Wondering if similar to 2020/2021 when the pop reports were lower and supply was more scarce for WOTC, if the same is happening right now for post WOTC era cards
I’m not very active but from what I see on instagram and ZG sales, EX era and the random “low pop” that nobody wanted to grade reverse holos are booming
Wonder if the supply for those cards will be processed eventually and there will be a market shift with a larger amount of supply hitting
Some of the ex era craziness is just shilling, fake sales, and hype. Some isnt. Hard to tell
For XY Base, Furious Fists, Phantom Forces, and Flashfire, often there is some edgewear/cornerwear issues right out of the pack. Like all sets there are different print runs which may have cleaner copies come out but for the most part the pop report accurately reflects the difficulty of grading these sets.
Primal Clash and Double Crisis seem to be the worst offenders. The full arts in PRC had edge issues and had whitening on the surface of the card due to the way the texture was printed. Double Crisis had poor QC and a shorter print run, so there is both condition rarity and a degree of scarcity.
Roaring Skies is an interesting one because even though it was heavily reprinted, the QC was not as good as AO & beyond. Still better than PRC and Double Crisis.
Evolutions had really good QC for everything except for the regular holos for some reason. Generations almost feels like Roaring Skies—there are a lot of issues that come up but there was enough printed so that true clean 10s exist.
Ancient Origins and regular XY sets beyond had plenty of reprints with really good QC. The PSA backlog should be full of cards from those sets in PSA 10. Anyone who tells you that those cards are hard to grade is lying to u lol.
Need to emphasize that this is all anecdotal, everything I said above might just be bs
Sorry I just realized I just droned on about XY QC and didnt answer your question.
For XY era, I believe there is a ton of post-Roaring Skies cards stuck in the backlog waiting for that 10 grade.
For the harder to grade cards maybe the populations will increase by single digits as a few 10s slip by but if there’s any significant market shifts happening for these cards, it will rely on something else other than the backlog.
This is just objectively true for EX Series reverse holos.
To illustrate:
Rayquaza’s pull rate was 1/324 packs.
Sableye’s pull rate was 1/95 packs.
There were 3.41x as many copies of reverse Sableye printed as Rayquaza gold star.
If roughly the same proportion of Sableyes are still in mint condition as Rayquaza gold stars, then we would expect to see 955 copies in PSA 9+10.
Basically, the pop reports of these reverse holos that people are paying gazillions of dollars for are not even close to mature yet. Like, literally not even 10% of the way there.
A Sableye reverse holo was worth almost nothing for years (e.g., I just checked, and I literally bought a mint (9-10 quality) raw copy for $5 from a forum member in 2020). And 11x LP or NM copies from TCGPlayer (from good vendors), all for under $3/card. As well as a bunch more from T&T, Collector’s Cache, and CoolStuffInc, as late as 2023–none for more than >$10/ea. No one wanted these things. Hell, I didn’t even want them–I was just picky about condition and Deoxys reverse holos are very fragile.
I’m not sure if the people paying crazy amounts for these cards realize this, but you could literally build a complete reverse holo set of EX Deoxys in NM/M condition in 2020/21 for less than the price of a single PSA 9 reverse holo Sableye now. There wasn’t a single reverse holo in the set worth even triple digits in mint condition. Anyone paying $1000 for a PSA 9 of that Sableye is, in my sincere opinion, either really (1) fiscally irresponsible or (2) really poorly informed.
(Note: I used Sableye as an example because it came to mind and it recently had a few insane sales. I have no particular beef with Sableye–it’s a nice-looking card.)
Tl:DR yes
Wouldn’t be me. I pulled a primal groudon secret rare with psa 7 level of whitening straight out of the pack 
Adding on to this with my experience living through/grading in the XY era, the first four sets had abysmal print quality as you note. XY Base and Flashfire were extra bad, but I remember pack-pulling a Gengar EX Full Art from Phantom Forces and PSA gave it an 8. It was quite honestly deserved.
The worst QC was the original print run of Primal Clash with the white dots on the back surface of all the FA cards. This run lasted through the release of Roaring Skies. Around that time, they finally did something to improve the card quality and also entered an era of increased printing. Roaring Skies card quality was much better, as was the second print run of Primal Clash and all the post-XY6 sets. Stuff like Double Crisis never got a reprint with the good quality, so we’re stuck with that set having next to unattainable 10s.
So there is good quality PRC out there, but it’s limited to a secondary print run. I’d say not much left to be graded. The latter half of XY likely has a lot still out there. I’ve recently graded like 5 PSA 10 English XY Full Arts, all from the latter half of XY, in the last few months.
There was that sale of a non holo Gengar PSA 10 for some stupid high number. That same day, TCGplayer sold out. I am guessing people are trying to get the 10 and sell in this crazy market.
Low pop cards that have abnormally high sales absolutely drives behavior, and more will be added to the pop report
I saw the phantom forces full art non mega gengar selling (or trying to be sold) for 15000$
Could buy you a base 1st Charizard. Or damn near any other card
I feel this is a tale as old as time. Cards “not worth grading” get a little attention. Small existing supply of graded gets wiped out. People start grading, card corrects.
But base 2 hasn’t corrected. When I ran the numbers it was the hardest set to grade in 2020, and it still is today. Even more difficult to get 10s
Doesn’t mean it’s going to be more desirable over time. I like base 2 and I have two boxes as investments. But I’m not buying graded as investments