A graded price looks like a fact. It is the surviving remainder of an argument about which listings were really that card in really that slab. We can see both sides of that argument, because the record keeps the count of what was discarded. Across every grader we hold, 183,466 comps were kept and 25,176 were rejected. That is 12.07% of everything a published price could have been built from.
By company: CGC discards 14.99%, PSA 12.16%, BGS 9.93%, ACE 5.40%, TAG 5.30%, AGS 2.75%, SGC 2.39%. By PSA grade the gradient runs one way from the top down, and it is the wrong way for anyone shopping the cheap end: PSA 10 discards 9.50%, PSA 9 11.26%, PSA 8 20.46% and PSA 7 26.76%, which is the peak. PSA 6 comes back down to 23.63%. The record is dirtiest around the grades where the slabs are cheapest and most numerous.
The prices built on almost nothing
Rejection is only half the problem. The other half is age. Median days since the last verified sale is 32 for a PSA 10 and 56 for a PSA 7, with a 90th percentile of 140 days at the top grade. 22.7% of PSA 10 rows and 33.2% of PSA 7 rows have not recorded a sale in three months.
The card that makes this concrete is the most famous one in the hobby. Base Set Charizard carries a PSA 10 median of $17,500 built on ONE verified comp, whose sale was 308 days ago. We do not print its graded population beside that, because this card's registry line is one of the ones several products are served from: the same line reported 104,907 graded copies in total on September 2, which is not a number about one Base Set Charizard. ___________'s Pikachu, the blank-line Wizards promo, is $6,400 on one comp and 323 days. Primal Kyogre EX $970 on two comps and 340 days. Rapidash $505.52 on one comp and 367 days. These are quotes, not markets.
The cards where most of the record is discarded
Mega Charizard X ex, the deepest tape we hold, keeps 1,028 comps and rejects 1,507, a rejection rate of 59.45%. _____'s Pikachu from the Celebrations Classic Collection keeps 37 and rejects 160, 81.22%. Flying Pikachu keeps 18 and rejects 70. Reshiram keeps 110 and rejects 204. Muk keeps 25 and rejects 41.
Population: 13,000 grade rows across 1,344 distinct graded keys and seven graders. Kept and rejected counts are the provider's own per row figures; a rejection is a discarded candidate listing, not an established fake sale. Rates are computed at row level as rejected divided by rejected plus kept, then summed, so a handful of very deep cards dominate the pooled figure. Mega Charizard X ex alone contributes 1,507 rejections, which is why the per card median rejection rate of 1.92% is reported alongside the pooled 12.16% for PSA. Staleness is measured from each row's last sale date against a fixed as of date of September 3, 2026. Per card figures are restricted to the 558 cards whose PSA 10 is built on at least ten comps. No regression is run. RECHECKED 2026-09-22: none of this can be replayed at its date. The per card graded payloads live in a short-lived cache whose oldest surviving row was written on September 8, and only 520 distinct cards survive in it today against the 1,344 read on September 3, so every card named above has expired out of the store except Base Set Charizard. What the smaller population does confirm is the shape: 3,747 grade rows over 520 cards return a 5.28% pooled rejection rate that still climbs from PSA 9 to PSA 7, and 58.7% of rows still carry the thin-comps flag. One correction has been applied: the population figure originally printed beside Base Set Charizard's PSA 10 came from a registry line that serves several products at once, and it has been removed rather than restated. Base Set Charizard's PSA 10 today reads one kept comp against fourteen rejected, on a last sale of March 3, 2026.