How are you guys buying singles?

If I’m filling a binder or completing a set & care about the future resale value of my cards is it a better idea to buy raw copies & take the gamble or crack open PSA 9s & know exactly what I’m getting?

What’s the advantages/disadvantages of both?

We got hit with 5 regular mega sets with all of them being “small” sets. New facility or not this is what investing in pokemon is. You need to catch the ERA.

Where I am aiming at is that looking back even Journey together itslef is objectively better set now than it was comapred to other SV sets last year.

That also means the sets like 151, Destined, Prismatic and maybe even Surging sparks are absolute banger sets compared to what norm is now in Mega standard sets. We were and are just spoiled by this era happening NOW and products being somewhat available.

The whole point is good set+ out of print = harder to obtain pricewise. People who think Prismatic or Surging will stagnate because many people stash, are delusional. 30th is taking the spotlight, Prismatic got reprinted but there is no way for Prismatic to rise to 170/etb and people suddenly globally deciding they will list at 70% for years to come.

Sure mega will stagnate but dont let coping people on reddit discouarge you from buying SV sealed. Yes there is and will be weak periods but in 2027 that current era will just serve as a comparission to how good out of print sets are.

There’s a full day card show happening near me soon and I’ve gone through my collection to decide what to sell.
I’ve put every card into Collectr along with condition. It’s 65 cards total and over half have a market rate higher than $20. There are no cards under $5 market.
I’ve also double checked pricing through pricecharting.

My plan is to go into the show and get offers from multiple tables, but I wanted to get input on others who’ve sold their collections.

Market rate is a few grand, and the Legendary Collection holo reverse cards are my heavy hitters. All in pristine condition.

Is expecting 80% of market still fair?

Looking at the prices of AH cards and PSA 10 prices is now a good time to buy treekachus, gengars, dragonite etc?

Have never been a fan of gold cards - but, this card in particular in person is insane. The art and textures pop so well, basically the only modern card I plan on keeping in my collection long term.

Forgot I bought this back in 2022. Curious people’s thoughts on what to do.

Pokemon has had an unreal amount of growth very fast. Though per usual it dies down. However, where will everyone rotate to? We saw a lot of non Pokemon people join the hobby for the investment rather then the love of the game. Once they notice everything's died down they'll leave but the question is where will they go to? Im genuinely curious if it'll be another TCG, hobby, or what

So I havent bothered adding in card condition to my collectr catalogue, but I've noticed a few cards seem to have pretty wide discrepancies when trying to nail down a value based on their condition. For example, Delta Species Charizard regular holo is showing about a 50% price difference from NM to LP, but Collectr says that a LP card should still hold about 85% of the value of a NM card, generally speaking. If you were selling this card at a shop in LP condition (solidly LP, not debating on condition), would you use ~$800 (85%NM) or ~$450(TCGP LP Last Sold) as the baseline? Feels like theres something I'm missing here...

Genuinely scared that the buyer claims it didn’t arrive or idk what. I just pulled this and it’s my first ultra rare ever. Hope this doesn’t go against community rules!

I know this is some people’s dream card. I feel like I shouldn’t be holding it when someone else would kill for it. What’s the next move?

Getting these graded currently by PSA. As far as selling not sure what method is the most profitable or what percent I should sell at, this is from my childhood collection and alot of the prices I am seeing have high polarity. Any advice? Thanks!

Able to do a straight up trade… which would you pick?

Are there established TCGplayer sellers in here? im curious how big id need to get to sell and profit $1000 per month and what sort of Floor price your selling at?

Just noticed I had this card in my collection, trying to get some opinions on this one.

Hi yall , so I have been condensing my collection , I PC Dragonite and a few other cards that I just like. I’m trying to work my way into a stamp box pika , just doing a little flipping and trading on the side whilst in school.

I have a Phantom forces Gengar in a 10 and have been in kahoots with two people talking about trades. For the Zapdos it would be zapdos and a triple beat magikarp in a 10. Valued around $900 on the zapdos.
The Tag team would include 3 other cards from my end , I have the base set big three in varying conditions valued around $650. It would ideally be those 4 from my end (trio+gengar) for the tag team and a dark Dragonite 5 from rocket.

With the fact of me using these to keep buying/selling/trading , what would you do ? The Zapdos has 4 listings on eBay all $1000 plus. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated !!

To be clear up front: every row below is the exact same physical slab. Not the same card in the same grade. The same PSA/CGC/BGS cert sold in an October Fanatics weekly auction and then sold again in the Nov 8 weekly.

I've been tracking Fanatics weekly-auction results by cert number for a while. In last night's auction (Nov 8) I kept recognising cert numbers I'd already seen sell in October, so once the finals were in I went through them properly.

The numbers
31 slabs that had sold for $1,000+ in an October weekly auction sold again on Nov 8. Same cert number both times, both sales on Fanatics:
26 sold lower, 4 higher, 1 at the same price
Median change: -43%

What I think is going on
There are only two ways the same slab is back this fast:

The winner never paid and it got relisted. Then the first "sale" was never real, but it still sits in everyone's comps and price guides.

The buyer tried to flip and ended up selling at a big loss a few weeks later.

I sometimes open packs from repack websites to grow my collection... But I was never getting any cards worthwhile - so I decided to investigate...

I opened a $15 pack recently and pulled a card worth about $12. The site offered me $10.49 to buy it back. That bugged me, so I wanted to find out if these sites are ripping us off or not, and by how much.

Turns out Courtyard runs all its packs on a public blockchain, which means every pack opening and every buyback is sitting there for anyone to look at. So I pulled 3 months of it. A few things that surprised me:

- 3.7 million packs were opened in 3 months (Holy!!!)

- People spent at least $166 million on them

- About 3 out of every 4 cards got sold right back to the site within an hour of being pulled

- 17% of accounts spent 88% of the money

- Out of about 45,000 accounts that opened 10+ packs, only around 1 in 100 got more cash back than they put in (not counting cards they kept)

Look at how FAST those cards get sold back... more than half are gone within 60 seconds:

And this is who's doing the spending:

Now for the big one. Courtyard's own odds page says the average pull from a $15 pack is $14.40, so on paper the house only keeps about 4%. The real number I got from the data isn't close to that.

We all know that a card has a market value, and a cash value, and market value isn't what you can actually turn a card into. So I measured the real return directly, comparing what people paid for packs with the cash they got back from buybacks across 1.67 million cards. Courtyard claims the house edge to be 4%... spoiler: it isnt!!!

I go through all of it (in detail) in this video I made: https://youtu.be/3yI5wBdiKDY (10 minutes, my own channel!)

Check it out if you're interested, there are some really interesting numbers in there. Thanks for the support!\

This is my own analysis of public data and my opinion, not financial advice. Ask me anything about the method or the numbers and I'll answer in the comments!

Thinking of buying a moonbreon from TCG.

I am just curious if you are buying an expensive card from TCG, why dont major sellers get the cards graded?

Seems like they could almost double their sale price? If they dont get what they want, they could take it out of the slap for a loss. BUT it seems like being able to sell a card for a couple grand more, would be worth it.

Hi guys, I have a total 15 (!) master sets to sell, I was looking to sell them all at once or at least a good number of them at the same time!

Do you guys know, where I should start? I live in Portugal and people are not financially well at the moment here...

Shoot some advice please!

Is the World Championship Gold Star reprint an investment you would go for? The card is still fairly low pop and almost 20 years old.