Surfing Pikachu Slabs Have Quadrupled This Year and a Pokemon Center Nidorina Jumped 27% in a Week

A PSA 10 Raincoat Pikachu sold for $8.4 million at Fanatics Collect on September 28, taking 64 bids and landing as the second most expensive Pokemon card ever behind the Pikachu Illustrator that went for $16.4 million in February. Nobody reading this is buying either one. What that sale did, arriving three weeks into a set that puts 30 different Pikachu illustrations in every pack, was send a lot of collectors back through old binders looking for the Pikachu they already owned. One 2009 card caught most of that, and it is behaving very strangely.

What's hot: Surfing Pikachu (Platinum Rising Rivals #114/111)

Surfing Pikachu 114/111 is a secret rare from Platinum Rising Rivals, illustrated by Toshinao Aoki, printed in 2009 and never reprinted in that frame. It costs about $184.92 blended ungraded on PriceCharting as of October 2, with TCGplayer's holofoil market price at $388.58 the same day and the cheapest Near Mint listing sitting at $229.99. Recent raw sales ran all over the place: $84.99 on September 27, $123.47 on September 28, $149.99 on September 24, and $300 on both September 25 and September 29. That spread is condition doing the work, which matters more on this card than on almost anything else from its era.

Here is the part worth your attention. Pull the graded prices for the same card and the shape is nothing like the raw price. On February 1 a Grade 8 copy was worth $159.06 and a Grade 9 was worth $311.59. On October 1 the Grade 8 read $750.00 and the Grade 9 read $1,195.99, so the 8 is up 372% and the 9 is up 284% in eight months. Over that exact same window the PSA 10 went from $3,273.53 to $3,133.07, which is a 4.3% decline.

So in February a PSA 10 Surfing Pikachu was worth about ten and a half times a PSA 9. Today it is worth about two and a half times a PSA 9. The bottom of the ladder climbed to meet a top that never moved.

The pop report explains why the top did not move, and it is the most extreme set of numbers we have run in this column. As of PSA's September 14 figures there were 655 English copies of this card graded, and exactly 12 of them are PSA 10s. Ninety three are PSA 9s. That is a gem rate of 1.8%, against the 50 to 70% a modern chase card gems at, and it is the sort of number you only see on a textured 2009 secret rare with dark borders where centering decides everything. We went through what actually produces that outcome in how to tell if a card will PSA 10.

Twenty six more copies were submitted in the 30 days to September 14. That is roughly 4% monthly growth on the graded pile, and on a 1.8% gem rate nearly every one of them comes back an 8 or a 9. The supply of the card is frozen at 2009. The supply of slabs is not.

The flipper's angle splits cleanly. If you own a genuinely clean raw copy, the submission math is ugly: you are paying $59.99 for PSA Standard or $79.99 for Priority to enter a lottery you win 1.8% of the time, and the consolation prize is a Grade 9 that has already run 284% this year. If you want the card, buy a graded 8 or 9 rather than chasing the 10. The 10 is pop 12 and PriceCharting has recorded exactly one PSA 10 sale in the card's history, $2,499.99 back in December 2023, and a quoted price with one sale behind it is a placeholder. That is the same problem we went through in the PSA 9 versus PSA 10 price gap.

One risk to name plainly. 30th Celebration contains 30 Pikachu cards numbered 023 through 052 out of 128, and none of them is Surfing Pikachu. The set printed the Pokemon, not the card. If a later wave of anniversary product does reprint this specific illustration, the nostalgia bid goes away quickly.

Biggest gainer: Nidorina 101 (30th Celebration, Pokemon Center stamp)

The biggest seven day gain on any card over $25 that we track is a Nidorina promo. TCGplayer's market price on Nidorina 101 with the Pokemon Center stamp went from $48.55 on September 24 to $61.51 on October 1, up 26.7%, and the cheapest delivered copy on October 2 was $65.69 across 27 listings holding 40 copies. Go back to its first real sales on September 17 and it started at $43.70, so the card is up 40.8% in two weeks while most of the set has fallen.

The same card without the stamp sells for $3.19.

That is not a typo and it is the whole story. Nidorina 101 is the full art promo that comes in the 30th Celebration Elite Trainer Box, illustrated by Taiga Kasai, and Nidorina got the anniversary card because it is number 0030 in the Pokedex and there are 30 Nidorina hidden in the artwork. Pokemon Center sold its own version of that box, and per PokeBeach's set guide it carries extra booster packs plus two Nidorina promos, one plain and one with a small Pokemon Center logo printed in the bottom right of the art. Every other pixel on the two cards is identical. One sells for $3.19 with 339 copies on the board. The other sells for $65.69 with 40.

What changed this week is that opening the Pokemon Center box stopped making sense. That box carried a $59.99 MSRP, sold out, and now trades at a $297.69 market price on TCGplayer, roughly double the $148.09 the standard box costs. A 30th Celebration pack is worth about $13.08 right now, so even counting the extra packs generously you are looking at somewhere around $180 to $210 of cards inside a $298 box, and nobody opens that to free a $65 promo. The stamped Nidorina's supply is more or less whatever came out in the first two weeks, and the 40 listed copies are what is left of it.

The standard box went the other way over the same stretch. We called the 30th Celebration Elite Trainer Box lower on September 7 off its $184.74 floor, and on October 2 the cheapest clean English sealed copy was $152.99, down 17.2%, with the published market price down 19.8% from $184.60 to $148.09. Cheap boxes get opened and expensive boxes sit on shelves, and the promo inside each one gets priced accordingly.

Be careful with the gain itself. Forty copies is a thin board, and a board that thin can move 27% because three sellers sold out and the fourth was asking more. This is a real supply story sitting on a number nobody should treat as precise.

Scoring last week's calls

Two calls came due and they split.

The 30th Celebration Elite Trainer Box call is correct. We said on September 7 that the September 16 street date would put retail copies in sellers' hands and break the price, named no target, and set the review for September 30. It broke.

The Flying Pikachu call from July 31 is partly right and mostly embarrassing. We said grade it if you already own a clean copy, and do not buy at $172 to grade. The first half aged well and then some: the Grade 9 went from $623.60 to $1,017.57, up 63%, and the Grade 9.5 went from $745.50 to $1,119.00. The second half was wrong. Anyone who bought at $172 and sent it in is now holding a slab worth considerably more than the whole trade cost.

Worse, we had already written down the test that would have caught it. Our own rule says that before calling a nostalgia spike lower, ask whether the upcoming release prints the card or merely the Pokemon. 30th Celebration printed 30 Pikachu and zero Flying Pikachu, which is exactly the case where the bid has nowhere to go but a fixed pile. We named that risk in the post, never ran the test, and called caution anyway.

One data note while we are here, because it cuts the other way. PriceCharting currently shows a $120,000 PSA 10 for Flying Pikachu. That figure rests on a single sale recorded on July 26, and the only other PSA 10 sale in its history is $1,499.99 from October 2021. Do not price anything off it.

This week's two calls

Both of these are predictions, and we will grade them right or wrong when they come due.

Surfing Pikachu 114/111: we expect the PriceCharting Grade 9 price to be below $1,195.99 on December 15, 2026. The card itself is from 2009 and cannot be printed again, so we are deliberately not calling the raw price lower, which is the mistake we just made on Flying Pikachu. The slab is a different product. Twenty six submissions a month into a 655 card pop at a 1.8% gem rate means a steady stream of new 9s arriving into a price that has already risen 284% this year. Wrong if the Grade 9 is at or above $1,195.99 on that date.

Nidorina 101 Pokemon Center stamp: we expect the TCGplayer market price to be at or above $61.51 on November 30, 2026. The box it comes in sold out, trades at double the standard box, and loses money if you open it, so the supply of stamped copies is close to fixed. Wrong if it is below $61.51. We are naming no upside target, because our record on naming levels is poor.

The takeaway

Both of this week's cards say the same thing. A card's supply and its slab's supply are two different things, and which one matters depends on what you are buying. Surfing Pikachu can never be printed again, which is why the raw card doubled, and PSA keeps making new 9s every month, which is why the 10 went nowhere while the 9 quadrupled. The stamped Nidorina is the reverse: the card is three weeks old, but the box that makes it is gone and nobody is going to open the ones that are left.

So before you submit anything this month, look at the pop report's monthly additions rather than the headline population. If a card is adding 4% to its graded pile every 30 days and gems under 2%, you are not buying scarcity, you are buying a place in a queue. We built Flipr to put those two numbers next to each other before you pay the fee.