Never marry yourself to distribution numbers because they are inaccurate. And more importantly, expected population does not reflect market availability.
Let’s take University Magikarp (suspected population of ~1,000) and TMB Lucky Stadium (suspected population of ~50) as examples.
If you sum PSA, CGC, and BGS pop reports, TMB Lucky Stadium (37, 12, 2) exceeds the total expected distribution number in just graded copies alone while University Magikarp (138, 24, 23) doesn’t even hit 20% of the total expected distribution number. And that is summing pop reports as if regrading doesn’t exist, which we know to be an issue with trophy cards.
So what gives? Why are so many more TMB Lucky Stadiums graded proportionally to their expected distribution number than University Magikarps? It could be related to how the cards were distributed. For example, TMB Lucky Stadium was given to participants of the 2000 Tropical Mega Battle, seemingly the most dedicated TCG players in the world at the time, all at the same event. On the other hand, University Magikarp was given to children across Japan who participated in the Tamamushi University contest in 1998, mailed individually to the winners.
Perhaps Unikarps were more likely to get lost over time than TMB Lucky Stadiums due to characteristics of the winners, or maybe extra copies of TMB participant and winner promos were kept by Akabane and other staff while the Unikarp was not. Price does not explain the major difference in pop report either. I genuinely thought that the pop report for Unikarp would balloon after Akabane’s trophy copies started to drip into the market, but we haven’t really seen that compared to tournament participant or winner promos.
The final possible explanation is that many fewer Unikarps were disturbed than once thought. Although the magazines mentioned 1,000, it’s possible that only a small proportion of the youngest children aced the final test, so the 198 given to the 6th grader cohort represented a large proportion of all distributed copies.