How we price Pokémon cards

Where the data comes from

• TCGplayer (via JustTCG) — live near-mint and per-condition market prices. This is the primary anchor for raw (ungraded) values, because it's the most liquid market collectors actually buy and sell on.
• eBay sold listings (real completed sales) — the source of truth for graded prices. We take the median of recent sales at each grade and company (PSA 10, PSA 9, BGS 9.5, CGC 10, etc.), and show the sample size as a “n sold” badge.
• Cardmarket — European marketplace pricing, used to cross-check and for regional context.
• PriceCharting — historical and broad coverage, used as a supporting signal (down-weighted for high-value vintage, where it's less reliable).

How we combine them

Raw value is anchored to the real TCGplayer near-mint price for the card's exact printing (holo, reverse holo, 1st edition, etc.). When other sources disagree wildly with TCGplayer — usually because a source mispriced a thin vintage card — we trust the live market and flag the rest.

Graded value uses real eBay-sold medians wherever we have enough recent sales. Where a card has no sold history, we fall back to a blended estimate — clearly labelled with lower confidence, because thin graded markets genuinely can't be priced precisely.

We run automated sanity checks every day: a worse condition can never cost more than a better one, a gem-mint slab can never be worth less than the raw card, and prices that imply impossible grading premiums are rejected rather than shown.

Reading the confidence rating

Honesty & limits

Card prices move constantly and thin markets are inherently uncertain. Our figures are aggregated market estimates for informational purposes — not appraisals, not PSA-official values, and not financial advice. We measure our own accuracy against real sold data and publish a daily guard that blocks any release where raw accuracy regresses. When we don't know something precisely, we say so with the confidence rating rather than pretending to.