In our Population Growth Tax window, one card behaved unlike everything else we measured: Dark Charizard from Team Rocket. Its registry barely moved, 34 new slabs a week against 9,591 existing across August 3 to August 20, 2026, and its PSA 10 median more than doubled, $1,563 to $3,475, between the two nearest verified readings we hold, July 27 and August 3. Every modern chase in the same period paid the growth tax. This card collected it.
Closed registries turn demand into price with no shock absorber
When demand hits Mega Charizard X ex, 730 fresh slabs a week absorb it: supply is the shock absorber and price moves slowly. When demand hits Dark Charizard, there is no absorber: the copies that exist are the copies that will ever exist, minus attrition, and the ask ladder simply reprices. Our Print-Run Archaeology shows the whole Team Rocket stratum sits in the shallow registry band, and Bulk's Hidden Floor shows the same age cohort holding a $2.34 floor under its WORST cards. Closed supply is the single variable those three findings share.
The caveat our own ledger insists on: verify the move's depth before believing it. A week-long doubling on a vintage card can ride thin tape, and the frozen-trophy study shows what thin tape does to 'value'. So here is the honest count on this one, which an audit of this page forced us to print. The $1,563 reading stands on six verified sales and the $3,475 on fifteen. Our own census of sample sizes sets fifteen as the floor for a Weekly Grade Play and fifty for a featured figure, and this move clears neither bar comfortably. The mechanism below is sound and the registry arithmetic is solid. The price move illustrating it is the thinnest kind of evidence we publish, and on closed registries the discipline is exactly this: always ask how many sales the move is made of.
Population series from moonstone daily PSA registry snapshots: Dark Charizard's runs August 3 to August 20, 2026, 9,509 to 9,591, which is the 34 slabs a week and the 0.35% quoted here. Medians are from verified eBay solds, first-to-latest across the readings we actually hold for this card, July 27 and August 3, 2026, at six and fifteen sales. Those two tapes are NOT the same window: an earlier version of this page described the price move as seventeen days inside the registry window, and it is seven days and mostly before it. Our graded store holds no reading for this card between August 10 and August 28, so no seventeen-day price pair exists to quote. Sample thresholds per the graded ledger's standard, minimum three sales per point. Not financial advice.