Latias ex

Latias ex comes out of Surging Sparks, which I've slotted into the Scarlet & Violet Era era on Cardboard Assets. That basket has returned +110 pp relative to the S&P 500 Total Return across 27 tracked products, with a 35.8% CAGR against SPXTR's 10.2%. Total invested at retail across the era runs roughly $2,478; basket value today is $6,020.

Raw spot sits at $177 per the most recent PriceCharting loose comp. The last documented sale closed at $175 on 2026-05-01, so the market's barely moved since. The trailing 90-day sample is 36 comps, which I'd call robust.

PSA has graded 450 copies of this card. The Grade 10 rate is 64.4%, Grade 9 lands 31.1%. PSA 10 / PSA 9 spread is $120, with PSA 10 trading at roughly 1.9× the PSA 9 comp. That's a meaningful but compressed gem premium.

Run those numbers through the optimizer and the verdict is SKIP at PSA. Expected value works out to $215, less raw, less fees, less shipping, gets to a net of $9.04 per card sent in. ROI is roughly +5% off the $177 raw cost.

Risk worth flagging: pop counts grow. If grading volume jumps in the next 12 months and the population doubles, the gem-rate denominator gets larger and Grade 10 comps soften. Hard to call where this trends if a major influencer pushes a fresh round of submissions, or if a grader rolls out a service-tier promo that pulls in a wave of marginal copies. My read: the math holds at current pop counts. Watch the 12-month grading volume — that's the lever that reshapes this thesis. For comparable exposure in the same era, look at Umbreon ex, Mega Charizard X ex. Both sit in the same rarity neighborhood and respond to similar collector dynamics.

Bigger picture: the era basket I'm benchmarking against is dollar-cost-averaged at MSRP across 27 sealed products as they released, then compared head-to-head against the same dollars dropped into the S&P 500 Total Return on the same dates. That's the honest baseline — not a lump-sum-at-inception comparison, which would flatter the cardboard side. Even so, this card's era ran a 35.8% CAGR. Numbers above pull from PSA POP Report, recent eBay sold listings, and PriceCharting loose comps as of 2026-05-04. Coverage expands when our commercial pop-data partner integration completes.