Guides
Practical guides on pricing, condition, grading, and deal-making — written for collectors, vendors, and anyone who wants to stop guessing.
Comping is the practice of establishing a card's real market value using actual sold transactions. Learn the principles and how to avoid the mistakes that burn buyers and sellers.
Condition is the single biggest variable in a card's price. Learn what NM, LP, MP, and HP actually mean, and how to inspect cards systematically before buying or selling.
Professional grading costs money and takes time. Here's how to decide when it's worth it, how to pick a grader, and how to calculate whether the premium justifies the submission.
Pokémon TCG has decades of reprints — Base Set, Base Set 2, Legendary Collection, Celebrations, Evolutions. Same name, same character, very different values. Learn how to read set IDs and avoid the four most common reprint traps.
The 1st Edition stamp is the difference between a $50 card and a $5,000 card on the same artwork. Learn what 1st Edition means, where to look for the stamp, which sets have it, and what the premium is actually worth.
Sold prices tell you what buyers paid; PSA pop reports tell you whether the supply has been digested yet — and whether it's about to grow. Learn the four numbers that matter, how gem rate decides grading-math outcomes, and what pop reports don't show.
Centering is set at the factory and can't be fixed. It's also the single most common reason a card that 'looks like a 10' comes back a 9. Learn how PSA measures centering, how to assess it yourself, and when it kills the grading math.
Holographic Pokémon cards have a metallic foil layer that scratches, silvers, and bubbles independently of corners and edges. The four failure modes graders look for, and how to inspect a holo so you don't submit a card that's destined for PSA 9.
A collection isn't a list of cards — it's a portfolio. Triage into chase / mid / bulk-rare / bulk-common tiers, price each tier appropriately, and build margin into the items you can't fully assess. The discipline that separates fast, profitable deals from slow, expensive ones.
When a comp says $100, you can't buy at $100 and you can't sell at $100. The spread is real, it's wide, and it embeds the time, capital, and counterparty costs of every transaction. Learn to read 'X% of market' offers and decide when to cross the spread for speed.
A $100 sale doesn't put $100 in your pocket on any platform — and the gap differs across channels. Fee structures broken down for eBay (~13.25%), TCGPlayer (~12.5%), and LCS buy rates (50–85%), with a worked net-to-seller comparison.
PWE for cards under $15. BMWT with tracking from $15 to $200. Signature confirmation and additional insurance above that. Match the shipping method to the card value, document everything, and stop letting one lost shipment wipe out a month of margin.
Every price is a summary. The interesting questions are how many sales went into it, how spread out they were, and how much to trust the average. A guide to the four core statistics (mean, median, standard deviation, CV), TCGDrive's confidence score, the 2-sigma outlier filter, and when to use each of the four pricing methods.