Pop-adjusted value: what a PSA 10 costs per copy in existence, and why the slope flips by era
Screen 1 regresses PSA 10 price on PSA 10 population within each era. In the vintage era scarcity barely predicts price. In the modern eras the slope is positive, which changes what 'below the curve' means.
The oldest idea in card collecting is that scarcity sets price. Screen 1 tests it, one era at a time, with the two numbers that exist for it: the price a PSA 10 last sold for, and how many PSA 10s PSA has ever made.
The inputs
Population comes from PSA's published reports, read by hand from BetterPop, a public mirror of them, and stored with the date of the read. The first read covers 99 cards: the 30 chase cards the encyclopedia tracks and the ten most valuable non-chase cards of each era. Commons and cards under $15 were left out, because a regression on cards nobody grades tells you about grading fees, not value. A second batch on 14 September 2026 added the next ten cards per era by the same rule, 158 cards in all.
Price is the eBay sold average for the PSA 10 grade, via PokemonPriceTracker. A bucket built on fewer than three sales is marked thin and shown as such.
Only observed rows enter the fit. A card whose PSA 10 price rests on the estimator is listed below the table, badged, and never moves the line.
The fit
Within each era, ordinary least squares of the log of the PSA 10 price on the log of the PSA 10 population. The residual, how far a card sits above or below the era's line, is the signal. Float, price multiplied by population, is shown alongside as the dollar value of every PSA 10 in existence; a small float is a thin market in both directions.
What the first read showed
On 13 September 2026, seven of eight eras had enough observed rows to fit. Black & White had three and was listed without a line.
The Wizards of the Coast era returned a slope of −0.24 and an R² of 0.07. The sign is the scarcity story, fewer PSA 10s meaning a higher price, but the fit explains almost nothing. Scarcity barely predicts what a vintage PSA 10 sells for on eBay.
Sun & Moon and Sword & Shield returned slopes between +1.5 and +1.7 with R² between 0.65 and 0.76. The sign is positive: more PSA 10s, higher price. That is not scarcity at work. It is population tracking demand. People grade what sells, so the most graded cards are the most wanted ones.
What the second batch changed
On 14 September 2026 the tracked set grew from 99 to 158 cards and every era fitted, Black & White included. The lines moved, and the honest thing is to say how.
The Wizards of the Coast slope went from −0.24 to +0.01 with an R² of 0.00: on 27 observed vintage cards, PSA 10 population says nothing about PSA 10 price in either direction. Sword & Shield kept its story, a slope of +0.96 and an R² of 0.70 on 22 cards: population tracks demand there. Sun & Moon did not keep its story. On 12 cards the slope was above +1.5; on 22 it is +0.23 with an R² of 0.04. The first read's line was drawn through a handful of heavily graded chase cards, and the next ten cards down did not follow it. Scarlet & Violet sits at +0.10 with an R² of 0.01, EX Series at +2.3 with an R² of 0.39 on 20 cards, XY at −0.55 with an R² of 0.34 on 12.
Two lessons from that. A slope fitted on ten cards is a sketch, and the page prints the count next to every line so the reader can weigh it. And the sign of the slope is not a fixed property of an era; it is a property of the cards in the sample. The screen recomputes nightly, and the next batch of cards may move it again.
Read the sign before the residuals
This is the part of the screen that matters most, and it sits above the table on purpose. In an era with a negative slope, a card below the curve is cheap for its scarcity. In an era with a positive slope, a card below the curve is cheap relative to how much it gets graded, which is a different claim about a different kind of demand. Both are worth a look. They are not the same question, and the screen does not pretend they are.
The caveat that stays on the page
For the vintage sets whose TCGplayer product carries both the 1st Edition and the unlimited print, the eBay PSA 10 bucket has no printing dimension. A vintage comp can mix both prints while the population line counts the unlimited print only. Base Set is unaffected, because its printings are separate products. The screen says this in its method rather than quietly averaging past it.
What it does not do
It does not rank cards to buy. It shows where each card sits against its era's own line, with the fit statistics that say how much the line is worth, and lets the reader decide what a residual means.