The PSA 10 Multiple Shrank on 6 of the 8 Cards We Tracked

Back on May 31 we looked at a Mega Lucario ex Special Illustration Rare sitting at $202.50 raw with a $537.79 PSA 10 above it, and told anyone holding a clean copy to send it in. The spread covered the grading fee with plenty of room left over. That same card reads $194.97 raw and $395.00 in a PSA 10 this morning, August 17, 2026, so the raw copy gave up under 4% while the slab gave up almost 27%.

We have written up enough cards since then to check whether that was a fluke, so today we re-pulled the full PriceCharting grade grid for eight of them using the same tool we used the first time. It was not a fluke. On six of the eight the gap between the raw price and the PSA 10 price narrowed over the window, which means the reason to grade the card got smaller while it sat there.

The eight cards, then and now

Card	Written up	Raw then / now	PSA 10 then / now	Multiple then / now
Mega Lucario ex #179	May 31	$202.50 / $194.97	$537.79 / $395.00	2.66x / 2.03x
Lillie's Clefairy ex #280	May 31	$215.08 / $165.51	$690.00 / $372.82	3.21x / 2.25x
Ash-Greninja-EX #XY133	Jun 4	$29.46 / $24.64	$2,143.27 / $9,760.36	72.8x / 396x
Dragapult ex #165	Jun 11	$112.31 / $102.10	$269.64 / $238.84	2.40x / 2.34x
Pikachu & Zekrom GX #33	Jun 11	$73.11 / $46.40	$1,089.00 / $650.00	14.9x / 14.0x
N's Zoroark ex #185	Jun 18	$48.09 / $42.63	$180.06 / $149.00	3.74x / 3.50x
Mew ex #232	Jun 25	$940.01 / $941.70	$3,850.00 / $3,062.22	4.10x / 3.25x
Mega Gengar ex #284	Jul 2	$1,234.25 / $1,027.16	$2,500.00 / $2,175.00	2.03x / 2.12x

Every figure is PriceCharting, ungraded blend against PSA 10, pulled on the write-up date and again on August 17, 2026.

The windows run from 46 days on Mega Gengar out to 78 days on the two we covered in May. When we last read PSA's pricing page on August 3 the cheapest tier available was Regular at $79.99 with a stated turnaround of 40 to 50 business days, which is roughly eight to ten weeks, so most of these windows are about one trip through the queue. Someone who read one of those posts, agreed with it, and dropped the card in a mailer that same week would be getting the slab back around now.

The raw price is not the number that hurt

At the median the raw copies came off about 14% and the PSA 10 comps came off about 19%, which is a soft market doing what a soft market does while everyone sits on their hands waiting for 30th Celebration on September 16.

The ratio between those two prices is the part worth arguing about, because that ratio is the entire case for grading anything. When Lillie's Clefairy ex was our counter-meta pick at the end of May, a PSA 10 was worth 3.21 times a raw copy. Today it is worth 2.25 times a raw copy, because the raw eased 23% while the PSA 10 fell 46%. Nothing about the card changed physically, and anyone who mailed a copy the week we wrote about it spent that entire compression sitting in PSA's queue. The payoff for putting that card in plastic is close to a third smaller than it was in May.

Mew ex is the cleanest version of the same effect. Its raw price is basically unchanged, $940.01 in late June against $941.70 today, so a flipper watching only the raw price would reasonably conclude that nothing happened for seven weeks. The PSA 10 came down 20% over that stretch, from $3,850 to $3,062.22, and the multiple compressed from about 4.1x to about 3.25x while the raw sat still.

Both exceptions had a supply reason

Mega Gengar ex is the boring one. Its multiple technically widened, from 2.03x to 2.12x, but that happened because the raw fell 17% while the PSA 10 fell 13%, so both legs were down and the widening is an artifact.

Ash-Greninja-EX is the real exception, and it is the worst call we have made this year. On June 4 we told readers not to buy it raw at around $84 to chase the slab, with a PSA 10 sitting at $2,143.27. That PSA 10 now reads $9,760.36, a 355% move, and the multiple went from roughly 73x to roughly 396x. The mechanism is supply: it is a 2016 promo with a fixed number of copies in existence and no way to make more, so a nostalgia catalyst that would round-trip on a modern card compounds instead. Everything else in that table is either still in print or came out of a set that got printed into the ground, and packs are still being opened. Before you guess which way a graded ladder is going, work out whether the catalyst creates future supply, which is the same test we ran on what a reprint does to the original card.

We named a price again, and it broke again

Scoring these also closed out the Mega Gengar call from July 2, and the direction on it was right. We said the card would not run from $1,234.25, framed it as sell raw into the attention rather than grade and hold, and pointed out that a Grade 9 at $1,260 was sitting right on top of a raw copy and would be a wash after fees. That last part aged well: the Grade 9 is now $957.91 against a $1,027.16 raw copy, so a 9 on that card is a straight loss today.

The number is what broke, and this is the third time. We said the raw would land somewhere in a $1,100 to $1,300 band over about 45 days, and it went to $1,027.16 instead, straight through the bottom of it. We gave N's Zekrom a $110 floor and it drifted to $96.83, we gave Pikachu & Zekrom GX a $90 to $110 landing zone and it went to $50.63, and now this one. In all three the action we recommended paid and the level we named did not hold, which follows once you say it out loud, because a price driven by attention has nothing underneath it pinning it to a level, so it keeps decaying until it finds whatever the card was worth before people started talking about it. We are going to stop naming floors and stick to the direction, the action, and the condition that would prove us wrong.

What to do with this

Stop underwriting the multiple you can see on the day you fill out the submission form. The number that decides whether the trade works is the multiple that will exist eight to ten weeks later, and on modern in-print cards the honest working assumption from this sample is that it will be smaller, so haircut today's multiple by about a fifth before you call the EV positive and skip anything that only clears at today's spread.

The narrower point is more useful. Look at the Grade 9 as carefully as the PSA 10, because that is where a miss actually lands. On three of these eight cards a Grade 9 now sells below a clean raw copy (Mega Lucario at $191.25 against $194.97, Mew ex at $920.00 against $941.70, Mega Gengar at $957.91 against $1,027.16), and Dragapult ex is close enough at $106.39 against $102.10 to be a wash once eBay takes its cut. Missing the 10 on any of those hands you back a card worth less than the one you mailed, on top of a fee you cannot get back, which is the whole argument in what a PSA grade does to a card that does not gem.

None of this is an argument against grading. It is an argument against grading off a screenshot. A fat multiple is already a warning about your odds, which we went through in the multiplier trap, and a fat multiple you have to wait ten weeks to collect adds a second bet on a comp that is drifting the entire time. Tracking both numbers is most of what Flipr does, and it exists because we made exactly this mistake on Mega Lucario in May, watching one price and assuming the other one stayed put.

We will re-pull all eight in mid-October and publish the numbers whether or not they make us look good.