1965 Topps Battle #15 Dog Warrior Owns Its Set's Best Top End: 10 of 69 Copies at PSA 9 or Better
Only ten copies of 1965 Topps Battle #15 Dog Warrior have ever come back from PSA at a 9 or a 10. That sounds like a small number until you see the set around it: no other card among the 66 in 1965 Topps Battle has done it at a higher rate.
The card's art is all motion. A dog is caught mid-lunge at a soldier in a leather jacket, who throws an arm up toward its jaws while a uniformed officer watches from the brush in the upper corner. The caption bar at the bottom reads, simply, DOG WARRIOR. The copy pictured with this article is PSA cert 40350267, a NM-MT 8.
The Set
The Trading Card Database catalogs the set as 1965 Topps Battle: The Story of World War II, and PSA's CardFacts carries it as 66 numbered cards. Most of the checklist is combat scenes with pulp-magazine titles: card 1 is "Fight to the Death," and the run includes "Death on the Bridge," "Snipers in the Snow" and "Terror from the Sky." Near the end the set turns to portraits. Cards 60 through 64 are Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill, Douglas MacArthur, Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, and it closes on two checklists.
It is not a heavily graded issue. The median card in the set has 64 copies in PSA holders, and Dog Warrior, at 69, sits just above that line.
PSA Population Report
| PSA Grade | Population |
|---|---|
| PSA 10 | 1 |
| PSA 9 | 9 |
| PSA 8 | 24 |
| Total Graded (All Grades) | 69 |
* Population data as of September 28, 2026. PSA population counts are dynamic and increase as more cards are submitted for grading.
Seven Perfect Copies in the Whole Set
This blog pulled PSA's population for every card in the set on September 28, 2026. All 66 CardFacts entries map one-to-one onto the 66 card numbers, with no variety splits. Together they hold 4,199 copies on PSA's straight scale, and only seven PSA 10s.
Those seven are spread one apiece across seven different cards. Dog Warrior is one of them. The other six are card 18, "Jungle Duel"; card 24, "Trapped!"; card 46, "Assassin in the Sky"; card 54, "U.S. Sailor"; card 55, "U.S. Commando"; and card 62, MacArthur. The other 59 cards in the set have never produced a Gem Mint.
The Most Nines, Shared
The PSA 9 count is where Dog Warrior starts to separate. It has nine, and only one card in the set matches it: card 35, "Terror from the Sky," also with nine. Five cards sit one behind at eight.
So Dog Warrior is the only card in 1965 Topps Battle that holds both a PSA 10 and a share of the set's highest PSA 9 count. Card 35 has the nines but no ten. The six other tens all sit on cards with fewer nines.
The Rate Is Where It Leads Alone
Counts favor cards that simply get submitted more, so the fairer test is the share of each card's graded copies that reached a 9 or better. Dog Warrior's is 10 of 69, or 14.5 percent, the highest of all 66 cards and not tied. Card 35 is next at 9 of 65 (13.8 percent), then card 22, "Stockade Attack," at 8 of 59. Across the set as a whole, 242 of 4,199 copies made a 9 or a 10, about 5.8 percent. Dog Warrior's rate is roughly two and a half times that.
The card is not the cleanest in the set overall, though. Widen the test to PSA 8 or better and Dog Warrior slips to tenth, at 34 of 69. Card 60, de Gaulle, leads that measure at 34 of 58. Dog Warrior's edge sits almost entirely in the top two grades.
Its full curve on the straight scale:
- PSA 10: 1
- PSA 9: 9
- PSA 8: 24
- PSA 7: 21
- PSA 6: 5
- PSA 5: 6
- PSA 4: 3
Nothing has graded below a 4. Two more copies carry half grades and three are qualified 8s, which sit outside the straight-grade total.
A Set That Stops at Seven and Eight
The shape of the rest of the set explains why ten high-grade copies stand out. Of the 66 cards, 33 have their largest population at PSA 7 and 32 at PSA 8. The single exception is card 1, "Fight to the Death," which peaks at PSA 6. It is also the most-graded card in the set, at 89 copies, and 81 of those sit below PSA 8. One card, 44, "The Torture Chamber," has never reached a 9.
Against that background, a card with ten copies at 9 or better is not a rounding error. It is the top of the set's population.
Verdict: 1965 Topps Battle #15 Dog Warrior is a mid-pack card by volume and the leader of its set where it counts most: one of only seven PSA 10s, a share of the most PSA 9s, and the best rate of 9-or-better copies of any card on the 66-card checklist.
