Why Pokémon Card Prices Are Different on Every Site

Look up the same Pokémon card on three price sites and you will get three numbers, sometimes a long way apart. None of them is lying. They are counting different sales. Here is what goes into a card price, where the gaps come from, and how we decide which sales count.

What a card price actually is

There is no official price for a Pokémon card. A price guide collects completed sales from marketplaces, decides which ones belong to the card, and summarises them into one number. Every step is a choice, and every choice moves the number.

• Which marketplaces. eBay alone, or eBay plus TCGplayer plus the auction houses. Auction-house sales skew high (big cards, serious bidders). TCGplayer skews low (raw cards, store sellers).
• Which sales belong to the card. A listing titled "Charizard Base Set" might be the 1999 card, the 2016 Evolutions reprint, a 1st Edition, a Shadowless, or a Celebrations Classic Collection copy. Those sell at prices a hundred times apart.
• Which grades go together. Some guides put every ungraded sale in one bucket, from mint to heavily played. Some fold CGC and BGS into "graded 9". Some treat PSA 10 and BGS 10 as the same.
• How the summary is made. The most recent sale, an average, a median, an average that weights recent sales more. On a thinly traded card these differ a lot.
• How old the sales are. Last 30 days, last year, all time. In a moving market the window is the price.

Where the big gaps come from

From what we see in the raw feed, five things do most of the damage.

1. Reprints filed on the original

The 2026 30th Anniversary line reprinted vintage chase cards with a small stamp. The reprinted Shining Celebi sells for about $20. The 2002 Neo Destiny original sells for $300 to $750 raw. In one month we recorded 111 reprint sales with titles that named the original card. Left in, they pull the original's "raw price" down to $35. We hold them out, and the real raws return to the median.

2. Fakes in the raw bucket

For chase cards with a high graded value, eBay carries a steady stream of $8 to $12 "raw" listings that are mass-produced fakes. On one Legend Maker Mew ex, seventy of them sat under thirty real sales at $600 to $1,500. Any average of that bucket is nonsense. Our rule: when a card's raw median sits under 5% of its PSA 8 price, we withhold the raw price rather than publish a fake one. Thirteen cards are withheld this way today.

3. Condition mixed into one number

A heavily played Base Set Charizard sells for a third of a near-mint one. If both are "ungraded", the ungraded price lands somewhere nobody would pay for either. We hold out sales whose listing says damaged, creased, water-damaged or heavily played, and we price every graded tier separately by company, so a PSA 9, a CGC 9 and a BGS 9 are three numbers.

4. Lots, proxies and the wrong card entirely

"Charizard 4/102 + 3 other holos" is not a Charizard sale. "Charizard PROXY" is not either. And a surprising number of listings carry a title that names one card while the photo shows another. We read the title with a set of rules and, for the sales that matter, we also match the listing photo against the card's own image. Sales that fail are held out and listed on the card page by reason.

5. Two prices that cannot both be true

If a card's PSA 8 price is higher than its PSA 9 price from the same company by a wide margin, one of them is wrong and we cannot tell which from the numbers alone. Rather than publish both, we publish neither until more sales settle it. On a given night this withholds about 300 prices across the catalogue.

What we hold out, by the numbers

Of the 1.69 million sales we have recorded, 65,900 are currently held out. By reason:

Every one of those is visible. Open any card page and the held-out sales are listed under the price with the reason, so you can disagree with a call and tell us.

How to read any price guide

1. Find the sales behind the number. If a guide will not show them, you cannot know what it counted.
2. Check the count. A median of three sales is a hint. A median of forty is a price.
3. Check the date of the newest sale. A price built on sales from last winter is a memory.
4. Match the grade exactly. PSA 10, not "graded 10". CGC 9.5, not "9.5".
5. For vintage, check the printing. Unlimited, 1st Edition and Shadowless are three different cards with one name.

Our full method, including the gate that refuses to publish a price that moved too far on too few sales, is on the how we price page. The numbers in this article are as of 7 October 2026.