Pop Report

A pop report tells you how many copies of a card a grading company has ever graded, broken down by grade. PSA, BGS, and CGC all publish theirs online for free.

Reading one is straightforward: find the card and print run, then look at two numbers — the population at the grade you care about, and the population above it. A card with 50 copies in PSA 10 is scarce; the same card with 5,000 tens is not, no matter how rare the pull was. Also check totals over time: a low pop can just mean few people have submitted the card yet, especially for new sets, so pops for modern cards climb quickly after release.