Alt's auction that opened August 28 and closes September 10 has two 2004 EX Team Rocket Returns Torchic Gold Stars in it, and as of September 5 the live bids were $1,968,000 on the PSA 10 and $90,336 on the PSA 9, both including the 20 percent buyer's premium. Neither is a sale yet. Both are already the most useful data points on the Gold Star market this month.
Populations
PSA has graded nineteen Torchic Gold Stars a 10 and 233 a 9. The last public PSA 10 sale on record was $25,400 in December 2020; the last public PSA 9 sale was about $22,000 in June 2026. If the current bids hold, the 10 will have gone up roughly 77 times in six years and the 9 roughly four times in three months.
Why the 9 is the better read
A seven-figure bid on one of nineteen cards is a contest between two or three people over a trophy. It is real money and a real result, but it is not a price other owners can act on: the next PSA 10 to come to market might clear at half that or double it depending on who shows up. A $90,000 bid on one of 233 cards is different. There are enough 9s for the price to be a market, and a four-fold move in a lane with that much supply means buyers across the whole Gold Star set have changed their minds about what these cards are worth. That is the number the other 232 owners, and the owners of every other Gold Star in a 9, should be looking at.
The general rule
When the top grade of a card has a population in the teens or lower, read the market from the grade below it. We saw this with the Rayquaza Gold Star last week: the Pristine 10 at $1.02 million was a unique object, and the plain 10 at $192,000 was the comp. We saw it with the two Treeckos on August 22, where the second 10 at $114,000 was the better guide than the first at $132,000. The headline number is what one buyer paid once. The number one rung down is what the card is worth.
The auction closes Thursday, September 10. We will have both results in Monday's issue.
Source: GempireCards, September 5, 2026.
Grade Expectations ran in The Pack Report, September 7, 2026: A $2.7 Million Illustrator, and a $204,000 Palkia. Published by Rip Station.