Guide

How to price a graded card

We don’t estimate slab values, and we’d rather say so than show you a number we can’t stand behind. The market prices elsewhere in TCGRadius come from TCGplayer and describe a raw, ungraded Near Mint card. A graded copy of the same card can be worth a small fraction of that or many multiples of it. That’s why listing a slab asks you for the value.

Asking prices are not sale prices. An active listing tells you what someone hopes to get, which is often well above what the card actually sells for. Always price off completed sales.

1. eBay sold listings — the most accurate

Search the card, then filter to Sold Items. These are real transactions, which makes them the best signal available to most people. When you look:

Match the exact card — same set, same card number, same variant. Reverse holos, promos and reprints are different cards with different values.
Match the exact grade and grader. A PSA 10 and a PSA 9 are not close, and a PSA 10 and a CGC 10 often aren’t either.
Prefer the last 30–90 days. Older sales can be badly out of date after a set reprint, a tournament result, or a hype cycle.
Ignore the outliers at both ends and look at the cluster in the middle. One unusually high sale is not the market.

2. PriceCharting and Card Ladder — useful, secondary

Both aggregate sales history into a chart, which is much faster than reading eBay by hand and good for spotting a trend. Treat them as a second opinion rather than the answer: they lag the market, they don’t always separate variants cleanly, and some data sits behind a paid tier. If an aggregator and recent sold listings disagree, trust the sold listings.

Things that move the price

Grade doesn’t scale smoothly. The jump from 9 to 10 is often several times the price, not ten percent more. Most of a slab’s value can sit in that last point.
The grader matters. PSA generally commands the highest prices in the Pokémon market, with BGS, CGC, TAG and ACE trading differently — sometimes at a meaningful discount for the same numeric grade. Price against sales from the same grader.
Population counts matter. A grader’s population report shows how many copies exist at each grade. A 10 that thousands of people own behaves very differently from one where only a handful do.
Special labels carry a premium. Black label, perfect subgrades and similar designations sell above an ordinary slab of the same number.

None of this is a guarantee — a card is worth what someone will actually pay for it. Pricing near recent sold listings simply gets you replies faster. For raw, ungraded cards see how we estimate value by condition.