How we calculate prices
Where the prices on TCG-Completist come from, what trend, “from” price and 30-day average mean, how the price to complete a set is calculated and why some prices are flagged as unreliable.
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Where the prices on TCG-Completist come from, what trend, “from” price and 30-day average mean, how the price to complete a set is calculated and why some prices are flagged as unreliable.
Prices are what collectors argue about most, and the number where you most want to know how it came about. So here is exactly where every number on TCG-Completist comes from and what it means.
For Magic we load the official price list from Cardmarket, Europe's largest trading card marketplace, every morning. Cardmarket creates it once a day at around 3 a.m. (CET); we pick it up early in the morning. All prices on the site, in your wishlist, in your statistics and in price alerts refer to this daily snapshot. They are not live prices.
For Lorcana, One Piece, Star Wars: Unlimited, Riftbound, Flesh and Blood, Digimon, Gundam and Dragon Ball Super Fusion World we use the same daily Cardmarket price list as for Magic. For One Piece, Cardmarket lists parallel and alternate art prints under the same name as the regular card; we match them by card code and price rank, so a few prices may be off. For Star Wars: Unlimited, Cardmarket products carry neither number nor version; we match Hyperspace, Showcase and Prestige prints by their price distance to US market prices. We do the same for alternate art, overnumbered and signature prints in Riftbound. For Flesh and Blood, Cardmarket lists every foil type as a separate product; we match regular, Rainbow Foil and Cold Foil separately by price distance. For Digimon, Gundam and Dragon Ball Super Fusion World, Cardmarket products carry the card number; we match alternate arts and parallels by the order in which Bandai and Cardmarket list them, so some promos have no price. Pokémon prices come via pokemontcg.io, Yu-Gi-Oh prices via YGOPRODeck. Both also pass on Cardmarket values.
All three values are shown in the card window. Important: they cover all languages and conditions combined and exclude shipping. If you only collect English near-mint copies, you will often pay a bit more.
Every set page shows what it costs to buy every card of the set as singles. We add up one card per collector number: the regular version, and the foil price for cards that only exist in foil (such as surge foils from collector boosters).
Since “every collector number” mostly means expensive special versions in modern sets, we also show:
Some cards trade so rarely that the trend price means nothing. A real example: for a headliner Smaug from The Hobbit the trend was €300. A single sale. The 30-day average was over €10,000, the cheapest offer around €25,000.
We flag such prices with ⚠ and leave them out of totals and top lists. This happens in two cases:
Below the set price you then see which cards are not included. Their real price is often far higher.
The reverse happens too: the trend is more than three times the 30-day average (from €5) because a few expensive offers pull it up. The card still shows the trend with ⚠, but totals use the 30-day average or, if higher, the cheapest offer. If even the cheapest offer is above the trend, the market really went up and the trend stays.
In your wishlist you can set a target price per card and choose what the alert watches:
A summed-up market price is a catalogue value, not what you would get when selling, more on that in Working out what your collection is worth. And if you want to complete a set cheaply, one box plus singles is usually the best route, see Singles or boosters.