its tracked price snapped from about $3.00 to $6.67 in a single day.

The Mewtwo move is not one card acting alone. Of the 24 Pokemon GO cards we track, 18 rose over the same eight days, with the middle card up about 2.9 percent. Radiant Venusaur went from $8.64 to $10.12 with its cheapest listing rising too. That is a whole set getting bid, slowly, rather than one Mewtwo getting picked off.

Why now is the honest part. We could not find an announcement that explains it. The tempting answer is the 30th Celebration set, which lands worldwide on September 16 and includes a Mewtwo ex in a brand new Futuristic Rare treatment, and new cards of a Pokemon usually send collectors back to that Pokemon's older cards. We have written that story several times. It does not hold up here. If Mewtwo were broadly hot, the expensive Mewtwo VSTAR from Crown Zenith's Galarian Gallery would be moving, and it is down slightly at $276.56. Mew ex cards are split, four up and five down. The Mewtwo cards that rose are almost all in one set, which points at the set rather than the Pokemon.

That leaves supply, and supply we can check ourselves. Pokemon GO came out on July 1, 2022 and has never been reprinted. A Pokemon GO Elite Trainer Box trades at $169.30 today against a $49.99 launch price, and a single loose booster pack from the set costs $11.44. Sealed prices across the set are creeping rather than spiking, which is what slow absorption looks like: fewer boxes exist every month, nobody is making more, and the singles grind up underneath.

Now the part that matters if you own one. PriceCharting has the raw card at $6.63, a PSA 9 at $27.38, and a PSA 10 at $99.99. PSA has graded 2,766 English copies with 1,356 landing a 10, so about 49 percent of submitted copies gem. That sounds like a trade until you price the submission. PSA's Value tiers are still paused, so Regular is $79.99 and takes 70 to 80 business days, both read off PSA's own pricing page today. Buy the cheapest genuine English copy at about $8.07 delivered, pay the fee, and you are into it for $88 before you have sold anything, while a PSA 10 nets roughly $85 after eBay's cut. You lose money on a hit, and half the time you get a PSA 9 worth $27. This is the same trap we broke down in the $79.99 grading math.

So the flipper's angle on Mewtwo VSTAR is raw only. If you pulled one in 2022 and it has been sitting in a binder, this is a better week to list it than any week since we started tracking the set. Do not send it to PSA.

Biggest gainer: Charizard ex (Obsidian Flames #125/197)

Charizard ex from Obsidian Flames rose from $4.75 to $5.93 over the same eight days, about 25 percent, and it is the biggest verified gain on our board after Mewtwo. PriceCharting independently reads the same card at $5.89, which is as close to agreement as two price sources get, so the number itself is solid.

The story behind it is thinner than the number. Go back one more week and this card was $5.67 on August 8, which means the whole gain is a return trip. What happened in between is that the cheapest listing fell to $2.85 around August 19, someone bought the cheap copies, and the floor came back up to $4.00. The middle of the listings went from $5.99 to $6.10 across that entire stretch, so the bulk of the market never moved at all. Measured across 30 days the card is up 4.6 percent, which is a normal month.

We also checked whether Charizard as a whole was running, because the 30th Celebration set reprints Base Set Charizard next month and that is exactly the kind of news that lifts every Charizard on the board. It has not. Of 42 Charizard cards we track, 20 rose and 17 fell over the week and the middle card moved 0.00 percent. A Prize Pack Mega Charizard X ex fell 22 percent in the same window. There is no Charizard rally, just one cheap card refilling its bottom shelf.

The grading answer here is worse than Mewtwo's. PriceCharting has the raw Tera Charizard ex at $5.89, a PSA 9 at $24.40, and a PSA 10 at $85.50. PSA has graded 6,586 English copies and 2,738 came back as 10s, a gem rate near 42 percent, with 82 more graded in the past month. Pay $5.89 for the card and $79.99 to PSA and you are in for $85.88, while a PSA 10 nets about $73 after fees. The best outcome available to you loses about $13, and the pop is still growing. The distance between a PSA 9 and a PSA 10 here looks enormous in percentage terms, which is the trap we mapped in the PSA 9 tax, but percentages do not pay a $79.99 fee on a six dollar card.

Our read: this is not a card to buy on the bounce, and it is not a card to grade. If you have raw copies, they are worth a dollar more than they were last week and that is the whole event.

Scoring an old call: Darkrai GX, and what we got wrong

On July 13 we flagged the Burning Shadows Darkrai GX rainbow at $32.17 raw ahead of the Pitch Black launch, and said the nostalgia run would probably give some of itself back once Mega Darkrai ex was actually in people's hands. The graded side, we argued, was the durable half.

Today that card reads $37.07 raw, up about 15 percent instead of falling back, and its PSA 10 has gone from $1,000 to $1,440.80, up 44 percent. The graded call was right and then some. The raw call was simply wrong, and we have made this mistake enough times now to name it: a new set featuring a Pokemon does not create any supply of that Pokemon's old cards. Pitch Black printed a great many Mega Darkrai ex cards and exactly zero 2017 rainbow Darkrai GX cards, so the buying had nowhere to go but the fixed pile of old ones. When the news adds supply, the spike round trips. When it cannot, the spike compounds.

That is the same mechanism sitting under Mewtwo VSTAR this week, which is why we are treating the Pokemon GO set seriously and treating the Charizard bounce as noise.

Our calls this week

These are predictions, and we will grade them here whether they land or not.

We expect Mewtwo VSTAR #031 to read lower than $9.42 on TCGplayer by October 26. The reason is not that the buying is fake, because we checked and it is not, but that $9.42 sits well above PriceCharting's $6.63 blended figure and the middle of the listings only moved about 12 percent while the headline moved 29. We are wrong if it holds at or above $9.42. We are refusing to name a floor, because we have named three of them this year and all three broke.

We expect Charizard ex #125 to read lower than $5.93 by October 26, closer to the $5.99 to $6.10 middle where it has spent the month, and we expect the wider Charizard board to stay flat rather than rally into the September 16 reprint.

The single action for this week is smaller than either card. Before you buy anything off a gainer list, open the listings and look at the cheapest copy. Three of this week's five biggest movers had a tracked price sitting two to four times above the cheapest card anyone was actually selling, which means the number was measuring an empty shelf rather than a sale. That check takes fifteen seconds and it would have saved you from all three. It is the same discipline behind the eight card review in PSA 10 prices dropping faster than raw.

Graded cards are speculative and illiquid, and nothing here is financial advice.