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.
Condition is measured, not assumed
Most trackers value a played card by knocking a fixed percentage off Near Mint, the same percentage for every card ever printed. Collectors know that is wrong: a lightly played vintage holo can trade within a whisker of Near Mint while a lightly played modern rare falls off a cliff. Where per-condition market data exists for a card, we price each condition from that card's own sales. Where it does not, the page shows the Near Mint price and says so, rather than dressing up a guess.
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 flat condition discounts. A played card is priced from played sales of that card, not a one-size-fits-all haircut.
- 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.