For the past two months I have seen an inordinate amount of ex Deoxys Rocket’s Raikou ex CGC graded cards in high grades being auctioned off through Fanatics. Since the beginning of September there have been 54 of them sold on Fanatics.
I also did some cert digging on CGC to find that many of these Raikou were submitted in bundles. Haven’t checked all of the certs, but the largest submission I have seen so far is 15 Raikou in a row. 6081457001-6081457015. Another odd thing to note is there are lots of removed certifications around some of the Raikou bundles I’ve checked.
I don’t want to make any accusations, but this all seems quite suspicious so I did some more researching.
I checked the ex Deoxys CGC pop report. Raikou has quite a high pop compared to cards in the same set, but it also seems that the Raikou grades averaged a bit higher as well.
Maybe I’m overanalyzing things, but knowing there has been a case of Gold Stars stolen from the factory makes me a bit more cautious when seeing these numbers on Rocket’s Raikou. Let me know your thoughts.
Example: Ryan has a stack of gold star Celebi, likely in near mint condition. If he graded all of them at the same time, would that be suspicious? If something was stolen from the factory 20 years ago, it would have been brought up in the 2016 boom or 2020 boom.
I know a cooltrainer loves those Celebi. You’re probably right. Think I’m just losing it seeing all of these Raikou being auctioned off at the same time. I suppose now is a better time than ever to do it so it’s not too crazy.
Wanted to add that Fanatics Collect has auctioned over 150 CGC graded Rocket’s Raikou ex since April 2025. The pop size is very strange, now up to 593 graded at CGC while the other ex cards are around 100-200.
Rocket’s Raikou ex is the only secret rare of EX Deoxys, released as a box topper and possibly printed on its own sheet.
There should naturally exist more Raikou ex than the rest right? If we consider that you get one Raikou per box and 3/9 of the other ex (Source: Guide to early EX Series pull rates - #3 by zorloth ), there should be 3x as many Raikou coming from booster boxes as other ex in the set.
Obviously this number will fall due to blister packs and other products but I’d still expect twice as many Raikou. Anecdotally I see Raikou ex listings on eBay Aus roughly twice as much as others from the set as well.
It’s definitely interesting though. The condition seems to suggest some sort of binder storage over many years, aren’t the stolen dogs generally higher grades than these?
I guess we’ll never know unless someone comes forward if it’s a Raikou collector, some who mass opened boxes on release, or cards stolen from a factory.
