How Collectibles Price prices work

eBay ask

Median of matched active listings after outlier drop. Pokémon asks publish only with n ≥ 3; MTG card-page asks are a plain eBay Browse median of fixed-price listings with no n gate. Neither is a sold comp. Titles and meta say “asks” until a sold pipeline ships.

TCGPlayer market

Near Mint raw finishes only, from pokemontcg.io (and PokeWallet when that key is set). We label this NM raw market — not a sold print.

MTG (Scryfall)

/mtg is an identity catalog from the official Scryfall REST API. We show name, set, collector number, rarity, legality, and art. We do not show Scryfall's usd field as a live price. Card pages may fill Guide / Foil guide / Recent sold from TCGPlayer mpapi and Current asks from eBay Browse. If a source errors or the sample is missing, that band stays empty — we do not invent numbers. Asks are never sold.

Hub, set, and search tiles read our own daily TCGPlayer snapshot, not a live call. Guide is TCGPlayer's NM market price. Where a print is too thin for TCGPlayer to publish one — common in Alpha and Beta, which have listings but no recent sales — Median ask shows the median of current TCGPlayer listings instead, under that label. It is an asking price, never presented as a sale, and the two are never averaged together. A print with neither shows no price.

Opening an MTG card page pulls TCGPlayer for that print right then and stores what comes back, so a card nobody has looked at yet gets its price on the first visit. We store one reading per print per day: a page view is not a new sale, so looking twice does not make two points.

The history chart on an MTG card page draws those same stored readings, so it is exactly as deep as the number of days the print has been observed — we do not backfill history we never saw, and a print we have read once shows a single point, labeled as one. It draws one source at a time: a median ask is never spliced onto the end of a market line, because that step would be a change of measure, not a change of price.

MTG prints can go in your collection and watchlist. They are raw only — our graded numbers are PriceCharting sold comps that exist for Pokémon, not Magic — and a lot valued off a median ask is labeled that way in the list and called out in the collection total.

Coins — three bands

/coins identity pages use three labeled bands: Guide from PCGS Price Guide, Recent sold from Heritage Auctions realized (eBay completed as fallback), Current asks from eBay Browse active listings. Numista is not a price source. Asks are never called sold. Best-buy /go/ is not wired for coins.

PriceCharting sold

Completed sales scraped from PriceCharting (TAG 10 market plus other grades we can map). Cached in Postgres. Grade rows may fall back to eBay asks when sold comps are missing — the page says so.