How we price cards

A card’s price is the TCGplayer market price for a near-mint, ungraded single, in USD, refreshed daily. Market price reflects what cards have recently sold for, not what sellers are asking.

It is not what you would net. Selling costs fees, shipping and condition, and a card with a price is not the same as a card with a buyer.

Most cards exist in several printings, and they are not worth the same. The headline price comes from the most standard one — the copy you’d get by opening a pack — never the most expensive.

This matters more than it sounds. Base Set Bulbasaur has a 1st Edition Shadowless printing worth $322.47. The card itself is a common worth $3.87. Taking the highest printing would have told you a bulk common was worth three hundred dollars — and for a while, it did: we found and corrected that across 745 cards.

Every printing still has its own price on the card’s page. They just don’t speak for the card.

1st Edition, Shadowless and Unlimited share a checklist and nothing else. Base Set is a $2,162 set in Unlimited and a $8,995 set in 1st Edition, so a set value that didn’t say which one it meant would be wrong by a factor of four.

Upstream prices are sometimes wrong, and a wrong price is worse than no price — it looks exactly like a real one. Two checks run on every sync. A condition ladder: a Lightly Played copy should not cost more than a Near Mint one. And an edition ladder: a 1st Edition should not be cheaper than the Unlimited print of the same card.

Anything failing those is withheld rather than displayed. That is 2,912 of 172,687 prices right now — 1.7%. Three of them, as of this page loading:

• Dark Gengar · Neo Destiny

  1st Edition at 500.00 is below Unlimited at 1103.00

• Charizard · Base

  1st Edition at 359.95 is below Shadowless at 2146.38

• Umbreon · Neo Discovery

  1st Edition at 160.00 is below Unlimited at 752.74

A 1st Edition priced below its Unlimited twin is almost never a bargain. It usually means counterfeits have polluted the sales that price is drawn from — which is exactly the number a buyer would act on, so it is exactly the number we won’t print.

Graded prices. A PSA 10 is worth a large multiple of a raw copy, and we have no graded data — so we never price one. Where you see a grade, it is a card you told us about, valued at its raw price.

Sold listings and sealed product. No comps, and no prices for sealed boxes or packs — which is why the pack pages tell you what a pack contains and never whether it’s worth buying.

Long history. Our supplier keeps about 31 days, so we record our own daily snapshot and it only goes back as far as we do — currently 2 days, most recently 2026-09-12. Charts arrive when there is something honest to chart.

Every card page has a report link, and it goes to a person. The Bulbasaur above was found by looking, not by being told — but being told is faster. See data & disclosures for sources and affiliate arrangements.