S&Poké 500

What the number is

Every price on this site is the TCGplayer Market Price — TCGplayer's smoothed average of what copies actually sold for on its marketplace (Near Mint, raw/ungraded) — captured once a day (~20:00 UTC) via tcgcsv.com. Each card is priced by its most valuable regular printing (shown in the card view, e.g. Holofoil). 1st Edition printings are excluded: they rarely trade on TCGplayer, so their "market" figures there are unreliable. If a card has no recent sales data, its last-known price is carried forward for up to 70 days (marked † in the table) rather than showing a false crash to $0.

Rarely, TCGplayer prints an obviously wrong market price for a thinly traded card (a $2,000 card flashing $500 for a day). A price far outside a card's own recent range is held at its recent median until later data confirms it, so a source glitch can't move the index. And because a card's daily change is only meaningful between two confirmed prices, cards without one on both days show "—" instead of a percentage and sit out of the movers list — vintage cards that trade a few times a year don't have a reliable day-to-day price, and we'd rather show nothing than a made-up number.

Why other sites show different prices

There is no single "true" price for a trading card — every tracker measures a different market. PriceCharting averages eBay sold listings (auctions and all conditions mixed), so it often reads lower than TCGplayer for high-end cards. eBay search results are mostly asking prices, which run higher than what sales actually close at. Graded (PSA/BGS/CGC) prices are a different market entirely and can be several times the raw price. The gaps are biggest on rare vintage cards that sell only a few times a year — two trackers can legitimately differ by 2× on the same card. This index uses one consistent, sales-based yardstick (TCGplayer Market) across all 500 cards, which is what an index needs; use the compare links in each card's detail view to see the same card on TCGplayer, PriceCharting, and eBay.