"This gold star Torchic just sold for $2,500,000 in a private sale", three hundred and thirty three votes on September ninth. Six days later, under a Celebi gold star on September fourteenth: "$78k seems cheap considering there are only around 100 PSA 10s of it". Only one of those posts priced a card off a count this month.
Gold star Pokemon cards rarity is not one number across the family. The room got the Torchic count right and the cheap way in wrong, because three cards hold more than a third of every gold star ten. We upvoted that Torchic thread ourselves.
The sale nobody can check
Our sweep logged thirty six gold star threads across the two subs in the fortnight to September twenty second. Exactly one of them cleared a hundred votes.
Torchic. A Rayquaza gold star thread on September twelfth took two votes, and a Treecko sale post on September sixteenth took one. A market wide question on September twentieth took eleven.
So the fortnight reads loud by thread count and quiet by votes. A private sale leaves no public record either. The room repriced a family off a number nobody outside it can open.
The September prices under the argument
PriceCharting carries the Torchic gold star at a PSA 10 near eighty five thousand dollars. We read that off the product page this week.
The two figures the room repeated sit near thirty times above it. Neither of them carries a public record anywhere we can open.
A Raikou gold star out of EX Unseen Forces carries a PSA 10 near fifteen thousand dollars on the same source. Entei sits near twelve and a half thousand.
So the cheap end of this family is real. The room reads it as a lag. We read it as a question about how many were printed and kept.
Gold star Pokemon cards rarity, opened last
The room's count was right. Our tracker holds 19 PSA 10 copies of the Torchic gold star, out of 1,467 copies sent in since 2004.
Nothing else across the twenty seven English gold stars of the EX era comes in lower. Raikou is the other end of the same family.
Our tracker counts 387 PSA 10 copies of the Raikou gold star. Twenty times. They came back out of 4,034 copies sent in since 2005.
Entei holds 300 tens and Suicune holds 269 on counts near four thousand apiece. Those three hold more than a third of every English gold star ten our tracker has counted.
Rayquaza holds 47 tens and Latias holds 22. No lag. The cheap way in is the common end of this family.
The submission side says the same. Our board logged near fourteen hundred further copies across all twenty seven in the thirty days to September twentieth.
One Ascended Heroes Psyduck took near four thousand four hundred in the same window. Twenty seven vintage cards against one card printed in January.
We rank the field on the board that ranks four hundred cards by measured grading and trading activity. No vintage gold star reaches it at all.
We found the same census gap under a Moonbreon the room called scarce while its ten count ran highest on our board a week ago. That gap is older than this fortnight.
Small print is real where it happened. We took the 2003 Skyridge Crystal Charizard apart by its foil and its edge code five days ago. The gold stars were not all printed alike.
The line our count cannot answer
One poster pulled all twenty seven English gold stars into a spreadsheet on September fifteenth. The cheaper ones "rose the most", that post read, and "the only 3 that fell were already expensive".
The Torchic thread had already left the harder line. "I understand it is a pretty scarce but it still Pop 19", it read on September fourteenth. "What made this card sell for so much?"