Is red or green more rare in the 1996 Bandai Carddass vending set? The PSA 10 count so far

The twelve prisms have 1,001 PSA 10s between them in PSA's report of 4 October 2026. We hold 515 of those certs, each confirmed as this set and this grade on PSA's own cert page, and 330 of them have a photo clear enough to read the banner: 182 red, 148 green. The other 185 are certs with no photo anywhere, most of them graded before PSA photographed slabs, and 486 have not been found at all. So the split is read on a third of the population. The census report explains how a cert gets a colour; this report is about what the split means.

The 50/50 rumour survives the first third of the count

Red is ahead, 182 to 148. The question is whether that gap is big enough to say the two colours were not printed in equal numbers. It is not. On 330 cards from a half-and-half print, a lead of 34 or more for either colour comes up 6.9% of the time, about one draw in fourteen. The gap is also too small to support the opposite story: a print run of 60% red would produce 182 or fewer reds only 4.1% of the time. So the count sits between the two, closer to half and half, and the honest statement is that nothing in it contradicts the rumour. Across the whole set, prisms and plain cards together, the lead is narrower still: 686 red to 603 green among 1,289 coloured PSA 10s, 53.2% red.

Two things could make a true 50/50 print show a red lead in PSA 10. The first is the gem rate: the foil and the print registration could differ between the two runs, and a colour that gems more often would be over-represented at 10 even if the same number of each was made. We cannot test that yet, because our colour reads stop at PSA 10. The second is which copies get photographed, since a sale photo is one of the two places a colour comes from. That one can be checked, and it does not favour red: among the 191 prism PSA 10s coloured from PSA's own slab photo, which exist whether or not the card has sold, red is 56.5%, and among the 139 coloured from a sale photo alone it is 53.2%. The red lead is in the population, not in what gets listed.

Card by card, three prisms are level and only the Moltres is lopsided

The table gives every prism. The Venusaur is 13 to 13, the Gengar 8 to 8 and the Mewtwo 21 to 20. Red leads on seven cards and green on two, the Machamp at 9 red to 12 green and the Moltres at 4 red to 13 green. The Moltres is the only prism whose split a 50/50 print produces less than one time in twenty (4.9%), and with twelve cards tested, one at that level is what chance delivers on its own. The Alakazam, 16 to 7, and the Mew, 17 to 8, lean red by two to one on samples of 23 and 25, which is a lead a 50/50 print gives about one time in ten.

The Charizard is the deepest read, 55 of its 113 PSA 10s, and it is 30 red to 25 green, a split a 50/50 print produces six times in ten. On the one card the market prices hardest, there is no evidence at all that one colour is scarcer in PSA 10.

Red Charizard is supposed to carry a premium, and the sales do not show one

The belief is that the red Charizard prism is worth more than the green because the red card matches a fire Pokémon. The record says otherwise so far. Since January 2024 we hold 31 PSA 10 Charizard prism sales with a colour: 17 red at a median of $10,200 and 14 green at a median of $9,300, a gap of 10% on samples that small. The three highest prices ever paid for the card are two greens and a red: $120,000 for green cert 132068889 on eBay on 11 October 2026, $100,100 for green cert 28897875 on eBay on 6 October (the record-sale report), and $79,720 for red cert 63942285 at Fanatics Collect on 5 October. The same red had sold for $47,695.50 on eBay in August. The chart is every one of the 31 sales by colour.

The two green records need the order read carefully. The red's $79,720 on 5 October was itself the record for the card, $25,720 above the $54,000 paid in June, and the two greens then broke it on 6 and 11 October. No red Charizard has come to auction since. Since April 2026 the card has set a new record on five of its six sales, three of them red ($32,400 in April, $54,000 in June, $79,720 in October) and two green, and the three October sales are simply the three copies that were offered after the price jump: one red, then two greens. The record belongs to green because green came up next, not because a red and a green were offered side by side and the green won. The first red offered at auction from here is the test, and on the sequence so far it would be expected to clear $100,000. The one red PSA 10 on the market as this is written is not at auction: Fanatics Collect lists red cert 54235271, the copy that sold there for $32,400 on 27 April 2026, at an asking price of `$1,200,000` with offers open, ten times the record. It is unsold as of 15 October, and an asking price is not a sale; what a red will actually make is still unknown.

Red, cert 63942285, $79,720

Green, cert 132068889, $120,000

The same holds across the twelve prisms. Over the last twelve months, 14 October 2025 to 13 October 2026, red PSA 10 prisms sold 54 times at a median of $4,487.50 and green 48 times at a median of $3,200. Red is ahead on the median, but of the seven prisms with a five-figure high since 2024, four have a green copy at or above the best red (the Charizard, Venusaur, Zapdos and Mewtwo) and three have the red ahead (the Blastoise, Gengar and Mew). With red the more common colour in the PSA 10 count, a red premium would have to come from preference alone, and the top of the market has not paid it.

What the sales do show is that red copies come to market less often. Since January 2024, 88 of the 182 known red PSA 10 prisms have sold, 48%, against 92 of the 148 greens, 62%. Red's 112 sales also sit on fewer cards: 24 of them are the same cert selling again, against 15 for green, so a sale count that looks level is a smaller group of red slabs changing hands more than once. On the Charizard it is 11 of 30 reds sold against 11 of 25 greens, and six of the seventeen red sales are repeats. Whether that is owners holding the red or the green simply being bought and resold faster, the data cannot say, but a buyer who wants a red copy at auction waits longer for one than the count suggests.

What to do with this if you are buying or selling

Three things follow from the count as it stands. First, neither colour is rare relative to the other in PSA 10, so a listing that prices one colour as the scarce version is pricing a belief, not a population; the gap between the two Charizard colours is 5 copies on 55 read. Second, if the two colours were printed in equal numbers, which is where the data points, the colour that ends up scarcer in PSA 10 is decided by the gem rate, and that is not measured yet; the Moltres (4 red to 13 green) is the first card worth watching for it, and the 17 Moltres certs with no photo would settle it. Third, the price of a copy is set by the card and the sale, not the banner. The two record Charizards are green, the two-year medians are within 10%, and across the prisms the colour with the higher record is red on three cards, green on two and level on two.

Every card in the set, the twelve prisms and the 139 plain cards, is on the home page with its red count, its green count and PSA's pooled PSA 10 population, and each card page shows every attributed copy with its photo. The PSA 10 prices behind this report are in the price report and on the sales page.