How the numbers are made

Card pages

A card page's price is TCGplayer's market price for that printing, an average of recent sales, which we read once a day. Where the vendor names the condition, the page names it; where it does not, the page holds one value per printing without one. Listed median is the median of the current asks on TCGplayer, not a sale.

The chart draws one value a day. A short view that would draw too many points keeps one point every few days, and still draws the highs and lows the page reports; the 1Y and MAX views keep one point a week and end with the latest daily prices. The dashed lines mark the view's high and low.

The price-changes table lists the days TCGplayer's market price changed. These are updates to a published average, not individual sales.

TCGplayer's own chart can differ from ours. Its product page can open on another printing or condition, and it plots its own quote times, where ours keeps one value a day.

How cards are grouped

A 1999 card and a 2024 card are not the same thing: each set's index is built only from that set's own products, so they never share one. The per-game line further down combines sets of every era.

Same card over time

same card, priced twice

These are the marketplace's prices for a card, read once a day, not records of it changing hands.

A day here is a day the marketplace published a price, not a day of trading. On Pokémon, over 320 days to September 2026, neither the count of cards that changed nor the size of those changes showed a weekday pattern. That is what a price built from recent sales looks like, and it is also what a market spread thinly over tens of thousands of cards would look like, so it tells you how to read the day and not which of the two it is.

The cleanest reading comes from watching the same card's market price again and again, not from comparing one card to a different one.

Break-aways

Most cards move with their set. A break-away is a card whose price detached from its set's shared move, above it or below it. They are counted weekly against how many cards were screened, so the exceptions never hide the middle.

What the day's movers selects

The day's movers are not every card that changed. They are a selection. A card enters only if it is a single card rather than a sealed product, and only if its move clears a floor: 5% and $3 on a $15+ card. A move that simply reverses the day before is dropped, and so are a move above 80% in a day, a move that undoes an earlier step of more than 5% within the card's last 30 days, and the second of two consecutive moves of 40% or more in the same direction. Each card is measured on one printing, the one priced highest the day before, and appears once.

The home splits the selection into the cards that rose and the cards that fell, each in order of percent change, the number each row shows. Across all games it takes each game's largest move first, so every game with a qualifying move is represented. A move off a price that had not changed for 14 days or more is left out of these lists and counted under them: it is a stale quote catching up, not that day's market. When a card's price is more than twice the lowest listed price for the same printing that day, the row also shows that listed price: the market price is an average of recent sales, and the listed price is the cheapest ask recorded that day for the same printing, in any condition and before shipping. A maximum is not a share: it names one card, and it describes no game's ordinary day.

On a quiet day the selection is small, and it has been empty. An empty day is reported as nothing rather than filled with the nearest thing.

Thin data, and quiet

When a group has only a little data, its reading is shown softer. When it has none, it shows nothing rather than guessing. A fresh set shows as accruing until enough cards have been priced more than once.

Two patterns the data keeps showing

These are two things the record has done, re-measured as the archive grows, and not predictions about what a set will do next. On daily TCGplayer market prices across every set, two regularities have repeated. New sets have settled down: prices moved most right after release, and the calming was front-loaded, fast at first, then slower and slower. And price has concentrated: in almost every set, most of the summed card prices sat in a handful of cards while the rest stayed near the floor.

The price index

Each set also carries a price index: the same product priced again over time, folded into one level, anchored 1.0 at the set's first measured week. It is built from TCGplayer's Market Price for each product the set lists, single cards and, today, sealed products alike (the marketplace's own published figure, which we read once a day, so one value per product per day), combined into one point per week. A level of 1.20 means the set's repeatedly priced products are up about 20 percent as the index averages them: each product's change is taken as a ratio and the ratios are averaged geometrically, each product counted equally rather than by its price, so it is not the set's total dollar value. A plain average of the percentage changes reads higher, because a few cards that multiply in price pull a plain average up far more than they move this one. Every published level, per game and per set, is listed on the indices.

Restricting the index to single cards, anchoring each set at its release week (or its first later week with a price), leaving out the prices recorded before that release date and counting each card in the set the marketplace listed it in on each day is the stated method and is not yet what the published series does. Measured on 1,974 weekly set series across 10 games (440 of them Japanese Pokémon, whose index has no published weekly series), that change would move 31 percent of them by more than 5 percent, and 18 percent by more than 20 percent, in at least one week both series cover, and would move the starting week of 291 sets; weeks only one series covers count there, not in those percentages. 34 set series the prior rule publishes would not be published under it, for example sets not yet released and sealed or deck products. It will be published with a recomputed history, and the prior series kept and rebuildable on request for 60 days. Until then, a set with few cards and a priced sealed product reads that product's move as well as its cards', and a set priced before its release starts its level on that pre-release price.

A set with fewer than 5 tracked products priced more than once shows accruing instead of a number. The count runs over the set's whole history, so its first weeks can still rest on one or two products, and the level then follows those products. The level says where those prices sit against their own start.

Every per-set level the index publishes carries, in the data behind the page, a range and the two counts it was built from: how many repeat-price pairs went into it, and how many priced printings those pairs came from. A printing is one product in one finish, so a card sold plain and foil counts twice. The weekly series behind the charts carries the levels alone, with no range. The range is produced by resampling the printings rather than the individual pairs. The counts that follow were measured on the series dated 2026-09-19. Measured across the 1,957 cells that have one, a set with twice the pairs and twice the printings carries a range about a tenth narrower relative to its level, where resampling independent observations would make it about three tenths narrower; that is a fleet average, and one of the ten lanes shows no such relationship at all. Which of the two counts the narrowing belongs to changes sign depending on how the comparison is set up, so neither is named here as the driver. On 53 of the 2,010 cells the index published on that date, ten lanes of which this site lists nine, the range has no width at all. On 41 the set has a single priced printing, so there is no second unit to resample. On the other 12 there is more than one and the calculation still cannot move; a field distinguishes the two cases, and on the second it does not say why. A range of zero width is not a precise estimate, in either case. A reader meets the range in one place, as a hover note on the indices tables, and only on rows whose level and range share a base; rows measured from a set's release do not show it.

The per-game composite

Each game's page carries one line drawn from every published set index in that game. For each period we take each set's own move, weight it by the set's total repeat-price pairs over its whole history (the same weight in every period), and chain the weighted moves together from a starting level of 1.0. Weighting by observations means a set measured from thousands of repeat pairs counts for more than one measured from a handful.

It reads the same set list the game's headline percentage reads, so the two cannot disagree about which sets count. A set with fewer than 5 tracked products is left out. A set counts in a week when its own index has a level at both ends of that week, so the number of sets contributing changes over the window as sets enter coverage. A set that enters later joins at the composite's level that week and adds no jump; its own index still starts at 1.00. A period where fewer than two sets can be compared is carried forward unchanged instead of inventing a move, and the chart shows the count of those periods. Moves are combined on a logarithmic scale, so a move and the one that returns the price to where it started cancel exactly. A 20 percent rise and a 20 percent fall are not that pair, and they leave 96 percent of the starting value.

A † beside a game's percentage means its direction depends on how the figure is built. We compute the same change two ways (sets weighted by their repeat pairs, as above, and every set weighted equally) on seven weekly grids (the published one and the same grid started on each of the other six weekdays): two times seven, up to fourteen readings (a grid whose latest week has too little data to move, or whose file is from another day, is left out). The mark appears when two of them point in opposite directions, each by more than the 4-decimal rounding of the published levels could move it, and at least one would print a nonzero percentage. The six extra grids joined this check on November 4, 2026.

What it is not: a separately published benchmark. It is a reading of the set indices, computed when the page renders, and it carries no weighting by how many copies of a card exist, because that number is not observable to us. The set indices themselves remain the published record. Nor is it the return of any one collection: a collection of specific cards has its own return.

Resolution, missing days, and revisions

Set charts offer two resolutions. Weekly folds daily prices onto a 7-day grid; daily runs the same estimator on a 1-day grid over the same history. The two can end at different levels for the same set, because each builds its level from its own first price; each chart footer states which grid it shows and the date its data runs through.

Missing days are not filled in. A day's level is estimated only from actual recorded prices; when no observation spans a day, that day is published as missing and the chart leaves a visible gap there, on a time-scaled axis that keeps the missing day's width rather than compressing it away. No interpolation, carry-forward, or synthetic price is inserted. Measured on 2026-07-27 across every game's published daily series, none of the roughly 83,000 daily points has an interior gap; the most recent day joins each series once its prices publish. When the same card's prices sit on either side of a short gap, the move between them is attributed across the gap by the repeat-sales regression, which is standard for this estimator family (the repeat-sales method of Bailey, Muth and Nourse 1963, Case and Shiller 1989, and Mei and Moses 2002), and is disclosed here rather than smoothed over.

Levels re-estimate on every publish. As new prices arrive, the whole series is recomputed, so earlier levels can revise rather than being frozen at first print. The published artifact is the record of what the estimator says today, and each file carries its own as-of date.

Backfill disclosure, August 17, 2026: the index window for Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, One Piece, Lorcana, Flesh and Blood, and the Japanese Pokémon catalog was extended back to the start of our daily price archive (February 8, 2024 for most games), from the shorter windows the live lane had accrued since mid-2026. Every level re-anchored to the earlier start, so index values before and after this date are not directly comparable; the change moved published levels materially and the prior series is archived. Star Wars: Unlimited and Gundam already carried full-archive windows; Magic keeps its shorter window for now and will state its own note when extended.

Magic extension, August 17, 2026: later the same day, Magic: The Gathering's window was extended to the same February 8, 2024 archive start with the same re-anchoring. The change moved published Magic levels materially (worst set cell 376% relative, concentrated in one vintage set; most cells far smaller) and the prior series is archived alongside the others. Levels before and after this date are not directly comparable.

Pokémon set-identity repair, August 2026: 62 Pokémon sets were being measured twice, as two separate index series, because their rows carried two different set names: one from our own set catalogue and one from the price source’s. The published index used the shorter of the two, so those sets showed a level built from about three months of history while their full history sat unused. The two series are now one per set, anchored at the earlier start. Published levels for those 62 sets moved materially (worst cell 319% relative, and the sets that were not split did not move at all); the prior series is archived, and levels before and after this date are not directly comparable for the affected sets. The count read 61 when this note first went up on August 24 and is 62 as of August 25: the rule that paired the two names was matching on how a name looked rather than on which catalogue produced it, so one set whose short name happens to look like a long one (Scarlet & Violet 151) was left split. It is now included, and the pairing rule reads the catalogue directly.

Release-week base, October 18, 2026: the statement on set and game pages of how far a new set's cards sit below the set's release-week level in weeks 26 to 30 now counts only sets with prices in their release week. Before this date, a set first priced in a later week was measured from that later week, so any change before that week was not counted; 49 of the 277 sets behind that statement were measured this way. Across games, the figure moved from about 35% to about 37% below. For Flesh and Blood it moved from between 10% and 35% below to between 20% and 50% below, now averaged over 18 sets instead of 42 to 43; 20 of the 26 Flesh and Blood sets that left are Blitz, Armory or Welcome decks. Old and new figures were computed from the same prices, so the move comes from the rule, not from the market. The earlier figures are archived.

Settle timing, October 19, 2026: the clause that said “most of that within about N weeks” took N from a smooth curve fitted to the weekly averages. That curve starts below the release-week level, so N counted 80% of a smaller drop than the one stated, and it read one to two weeks later than the averages themselves: across games 11 rather than 10, MTG 13 rather than 12, Yu-Gi-Oh! 13 rather than 11. The clause now reads the averages directly, counted from release: the share of the stated drop made in the first week, and the first weeks by which 60% and 80% of it had happened; where those do not separate, the weeks for half and 80% of it. Same prices, a different rule; the earlier figures are archived.

What this is not

A reading of how a set has moved. Not advice, not a price target, not a tip to buy or sell. An index level says where those prices sit against their own start; it does not tell you what comes next.

See about for the product overview.

Citing tcgvibes.com

Reference the page URL and the as-of date shown on it. Every number on the site carries its window and date.

tcgvibes.com, page title, URL, as of the date shown on the page.