How a number
is built.
Most price guides hand you one figure and tell you nothing about it — a point pretending to be a fact. Here's the whole thing, in order: how we make sure it's the right card, where the number comes from, and everything we show you so you never have to take it on faith.
That's the whole number, in one panel — the mark, the range it sits in, and the three real datapoints that pinned it. Below is how each piece got there.
First, we make sure it's the right card.
A card's name and number aren't enough to price it. Charizard #4/102 is a ~$196 Celebrations reprint, a 1999 Base Set original worth many times more, and a gold-metal novelty that isn't a real card at all — same name, same number, wildly different money. Most feeds match on text and quietly average them together.
We don't. Every card is pinned to a specific catalog identity — set, number, and where possible a marketplace product ID — before a single price is pulled. If a listing isn't your card, it never touches your number.
Then we gather what actually happened.
Two kinds of evidence, kept separate: real sales — what the card has recently sold for — and live asks, the prices people are listing it at right now. Sold prices are the ground truth; asks tell us where the market is leaning today.
We pull only the condition you hold (a raw card is compared to raw cards, not to graded slabs), and we strip the noise: proxies, lots, bundles, empty sleeves, and mistyped listings get filtered out before anything is counted. A price is only as good as what it's built from.
We find the honest floor — not the wishful ceiling.
Anyone can list a $200 card at $900 and hope. Those asks are noise, and averaging them in is how guides drift high. We anchor to the bottom of the real market: the lowest genuine sales and the cheapest legitimate asks — the price you could actually buy or sell at today.
Outliers get caught in both directions. A $4 "Charizard" that's really a sticker is thrown out just as fast as a $900 fantasy. What survives is a tight band of prices that real money has stood behind.
We give you the range, not just a point.
A single number hides how sure it is. So the mark always comes with the band it sits in — the low and the high the market is genuinely trading between. A tight band means the market agrees; a wide one means it's your call, and now you can see that instead of guessing.
The mark itself sits inside that band, weighted toward real sales over open asks. It's the number we'd stand behind — and the range is how we admit what we don't know.
And we show the depth behind it.
A price backed by one sale and a price backed by fifty should not look the same — but on most guides they're printed identically. We show the sample size on every card, so a number you can lean on and a number that's barely a rumor never wear the same face.
Tap any figure in the app and the whole panel opens: the sold prices, the live asks, how many copies are for sale, and the exact points that set the mark. Nothing is hidden behind the number.
When the data is thin, we say so.
Some cards barely trade. Rather than invent a confident figure from two stale listings, we widen the range, lean on whatever real sales exist, and flag it — so a rarely-traded card reads as exactly that. An honest "we're not sure" beats a precise number that's wrong.
What we never do
- ✕Average three different cards together because they share a name and number.
- ✕Let wishful high asks pull the number up. The floor is real; the ceiling is often fiction.
- ✕Compare a raw card to graded slabs, or a near-mint to a beater.
- ✕Print a one-sale guess and a fifty-sale consensus as if they're equally solid.
- ✕Show you a number and hide where it came from. Every mark opens up.