Price index
What the market as a whole did, rather than what one card did — built from the same daily observations as every other number here. No survey, no estimate, no smoothing.
Sealed product and singles are tracked separately, because they are not the same market and do not move together. Opening boxes adds singles to the supply and removes sealed from it, so the two can pull in opposite directions for years — a single blended line would average that away.
English
English singles
11,582 cards in the sample · rebased to 100 at 2024-02-21- 30d
- +3.1%
- 90d
- +12.8%
- 1y
- +71.5%
- All
- +136.8%
- Level
- 236.8
Weekly chain-linked, matched-sample; cards clearing $5 in both weeks of a step. How this is built.
English sealed
1,880 sealed products in the sample · rebased to 100 at 2024-02-21- 30d
- +1.3%
- 90d
- +6.8%
- 1y
- +43.3%
- All
- +126.7%
- Level
- 226.5
Weekly chain-linked, matched-sample; sealed products clearing $5 in both weeks of a step. How this is built.
Over the last twelve months English sealed moved +43.3% and singles +71.5% — a gap of 28.2 points in favour of singles. Both are TCGplayer US-marketplace prices in USD, so the gap is not a currency effect.
Japanese
Japanese singles
4,721 cards in the sample · rebased to 100 at 2025-01-15- 30d
- +0.9%
- 90d
- +6.3%
- 1y
- +21.1%
- All
- +15.1%
- Level
- 115.3
Weekly chain-linked, matched-sample; cards clearing $5 in both weeks of a step. How this is built.
Japanese sealed
1,001 sealed products in the sample · rebased to 100 at 2025-01-15- 30d
- +2.3%
- 90d
- +11.2%
- 1y
- +48.5%
- All
- +67.6%
- Level
- 167.8
Weekly chain-linked, matched-sample; sealed products clearing $5 in both weeks of a step. How this is built.
Over the last twelve months Japanese sealed moved +48.5% and singles +21.1% — a gap of 27.4 points in favour of sealed. Both are TCGplayer US-marketplace prices in USD, so the gap is not a currency effect.
How this is built
Each weekly step is the geometric mean of price ratios for products priced in both of the two weeks — a matched sample. Steps are multiplied together to form the line. Because every step is matched, a product first appearing or finally delisting cannot move it: only prices can.
A median was tried first and is unusable on this data: prices are sticky. Across all 1,605,826 weekly comparisons in our history, 49.1% show no price change at all — 45.9% in the English market and 63.5% in the Japanese one — so the median step is exactly 1.000 and the index would read flat forever. The geometric mean is robust rather than outlier-driven: clipping extreme steps to a halving or doubling touches 0.11% of them and moves the annual figure by under a point.
A product must trade above $5 in both weeks of a step to be counted. Without that floor a one-cent card moving to two cents reads as +100% and rounding dominates. The floor changes the answer — English singles over the trailing eleven months (2025-09-30 to 2026-08-30) end at 142.4 with no floor, 157.3 at $1, 163.0 at $5 and 155.7 at $20 — which is why it is stated rather than assumed. It is applied per step, not standing: a product that falls below $5 is not expelled from the index, it simply has no comparison that week and rejoins when it clears again.
Flagged observations are excluded, so a parked or stale price cannot enter the index. Nothing is smoothed, extrapolated or backfilled, and the index is rebuilt from scratch each night after the anomaly sweeps rather than extended — a price we reject tomorrow must not remain inside a level published today. Full methodology.