How it works

Two kinds of numbers float around the hobby, and we treat them very differently:

• Sold prices — what cards actually changed hands for. This is the truth of the market.
• Asking prices — what sellers hope to get. They run high, and a shelf of unsold listings means nothing.

Your card's value is built from sold prices only — asking prices never sneak into what we say a card is worth. But we don't throw asks away: we show them as a separate signal and compare asks vs. recent solds to flag when a card is heating up or cooling down. That's sentiment, clearly labeled — not value.

A base rookie, a /25 gold parallel, and an on-card auto are wildly different cards. Lumping their sales together gives you a number that's wrong for all three — so when we value your card, we match it to its exact twin: year, set, card number, parallel, and whether it's an auto or relic — and for graded cards, the same grade from the same grader (a PSA 10 is its own market). Then we read only those sold comps.

• One shared source of truth. A card is priced once and everyone sees the same current number, so values stay consistent.
• Real history, real dates. Your price history and trends come from actual dated sales pulled months deep — not a line we start drawing the day you add the card.
• Honest about thin data. Lots of rookie and parallel cards trade rarely; when there aren't enough sales to price confidently, we say so instead of inventing a number.

Card value tells you what a card is worth today. Player Equity is our take on where the player is trending — because with rookies and prospects, the player's trajectory is what moves the cardboard. It's a single verdict, and we always show the pieces behind it so you can judge for yourself:

• Draft pedigree — where and how high they were drafted (first-round capital carries weight). Undrafted players and international free agents are labeled as such, not guessed at.
• Production vs. expectation — how their on-field results stack up against what their draft slot predicts, so a late pick exceeding their pedigree stands out from a high pick falling below it.
• On-field performance — real, current stats, scored against players at their position and level (football, baseball, and basketball — including minor-league and college context).
• Price vs. the model — is the market under- or over-pricing them for that pedigree and production? A strong player whose cards are cheap leans Buy; a hyped name whose cards ran ahead of the results leans Hold or Sell.

We also track how a player's whole card market is moving — the typical trend across all their cards, not one lucky or unlucky sale — so the read doesn't swing on a single result.