They’re still rare cards, but they’re not as rare as they otherwise would have been.
I have a blog article all about the 2009 Design Contest and as part of that I compare the graded population of the 2009 and 2010 Design Contests with the 2015 Art Academy set - all of which had the same official distribution of 100 cards being awarded to each winner: pichu.blog/2009-design-contest#cards-which-have-surfaced.
To summarise: the Art Academy contest is known to have extra copies (to my knowledge the Kyogre illustrator still has all 100 of their cards but as of the time of writing this post PSA has graded 13 of them). This is what the population distribution for the Art Academy looked like on PSA’s pop report in July last year:
4 of the cards had no copies graded at all whereas others have a lot of copies graded. The cards with a lot of copies graded are from winners who have been actively selling their cards. This is very much all over the place and is in line with what I’d at least expect to see for a distribution of this nature.
Comparing this with the 2010 Design Contest, we see this (again, this is as of July 2020):
All of the cards had at this point between 37 and 48 copies graded. There’s a lot of uniformity to this as if all of the winners had somehow banded together to sell a similar number of copies of each of their cards. As a tidbit: 20 copies have been graded since I made this chart and the range is now 39 to 51.
Finally the 2009 Design Contest in July 2020 looked like this:
At this point between 3 and 5 of each card had been graded by PSA. Despite very few of each card having surfaced, there is still a lot of uniformity here as if to imply the winners had all specifically banded together to sell 3-5 of their cards.
Around October last year the winner of the 2009 Televi-Kun contest listed one of their cards for sale on YJA. At this point 3 of their cards had been graded by PSA since before 2017. @pokekuma13 reached out to them to ask how many other copies they’d sold and they replied to say that they’d sold one copy before this point.
Only 1 of the 2009 cards have appeared on PSA’s pop report since then, though I graded 2 cards with CGC and @magicrap the winner of the first Televi-Kun auction mentioned above graded theirs with BGS. I don’t know how many of the 2010 cards have been graded outside of PSA unfortunately.
I believe that a handful of 2009 sets were leaked out and where nobody got in trouble for it I think in 2010 they did the same but on a much larger scale.
I’m possibly bias having recently picked up a copy of the card myself, but I’d not be surprised if there are fewer of the 660 officially-published ‘Chosen Entry’ cards out there than there are each of the 100 officially-published winning cards.