Every PSA 10 in the 1977 Star Wars Set, Ranked From Rarest to Most Common

Across the whole 66-card first series, PSA has awarded 1,188 tens from 50,471 cards graded. That is 2.35%. But the spread between individual cards is enormous, and the reason is not the one most people assume.

Two cards have managed four PSA 10s in nearly fifty years. One has managed thirty-nine. Here is the whole thing, and then the explanation, which I think is the interesting part.

The full table

Ranked by how many PSA 10s exist, fewest first. The last column is what share of submissions of that card came back a ten.

#	Card	PSA 10s	Graded	Rate
63	May the Force Be With You!	4	1,121	0.36%
60	Peter Cushing As Grand Moff Tarkin	4	587	0.68%
7	The Villainous Darth Vader	5	1,609	0.31%
30	Han in the Millennium Falcon	7	552	1.27%
53	Battle in Outer Space!	8	561	1.43%
15	Artoo-Detoo Is Left Behind!	8	500	1.60%
66	Amazing Robot See-Threepio!	8	443	1.81%
48	Artoo-Detoo Is Loaded Aboard	8	422	1.90%
1	Luke Skywalker	9	5,180	0.17%
45	The Light Sabre	10	713	1.40%
19	Searching for the Little Droid	10	482	2.07%
4	Space Pirate Han Solo	11	1,551	0.71%
8	Grand Moff Tarkin	11	958	1.15%
37	Cornered in the Labyrinth	11	501	2.20%
23	See-Threepio Is Injured!	11	438	2.51%
51	See-Threepio and Princess Leia	12	639	1.88%
43	Luke Prepares to Swing Across the Chasm	12	569	2.11%
65	Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill	12	536	2.24%
39	Steel Walls Close in on Our Heroes!	12	529	2.27%
42	Stormtroopers Attack!	13	644	2.02%
16	Jawas of Tatooine	13	514	2.53%
58	Harrison Ford As Han Solo	14	1,458	0.96%
5	Princess Leia Organa	15	2,123	0.71%
44	Han and Chewie Shoot It Out!	15	780	1.92%
27	Some Repairs for See-Threepio	15	622	2.41%
64	Governor of Imperial Outlands	15	585	2.56%
38	Luke and Han in the Refuse Room	15	517	2.90%
6	Ben (Obi-Wan) Kenobi	16	1,416	1.13%
26	A Horrified Luke Sees His Family Killed	16	615	2.60%
21	The Tusken Raiders	16	571	2.80%
57	Mark Hamill As Luke Skywalker	17	1,350	1.26%
35	Luke and Han As Stormtroopers	17	543	3.13%
14	Luke Checks Out His New Droid	17	532	3.20%
55	Han, Chewie and Luke	18	589	3.06%
50	Rebel Leaders Wonder About Their Fate!	18	535	3.36%
41	Facing the Deadly Chasm	18	488	3.69%
49	The Rebels Monitor the Raid	18	452	3.98%
2	See-Threepio and Artoo-Detoo	19	1,211	1.57%
25	Luke Rushes to Save His Loved Ones	19	566	3.36%
59	Alec Guinness As Ben Kenobi	20	990	2.02%
31	Sighting the Death Star	20	650	3.08%
13	A Sale on Droids!	20	493	4.06%
36	Blast of the Laser Rifle!	20	436	4.59%
61	Mark Hamill in Control Room	21	549	3.83%
46	A Desperate Moment for Ben	21	479	4.38%
10	Princess Leia-Captured!	23	843	2.73%
28	Luke Agrees to Join Ben Kenobi	23	544	4.23%
33	The Droids in the Control Room	23	486	4.73%
20	Hunted By the Sandpeople!	23	469	4.90%
3	The Little Droid, Artoo-Detoo	24	1,512	1.59%
17	Lord Vader Threatens Princess Leia!	24	656	3.66%
18	Artoo-Detoo Is Missing!	24	556	4.32%
24	Stormtroopers Seek the Droids!	24	518	4.63%
32	Lord Vader's Guards	24	507	4.73%
9	Rebels Defend Their Starship!	25	545	4.59%
40	Droids Rescue Their Masters!	26	514	5.06%
29	Stopped By Stormtroopers	26	497	5.23%
56	A Day of Rejoicing!	28	618	4.53%
62	Lord Vader's Stormtroopers	28	568	4.93%
54	The Victors Receive Their Reward	29	517	5.61%
34	See-Threepio Diverts the Guards	29	510	5.69%
12	The Droids Are Reunited!	30	579	5.18%
22	Rescued By Ben Kenobi	30	558	5.38%
47	Luke Prepares for the Battle	31	656	4.73%
52	Who Will Win the Final Star War?	36	604	5.96%
11	Artoo Is Imprisoned By the Jawas	39	615	6.34%

The two rarest

Card 63, "May the Force Be With You!", and card 60, "Peter Cushing As Grand Moff Tarkin", both sit at four.

Cushing is the one that surprises people, because it is not an obviously desirable card. But 587 have been graded and four made it, which tells you the card itself is difficult rather than that nobody tried.

Where the ranking misleads you

Now the part worth sitting with, because a table ordered by count answers a different question from the one you probably have.

Luke Skywalker, card 1, has nine PSA 10s. That puts him ninth on the list above, which makes him look moderately difficult. He is not moderately difficult. He is the hardest card in the set by a distance: those nine tens come from 5,180 submissions, a rate of 0.17%. One in every 576 attempts.

The Jawa card at the bottom of the table, number 11, is 39 from 615. One in sixteen.

So Luke is roughly thirty six times harder to grade a ten from than a card nobody wants. Ranked by count he looks unremarkable, because the count does not know how many people tried.

Why the commons look easy

Here is the mechanism, and once you see it you cannot unsee it in any population report.

Nobody pays a grading fee on a two-dollar common unless it already looks flawless. There is no point: a PSA 6 of "Rescued By Ben Kenobi" is worth less than the cost of grading it. So the commons that arrive at PSA have been filtered before they get there, and the population report for those cards is not a sample of surviving cards. It is a sample of cards somebody already judged to be near perfect.

Card 1 is the opposite. Luke Skywalker is worth grading in almost any condition, so thousands of ordinary copies get submitted alongside the good ones. The denominator is stuffed with cards that were never going to make a ten.

Which means the low rates on the hero cards and the high rates on the commons are measuring submission behaviour at least as much as they are measuring condition.

The pattern that proves it

Look at the four most-submitted cards in the set. Luke at 5,180, Princess Leia at 2,123, Darth Vader at 1,609, Space Pirate Han Solo at 1,551.

All four are in the ten hardest cards to grade a ten from. Every single one.

If gem rate were purely about how the cards were printed and stored, there would be no reason for the four most popular cards to cluster at the difficult end. They cluster there because popularity is what puts marginal copies in front of a grader.

So which is actually rare

Both readings are true and they answer different questions.

If you want the card that is hardest to obtain in a PSA 10, that is the count: four exist of card 63 and four of card 60, and no amount of money conjures a fifth.

If you want the card hardest to produce a PSA 10 from, that is the rate, and it is Luke by a mile, then Vader at 0.31%.

Set builders care about the first. Anyone thinking of cracking a nine and resubmitting cares about the second. They are not the same question and a single ranking cannot answer both, which is why the table above carries all three numbers rather than just the one.

Every card in the set has a page here showing what is listed and what has verifiably sold in each grade, and you can read how we work the numbers out.