Pokémon Cards Worth Chasing: Every WotC Card Ranked

Artwork above: Keiko Fukuyama, Relay Race (1999 postcard set) — scan via The Art of Pokémon, found through the restoration blog Hi-Res Pokémon.

Every English Wizards-era card — all 18 sets, from Base Set through Skyridge and the era's promos — priced raw and at PSA 7, 8, 9 and 10, and ranked by what a raw copy could be worth in a PSA 10 once you pay to grade it.

The short version: the prize is real but the odds are what decide. 399 of the 3,540 ranked cards clear the $59.99 grading fee at a PSA 7, and 380 of them still lose money even at a PSA 10 at today’s prices. The largest prize on this page is Pikachu — Reverse Holo Legendary Collection (Pikachu [Reverse Holo] #86) at about $423,799.42 — but only 54.5% of its graded copies reach a PSA 7. Set your price range below and the ranking re-reads for what you could actually buy.

3,540 cards ranked · 49 printing runs · the 78 cards with a missing grade figure are listed too, with the gap named on the row · prices: PriceCharting sold comps, October 12, 2026 — refreshed monthly. Costs include the $59.99 PSA fee.

The Ranking

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How to read this list — and why I built it this way

The ranking is by potential value — a card’s PSA 10 price minus what it costs to buy it raw and grade it. That is the size of the best-case prize, and it is deliberately simple. Set a price range and the list re-reads for your budget, so you are comparing the cards you could actually buy against each other instead of against the biggest card in the era.

Then read the odds. Every card shows its real chance of each grade, drawn from its own population rather than a rule of thumb, beside the profit at that grade. They will not sum to 100%: the rest of a card’s graded population sits at grade 6 or below, and that line is shown too, because a card that often lands there is a different proposition from one that does not. Read the two together — a large prize with poor odds is a lottery ticket, a smaller prize with good odds is a decision. Judging population and price side by side, on the cards your budget actually reaches, is how you work out what is worth chasing and what you want to collect.

Why potential value, and not a single blended return figure. A blended number hides both the size of the prize and the risk in it, so every card shows the odds of each grade right beside the profit at that grade, and you weigh the prize against the likelihood yourself. The population basis is PSA only for the same reason: one denominator, measured the same way on every card. CGC and BGS figures are real, but mixing three grading companies into one share makes the odds mean less. Shipping and insurance are excluded from the cost basis on purpose — they vary by where you live and how many cards you send, and consistency matters more here than completeness.

There is one catch, and it is the whole game: condition. To use this list well you have to be able to look at a raw card and estimate, roughly, what it would grade — and understand why graders penalize what they penalize. A card bought at a PSA 9 price in PSA 6 condition is a loss no matter how good its rank looks here. If that skill is new to you, the grading ROI guide covers the cost math and the pre-screen check; a dedicated condition guide is coming.

This is my perspective as a collector, not a promise of returns. Every figure on the page is a decision input, not a forecast.

The Thread Running Through the Whole Era

One pattern holds from Base Set to Skyridge: the biggest prizes and the best odds rarely belong to the same card. Of the top 50 cards on this page, only 49 clear the fee at a PSA 7 — at the very top of the list you are usually buying a prize, not a probability. The best odds in the dataset belong to Venusaur #15, at rank #336: it reaches a PSA 7 or better 100.0% of the time. Its price is $69.84 raw.

That is the case for reading a ranked list instead of a price list. A PSA 10 price tells you what the best version of a card is worth; the grade odds tell you whether that version is likely to end up in your hands. The cheapest ranked card here costs $0.40 raw — which is the other half of the point: the filter above is how you find the cards that fit the money you actually have, and then read their odds before you spend it.

Where This Goes Next

The ranking now covers the whole era: 18 sets, 49 printing runs, 3,540 cards. Each printing run also has its own page, linked from the printing-run index at the top of this page, so the same figures can be read one collecting target at a time rather than as one long list. Past that, the work is depth rather than breadth — written reads on the cards where the numbers alone do not tell you the interesting part, and the collection suggestions this ranking exists to feed.

Ranking figures are dated October 12, 2026, drawn from PriceCharting price aggregates and PSA population data. Graded markets move; re-check before acting on any number here. 3,266 of 3,540 rows carry a PSA census; where a census or a grade comp is genuinely missing the row says so.

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