Three times in 2026 the record for the most expensive English-language Pokemon card has been set, and the last two came eleven days apart.
| Date | Card | Grade | Price | Venue |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| February | 1999 First Edition Base Set Charizard | PSA 10 | $954,800 | Goldin |
| August 30 | 2005 EX Deoxys Rayquaza Gold Star | CGC 10 Pristine | $1,020,000 | Fanatics Premier |
| September 10 | 2004 EX Team Rocket Returns Torchic Gold Star | PSA 10 | $2,700,000 | Alt |
Population over character
The Charizard held the record for six months, and Charizard has held it, in one printing or another, for most of the hobby's history. The two cards that passed it are a Rayquaza and a Torchic, from 2005 and 2004 expansions that were sold at retail in boxes of 36 packs. What they have in common is the Gold Star rarity (roughly one per two boxes) and tiny top-grade populations: one Pristine Rayquaza, nineteen PSA 10 Torchics. The First Edition Charizard has a PSA 10 population over a hundred. In 2026 the market is paying for scarcity of the grade first and the name on the card second, and the clearest proof is in the same Alt auction: the Dragon Frontiers Charizard Gold Star, the most famous Gold Star of all, sold for $393,000, one-seventh of the Torchic.
Where the next record comes from
Three candidates. First, the other Gold Stars with PSA 10 populations under twenty: there are several, and the Treecko ($132,000 on August 22, before the Rayquaza and Torchic results) now looks like the cheapest of them. Second, the First Edition Base Set Charizard itself, which has not traded publicly since February; with a Chansey from the same set at $238,597, a Charizard 10 would almost certainly clear its own record. Third, a Japanese card re-entering the English conversation is not possible by definition, but the Illustrator, the Snap cards and the trophies set the ceiling the English cards are climbing toward: the Illustrator PSA 9 at $2.7 million on August 31 is exactly the Torchic's price.
What it means lower down
None of this changes the price of a $50 card directly. What it changes is the comp structure above it. When the top of a set re-prices by a factor of a hundred, the cards one and two tiers below get re-marked over the following weeks, which is why Team Rocket Returns read +6.7 percent in our Index this week and why the PSA 9 Torchic at $156,336 is the number most owners should be watching.
Sources: TheGamer, September 12, 2026; SI Collectibles, August 31, 2026.
Chart of the Day ran in The Pack Report, September 14, 2026: $2.7 Million for a Torchic: the English Record Doubles in Eleven Days. Published by Rip Station.