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How TCGMeta prices cards

Sold prices are facts, asking prices are opinions. How our price ladders, graded rungs and fair prices are built, and where the data comes from.

Every price on TCGMeta starts from one rule: what a card actually sold for is a fact, and what a seller hopes to get is an opinion. The two never mix in our numbers.

Sold prices first

Where real settled sales exist, they lead. Graded slabs sold on tokenized marketplaces settle on-chain, which means the sale, the price and the exact cert are all verifiable. Those sales build the per-grade ladders you see on card pages, and the medians that drive grade signals on tiles.

Vendor prices where sales are thin

Most raw cards trade too thinly for a clean sold ladder, so their headline price comes from vendor market data, clearly attributed. Hover the source icons on any card page to see exactly who tracks it. When a card has both, sold data wins the headline.

What we refuse to do

  • No blending asking prices into sold averages. An unsold listing at any price is not evidence of value.
  • No inventing graded prices from raw ones with multipliers. A grade rung appears when real market data exists for it.
  • No silent estimates. If we do not know, the page says so instead of guessing.

Prices refresh daily. The prices browser is the front door to everything we track.