Kayou Naruto Grading: 82% of CGC Grades Are a 10

Kayou's product pages will tell you a set has 158 cards across 10 rarity tiers. They will not tell you what happens when one of those cards goes into an envelope and comes back in plastic.

CGC does. Its population report for Naruto (Kayou) is a live, public count of every card the company has slabbed, broken out per set and per grade, and as of 20 August 2026 it stands at 1,668 cards. That is a small enough census to read end to end and a large enough one to say something. So I read all of it.

The headline: this is not a coin flip. Grading a Kayou Naruto card is, on the record so far, overwhelmingly likely to produce a 10.

The whole census, in one number

1,361 of the 1,668 cards CGC has graded — 81.6% — came back as a 10. Here is the full spread, pulled from the per-card population data behind CGC's report:

Nearly two thirds of everything sent in came back Pristine 10, CGC's top card grade. Add Gem Mint 10 and you have four cards in five.

The census splits by language, too: 974 of the 1,668 are Simplified Chinese printings and 694 are English. The English half is the one that matters if you bought your boxes in the US, and it grades slightly higher — 584 of 694, or 84.1%, are a 10.

The English sets, set by set

Eight English groups exist in CGC's Naruto (Kayou) census. Every set Kayou currently sells in the US is in there, including the Ninja Age Premium Collector Box that Beckett and Kayou were still selling as early access at the end of July.

Heaven Scroll is the weak link at 69.8%, and it is also the set Kayou launched its US line with — PSA's write-up of the collaboration below names Heaven Scroll among the sets Kayou brought to the US. CGC dates all 65 of its census entries to 2025, so those cards have had the longest to sit in binders, sleeves and shoeboxes before anyone thought about slabbing them. Chapter Jin Series 3, dated 2026 throughout, sits at 77.4% but pulls the highest Gem Mint 10 count of any English set: 32 of its 124.

The four smallest English groups all sit above 91%, which is what small samples of freshly opened product look like, and is the reason I would not read much into 96.2% off 52 cards.

That card — NRSA02-MR-001L4 — is one of three English cards tied at 10 submissions, behind only the promo below at 115 and a Heaven Scroll SSR at 12. Nine of its ten came back Pristine 10 and the tenth Gem Mint 10.

What Pristine 10 and Gem Mint 10 actually mean

They are not the same grade with different stickers, and the gap matters when 82% of the census sits in those two rows.

Per CGC's published grading scale, Pristine 10 is "a virtually flawless card to the naked eye", requires 50/50 centering, and is reserved for cards that are flawless under 10-times magnification. It gets its own label design.

Gem Mint 10 is a card that earned a 10 overall but missed one Pristine criterion. CGC's stated tolerances: corners perfect to the naked eye and Mint+ under 10x, surface free of print spots with perfect gloss, front centering no worse than roughly 55/45 and reverse centering no worse than 75/25.

So the difference between the two is usually centering or one magnified corner. On a Kayou card that comes out of a sealed pack, either is achievable straight from the wrapper, which is the simplest explanation for a census where the top two rows hold 1,361 of 1,668 entries.

One thing not to chase: CGC lists Perfect 10 on its scale as a retired grade carried over from the older CGC Trading Cards and CSG scales. No new card gets one, so a Kayou Naruto card cannot.

Nothing in the census is worse than a 6.5

Run down that first table again and notice where it stops. The lowest grade recorded on any Kayou Naruto card in CGC's census is Ex/NM+ 6.5, and there are four of them. Nothing at 6, nothing at 5, nothing lower. There are also zero Authentic Altered cards — CGC's designation for a card that is genuine but has been trimmed or recoloured.

Two readings, and they are not mutually exclusive. One is that Kayou's product is new — the oldest cards in the census are dated 2021 and the bulk are 2025 and 2026 — so there has not been time to accumulate beaten-up copies. The other is that nobody pays to grade a bent Kayou card, so the damaged ones simply never enter the census. A population report counts what was submitted, not what exists.

Either way it changes what the numbers are useful for. This data tells you what happens to cards people choose to submit. It does not tell you the condition of the average card in a box. Those are different questions and only one of them is answered here.

Forty cards came back with no grade at all

The most interesting row in the table is the smallest one. Forty entries — 2.4% of the census, and all forty of them in the English sets — carry CGC's Authentic designation instead of a number.

CGC's scale defines Authentic as a card that is genuine and unaltered but cannot receive a numeric grade, and it names two triggers: a card missing a portion of stock, such as a hand-cut card that falls below published measurement tolerance, and a card below the minimum size requirements.

Where they land is oddly concentrated:

Thirty of the forty are SSR or SR cards. The single worst-affected card is NRSA01-SSR-021L3, a Heaven Scroll Naruto Uzumaki: eight submissions, five of them Authentic. The hero image at the top of this piece, NRSA01-SSR-019L3, is the same story at smaller scale — 12 submissions, seven Pristine 10, two Gem Mint 10, three Authentic.

CGC does not publish a per-card reason, so I am not going to invent one. What is worth knowing before you submit is where the designations concentrate: 21 of the 90 SSR submissions and 9 of the 26 SR submissions came back without a number, against 10 across the other 578 English submissions put together.

The code on your card is not the code in the database

This is the practical trap, and it will cost you ten minutes if you do not know about it.

Pick up a Kayou Earth Scroll Series 1 card. Kayou's own US product page prints the prefix NRI01 on all 131 cards in that set — every single one. Now search CGC's population report for NRI01 and you get nothing, because CGC files that set as Earth Scroll (NREA01) and numbers its 32 census entries NREA01-.

They are the same set. The card lists match one for one: AR-001 Anko Mitarashi, AR-002 Orochimaru, AR-006 Sakura Uchiha, AR-009 Boruto Uzumaki, AR-010 Sarada Uchiha, and on down through the CR, MR and SP tiers. Same names, same numbers, different prefix.

That is the card. Read the bottom-right corner: NRI01-AR-009L4. In CGC's census the same Boruto is NREA01-AR-009L4, with one submission, graded Pristine 10.

It happens a second time in the other direction. CGC carries a group called Jin Chapter Series 1 (NRV01) with nine cards graded — a set name that does not appear anywhere on Kayou's US site, which lists no Chapter Jin Series 1. Its card list is SP-001 Naruto, SP-002 Sasuke, SP-003 Sakura, SP-004 Kakashi, SE-001 Sasuke and PU-003 Naruto. That is the Heaven Scroll Series 1 line-up, numbered under a third prefix.

The rule to take away: when you search a grading census, search by character name and tier code, not by the prefix printed on your card. The prefixes are not stable across catalogues.

The most-graded Kayou Naruto card is a PSA promo

Of the 307 distinct English cards in CGC's census, one is submitted more than any other by a wide margin — and it is not a chase card out of a box.

NRSA-PR-003, a Naruto Uzumaki that CGC labels "PSA Magazine", has 115 submissions. That is 16.6% of the entire English census on a single card, and more than the Ninja Age Premium Collector Box (33) and Earth Scroll Series 2 (37) put together.

Its spread: 87 Pristine 10, 6 Gem Mint 10, 1 Mint+ 9.5, 5 Mint 9, 5 NM/Mint+ 8.5, 3 NM/Mint 8, 2 Near Mint+ 7.5, 2 Near Mint 7, 1 Ex/NM+ 6.5 and 3 Authentic.

The card comes from a collaboration PSA announced with Kayou: a members-only textured holofoil NARUTO promo, showing Naruto inhabited by the Nine-Tails with Gamakichi on a television, sent to PSA Collectors Club members who selected the Pop Culture & TCG edition of PSA Magazine and shipped with the December issue. PSA's announcement asked members to join or renew by 31 October to receive one.

So the most-graded Kayou Naruto card in CGC's census arrived free in a rival grading company's magazine. Make of that what you will.

The promo group as a whole is the story here. Fourteen distinct promotional cards account for 168 grading events — more than any actual set — and the list reads like a map of Kayou's US marketing: a Konan from New York Comic Con, an NRSA-PR-002 flagged "NA Ver. (Serialized # to 999)", an NRIE-PR-002 marked "SEA Ver.", a Team 7 tied to Earth Scroll 02, and two Ninja Age promos.

Where Kayou sits in CGC's filing cabinet

Kayou Naruto is not filed as a trading card game, and that is correct — it is a collectible line with no rules text, no costs and nothing to resolve against another card.

CGC puts Naruto (Kayou) under Non-sports Cards, where it is the second-largest Kayou category behind The Three Kingdoms (Kayou) at 2,245 graded. Bandai's 2006 Naruto CCG, which was an actual game, sits in a completely different bucket: Trading Cards, as "Naruto CCG", with 500 graded.

Putting the two next to each other is the clearest illustration of what a twenty-year gap does to a grade:

The 2006 figures are drawn from CGC's per-card census for that category, which breaks the 500 out across 57 groups in four subcategories. Its distribution is a normal-looking spread centred on Mint 9 and NM/Mint 8, with a long tail running down to 3. Kayou's is a spike at the top with almost nothing under it.

The other two graders

CGC is the one publishing open numbers, but it is not the only company that will take these cards.

PSA catalogues Kayou Naruto sets in its own population report, under Non-Sport Cards, with set entries named for the card codes — the 2025 NRSA01 Heaven Scroll English/United States Series 1 PTR set and the 2026 NRSA03 Chapter Jin English Series 3 AR set both have pages. The numbers behind them sit behind a PSA account sign-in, so I cannot put a figure on how many PSA has graded. PSA has also worked with Kayou directly, on the PSA Magazine promo above.

Beckett partnered with Kayou at the 2026 National Sports Collectors Convention in Chicago. Beckett's show page lists a Kayou tie-in at Booth 2820 selling Naruto: Ninja Age boxes ahead of the official release, plus a daily draw for exclusive Naruto promo cards from 29 July through 1 August. Kayou's own event listing for the same show ran 29 July to 2 August at booth #2820 and advertised complimentary on-site Beckett grading, in limited daily supply.

CGC does publish a written policy, and there is one Kayou Naruto line in it worth reading before you pack an envelope. Its Cards We Grade & Policies page lists "Kayou Naruto - card number starting with 'NR-'" among the cards CGC Cards does not grade. In the census, those bare NR- codes belong entirely to older Simplified Chinese printings dated 2022 and 2023 — 31 entries and 32 grading events. Every English-language card in the report carries a longer prefix instead: NRSA, NREA, NRIE, NRCCNA or NRV.

What the census cannot tell you

Being straight about the edges of this data:

• It is a count of submissions, not a survey of the product. Cards nobody bothered to grade are invisible to it.
• It is one company. PSA and Beckett numbers would change the picture and neither is openly published.
• It says nothing about value. CGC's own disclaimer on the report says population data is not an indicator of value or rarity, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
• It moves. CGC timestamps the file; the run behind this piece was stamped 20 August 2026. Ninja Age has 33 entries today because it is the newest set in the report.
• None of this touches Bandai's game. The NARUTO CARD GAME that debuted at Gen Con 2026 does not release until Summer 2027 and has exactly one card in circulation. Different company, different product, nothing in this census.

If you are deciding whether to send a stack off: the census says the grade is the least of your worries on a card pulled and sleeved carefully, that the SSR and SR tiers carry a real risk of coming back Authentic instead of numbered, and that you should look your set up by card name rather than the code stamped on the front.

Population figures, set labels, card numbers and grade definitions above are read from CGC's Naruto (Kayou) population report and published grading scale, with the population file timestamped 20 August 2026.