A card is worth what it has recently sold for, not what someone is asking. Learn to read sold data, spot the traps in an average, and price a card in under two minutes.
Key takeaways
- Value comes from completed sales, not active listings. Anyone can ask any price.
- Check at least the last five to ten sales of the same card, same set, same printing and same condition.
- Match the printing exactly: holo, reverse holo, 1st Edition, promo and alternate art versions are different cards for pricing.
- Graded and raw prices are separate markets. Never price a raw card off a slab sale.
- Prices you see quoted in dollars need converting, and a UK sale usually lands differently to a US one.
Most overpaying happens for one reason: the buyer looked at what sellers were asking instead of what buyers had paid. Asking prices are a wish. Sold prices are evidence. Once you only look at evidence, the market becomes much less mysterious.
Where the numbers come from
- Marketplace sold data: on eBay you can filter search results to sold and completed listings, which shows real transaction prices with dates.
- Aggregated market prices: TCGplayer publishes a market price derived from recent verified sales of that specific product, which is why it moves without any seller changing a listing.
- Auction house results: published for higher-value and graded cards, useful at the top of the market and largely irrelevant for a £4 card.
- Our own catalogue: DeuxyDex card pages carry a tracked market figure converted to pounds, which is what our buy-back quotes work from.
How to price a single card properly
- Identify the card exactly: name, set, card number and printing. The number in the bottom corner plus the set symbol is enough.
- Search sold listings for that exact card and read the dates, not just the prices.
- Throw out the obvious outliers: mislabelled listings, lots that included other cards, and anything sold as damaged.
- Separate graded results from raw results, and separate grades from each other.
- Take the middle of the remaining recent sales. That is your working value.
Traps that make an average lie
- Bundle sales: a card that appeared in a lot of thirty tells you nothing about its individual price.
- Best-offer sales: the displayed price is not always the accepted price on some platforms.
- Shipping baked into the price: a £9 card with £4 postage is not a £13 card.
- Currency: a US sale in dollars converts to a different number in pounds, and UK supply for the same card is usually thinner.
- Stale data: for a newly released set, prices can move week to week as more product is opened.
Why our buying and selling prices differ
We sell at tracked market and buy at 70% of it in cash, or 85% in store credit. The gap is not a trick: it covers the risk of holding stock whose value can fall, the cost of checking and protecting cards, payment and postage fees, and the fact that you get paid immediately instead of waiting for a buyer.
Search a card and see the tracked market value and what we would pay for it, before you commit to anything.
See a live quote →Common questions
- How do I find out what my Pokémon card is worth?
- Identify the exact card and printing, then look at recent sold prices for that same card in the same condition — ignore what sellers are asking. Take the middle of the last handful of sales as your working value.
- Why is the price on one site different from another?
- Different sites measure different things: some show asking prices, some show an average of recent verified sales, and some mix graded and raw results. They also use different currencies and different buyer bases.
- Are asking prices completely useless?
- Not completely. If dozens of copies are listed and none are selling, that tells you supply is high and the real value is below the asks. Use asks to read supply, use sold prices to read value.
- How often do Pokémon card prices change?
- Cards from a brand-new set can move week to week while packs are still being opened. Established cards move more slowly, usually with news, reprints, anniversaries or a spike in attention.
A video version of this guide is planned for the DeuxyDex channel.
Sources
- [1] eBay: searching completed and sold listings
- [2] TCGplayer: how market price is calculated
- [3] PSA: card grading standards
Prices, pull rates and set details change. Where we could not verify a claim, we left it out.