The deepest registries in Pokémon do not belong to chase cards. They belong to promos that come free with a purchase: the MEP Black Star program tops our registry-depth table at a 38,076 average, which is a mean over the three MEP cards carrying a pop above 100, not over the program. Read it the way that table insists: one of those three, Mega Charizard X ex, is 93% of the group total on a registry line several products share, so 38,076 measures the depth of a line, not the population of a card anyone could buy. Averaged across all five MEP cards we hold a reading for it is 22,863. People grade what is easy to gem and free to acquire, and the modern promo pipeline is both by design.
The economics of grading a free card
A sleeved promo arrives pack-fresh by construction, which pushes gem rates toward the 53% modern average and above; a $20 fee against a $50-150 PSA 10 is a fine trade at scale, and scale is what a with-purchase promo has. The MEP Mega Charizard X rides the same mania as its pack-pulled sibling with a fraction of the acquisition cost, which is exactly why its registry is the one growing at handout speed. The Grading Throughput Index counts the result: promos are a structural share of the ~44,000 slabs a week our cohort records.
The program also produced our catalog's strangest recent entry: the Worlds 2026 stamped Pikachu, a card so new that no database anywhere listed it when a reader's scan failed. We seeded it into our own catalog from his photograph, fingerprint, embedding and all, and it now identifies with high confidence. We hold no registry reading for it at all, which is not the same as a registry of zero: the card has no TCGplayer product to join a population snapshot to yet. Given everything above about this program, check back in a month.
Registry depth as of August 28, 2026, from daily PSA population snapshots per the Print-Run Archaeology methodology: per-set means across the cards with a pop ABOVE 100, which is three cards for MEP and skews hard toward each set's most-graded prints, and which is why the absolute is a stratum reading rather than a card population; throughput from the linked index. The mep-093 seeding is documented in our catalog history. Not financial advice.