# moonstone

> moonstone is a Bloomberg terminal for Pokémon trading cards: live TCGplayer prices, verified graded sale medians, PSA population history and sealed-product prices for 63,615 catalogued cards, recorded daily as our own price series. We publish quantitative research on that data, a screener over it, and a card-scanning API, and we treat the recorded series as the asset: every study is reproducible from the tables it names.

Site: https://www.moonstonehq.com
Articles: 207 (latest 2026-09-23)
Feed: https://www.moonstonehq.com/feed.xml

## Data surfaces

- https://www.moonstonehq.com/about: What moonstone is and how every figure is made: recorded daily prices, verified graded sales, PSA populations and gem rates, break-even math, the Scan API.
- https://www.moonstonehq.com/research/screener: Filter every tracked card by set, rarity, artist, price, recorded move, PSA 10 median, gem rate and population; every screen is a shareable URL.
- https://www.moonstonehq.com/research/daily-tape: Which cards actually sell: a weekly leaderboard of recorded eBay sales per card with sold counts, median prices and week-over-week pace.
- https://www.moonstonehq.com/research/grading-desk: The PSA registry read weekly from our own daily population snapshots: new copies entering the population, gem rates by era, and the PSA 10 premium over raw.
- https://www.moonstonehq.com/research/movers: Biggest movers measured median against median over the stated window, singles and sealed, with the window printed on the page.
- https://www.moonstonehq.com/sets: Directory of every set with a renderable page: card counts and links to each set's value, history and pack economics.
- https://www.moonstonehq.com/set/[slug]: One set: set value, card list with live prices, price history and sealed economics. The slug is the lowercased set name.
- https://www.moonstonehq.com/card/[id]: One card: raw and graded medians with sample sizes, price history, PSA population, printings and the articles that cite it.
- https://www.moonstonehq.com/artists: Every illustrator in the catalog ranked by the combined market value of their attributed cards.
- https://www.moonstonehq.com/status: Live status of the Scan API, pricing data, site, research tools, portfolio and billing, with ninety days of history.
- https://www.moonstonehq.com/developers: The card-scanning REST API: identify a card from a photo, 60,000+ English and Japanese printings, graded slabs included, with plans and keys.

## Card pages

- `https://www.moonstonehq.com/card/{id}` is one printing of one card. The id is ours (`base1-4`, `swsh7-215`, `jat-574848` for Japanese rows); resolve a card by name and set through https://www.moonstonehq.com/search.
- `https://www.moonstonehq.com/card/{id}/data.json` is the same page as JSON: identity, market price, PSA sold medians by grade, PSA population, our recorded daily series, and a plain-language methodology block. It is also the `distribution` of the Dataset in the page's JSON-LD. Prefer it over scraping the HTML.
- Every figure on both carries three things: the UNIT it is measured in (USD, count, percent, multiple), the SAMPLE behind it (how many verified sales a median is a median of), and the DAY it is dated to. A figure we cannot date is returned undated rather than dated to the moment you fetched it.
- The page's own HTML states the same figures server-side, in a fact table and a short Q&A. Nothing worth citing is behind JavaScript.

What a card page will NOT tell you, by design:

- A PSA 10 "median" built on one recorded sale. One sale is reported as one sale.
- A gem rate derived from a registry row whose ten-count the provider omitted. Absent is reported as absent, never as zero.
- A graded price derived by multiplying a raw price. Every graded figure is a median of recorded sales or it is not published.
- An offer, an ask of our own, or a price you can transact on. moonstone sells nothing; the market price is a recorded third-party marketplace figure.
- A forecast. The break-even arithmetic on a card page is arithmetic on figures already on that page.

Cards with no price, no graded sale and no population ever recorded (17,643 of 63,600) are served but marked `noindex` and kept out of the sitemap. They are not a gap in the data you should paper over; they are a card we have nothing on.

## Methodology

Every figure we publish carries its sample size and its window. Graded prices are medians of recorded sales, never multipliers on a raw price. A gem rate with no recorded PSA 10 is reported as absent, not as zero. We refuse to state figures the data cannot support, and an article says so in its methodology block where the evidence is thin.

## Articles (newest first)

- [EX Era PSA 10 Gem Rates: 519 Cards Measured](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/ex-era-psa-10-gem-rates): Across 519 EX-era cards with 100 or more PSA submissions the median gem rate is 9.4%, and it falls as the card gets dearer: Gold Stars gem at 3.8%.
- [Team Rocket Returns Card Prices: All 111](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/team-rocket-returns-card-prices): One card is 41.2% of Team Rocket Returns. Torchic ☆ asks $4,500 of the set's $10,931.31, and the set's other two Gold Stars carried no price that day.
- [Unseen Forces Card Prices: All 117 Cards](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/unseen-forces-card-prices): Unseen Forces is the most valuable EX-era set at $11,209.45 across 117 cards, and four of them carry 55.9% of it. The other 113 average $44.
- [Expedition Base Set Card Prices: All 165](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/expedition-base-set-card-prices): Every one of the 165 Expedition Base Set cards carries a price. The set sums to $9,857.67, the median card asks $13.49, and not one card reaches $1,000.
- [EX Era Pokémon Cards Value: All 1,694 Cards](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/ex-era-pokemon-cards-value): The sixteen EX-era sets hold 1,694 English cards and $87,845.77 of asking price. Sixteen cards carry 32.6% of it, and 1,040 cards carry 1.8%.
- [What Are POP Series Pokemon Cards Worth?](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/pop-series-pokemon-cards-value): Nine POP Series sets, 153 league-handout cards, $5,337.93 of ask. Against their pack-pulled twins the handout wins on commons and loses badly on chase cards.
- [What Are McDonald's Pokemon Cards Worth?](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/mcdonalds-pokemon-cards-value): Thirteen McDonald's sets, 190 cards, $4,862.21 of ask. Two of the thirteen hold 72.1% of it, and just ten of the 190 carry a recorded PSA 10 sale.
- [Are Pokemon Black Star Promos Worth Anything?](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/are-black-star-promos-worth-anything): Across 1,347 English Black Star Promos in ten families, the median asks $8.30 and 98 cards hold 57.8% of the $45,730.41 the whole run is worth.
- [Which Neo Set Holds Its Value?](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/which-neo-set-holds-its-value): Across 365 cards in the four Neo sets, Neo Destiny holds $10,269 of ask at $90.88 a card, and 69.0% of that sits on cards with a recorded PSA 10 sale.
- [Cheapest Way to Own a Gold Star Pokemon Card](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/cheapest-gold-star-pokemon-card): There are 27 English Gold Stars, not 22. The cheapest ask is $500 for Registeel, and only four of the 25 EX-era cards carry a PSA 10 sale on ten or more comps.
- [Vintage Japanese Pokemon Card Prices, Set by Set](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/vintage-japanese-pokemon-card-prices): The Japanese originals of the Wizards-era sets, priced. Expansion Pack asks $2,190.76 against Base Set's $2,217.56, and by Skyridge the Japanese side is 0.287.
- [Diamond & Pearl Era Card Prices: 20 Sets](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/diamond-and-pearl-era-card-prices): The 2007 to 2011 English sets hold 1,949 cards worth $42,920.75. 339 carry a PSA 9 sold median and no PSA 10 one, and 7 the reverse: this era trades in nines.
- [Sun & Moon Era Card Prices: All 17 Sets](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/sun-and-moon-era-card-prices): The 2017 to 2019 English sets hold 2,669 cards worth $45,018.97. The median card asks 45 cents, 1,605 are sub-dollar, and 52 cards are half the era's value.
- [Japanese Promo Card Prices: 21 Families Counted](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/japanese-promo-card-prices): The 21 Japanese promo families hold 2,094 cards. Only 1,244 carry a live ask, they total $72,051.63, the median is $17.10, and 21 of them ask under a dollar.
- [Japanese 151 vs English 151: Prices Compared](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/japanese-151-vs-english-151): 193 cards resolve across the two languages and English is dearer 152 times, but the ratio flips by tier: 0.28 on illustration rares, 1.09 on the special art.
- [Japanese vs English Pokemon Cards, By the Numbers](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/japanese-vs-english-pokemon-cards): Japanese rows outnumber English by somewhere between 32,405 and 37,948 to 21,908 in our catalog, and carry far less: 43.3% record a rarity against 97.1%, 25.3% an artist against 93.0%.
- [Who Draws Pokemon Cards? 399 Names, Counted](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/who-draws-pokemon-cards): 399 credited illustrators drew 20,367 English cards, and 25 of them drew half. Hold set and rarity fixed and the name on the card is worth 0.99x.
- [How Many Printings Does a Pokemon Card Have?](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/how-many-printings-does-a-pokemon-card-have): 21,908 English cards resolve to 34,433 separately priced printings. 64.3% are sold in two or more finishes, and the expensive ones almost never are.
- [Pokemon Card Rarity Chart: What Each Tier Is Worth](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/pokemon-card-rarity-chart-by-value): The rarity field takes 37 distinct values across 21,908 English cards, 35 of them printed labels, and they fold into 11 tiers. Four of the seven ladder steps separate price. One does not, and two run backwards.
- [How Many Pokemon Cards Are There? A Real Count](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/how-many-pokemon-cards-are-there): Our catalog holds 63,600 rows, and that is not how many Pokemon cards there are. Deduplicated twice and stripped of digital sets: 21,908 English printings.
- [Alakazam ex 201/165 Value: the PSA 9 Sells for Less](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/alakazam-ex-151-value): The 151 special illustration rare asks $74.50 and its PSA 9 sold median is $72.00. On a 40,265-slab registry the nine is worth less than the ungraded card.
- [Magikarp & Wailord GX 161/181: $882 and 77 Comps](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/magikarp-and-wailord-gx-value): The Team Up alternate art asks $882.13, third dearest in its set, with a PSA 10 at $4,275.00. Its promo twin gems 0.69% and has no PSA 10 sale at all.
- [M Charizard EX 101/108 Evolutions: Price and Pop](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/m-charizard-ex-evolutions-value): The Evolutions full art asks $127.02, with a PSA 10 at $617.50 on 356 sales and 34,109 PSA slabs. A different M Charizard EX in the same set asks $41.58.
- [Special Delivery Charizard Value: a 14% Gem Rate](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/special-delivery-charizard-value): SWSH075 asks $208.31 and its PSA 10 sells for $1,311.93. Of 32,567 submissions only 4,546 came back tens, and the last 474 slabs returned twelve.
- [Mewtwo & Mew GX SM191 Value: 638 PSA 10 Sales](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/mewtwo-and-mew-gx-sm191-value): The promo asks $387.37 and its PSA 10 sells for $2,125.00 on 638 verified sales, the 49th deepest sold tape of the 5,879 cards in our graded cohort.
- [Banned Pokémon Card Art: What Censorship Cost](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/banned-pokemon-card-art): Twelve Pokémon cards were redrawn or withheld for the English release. Across 605 matched English and Japanese pairs, the five widest gaps are all art cases.
- [Banned Pokémon Cards: Does a Ban Change the Price?](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/banned-pokemon-cards-tournament): Play! Pokémon bans 27 cards from Expanded and none from Standard. The median banned printing still asks above 62% of the cards printed beside it.
- [What a Reprint Does to the Original Card](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/pokemon-reprints-and-the-original): Across 543 same-rarity reprint pairs the original trades at a median 1.13x the reprint. Reprinted one tier up, the original is worth 0.32x the newer card.
- [Is a Pokémon Set Index Just Its Chase Cards?](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/set-index-vs-its-chase-cards): The top five cards hold 57.2% of a set's value but carried only 45.6% of its value change. Across 41 fixed baskets, 94.9% of cards moved with the set.
- [Does Set Size Change What a Pokémon Set Is Worth?](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/pokemon-set-size-vs-value): Across 192 English sets, printed checklist size correlates -0.402 with the median card price and +0.501 with total set value. Bigger sets, cheaper cards.
- [Pokémon Set Value by Era: 142 Sets Measured](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/pokemon-set-value-by-era): The median set from 1999 to 2003 is worth $2,357 and its median card $3.62. The median Sword and Shield set is worth $643 and its median card 27 cents.
- [Do Pokémon Sets Gain Value With Age? 100 Sets](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/do-pokemon-sets-gain-value-with-age): Across 100 English sets with a continuous recorded value series, the median 10 to 15 year old set returned 190.3% while sets under three returned 22.8%.
- [Pokemon Pull Rates by Set: What Is Published](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/pokemon-pull-rates-by-set): Of the 110 English sets sold in booster packs that we track, 31 have pull rates from a published study. Eleven studies carry them, and 24 sets borrow odds.
- [Sealed vs Singles: Which Price Moves More?](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/sealed-vs-singles-pokemon-prices): Over 23 recorded days, 1,800 sealed products and 37,273 singles both repriced on a median 13.6% of day-to-day steps. Under that tie the two tapes have opposite shapes.
- [Do Sealed Pokemon Boxes Go Up in Value?](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/do-sealed-pokemon-boxes-go-up-in-value): Across 56 priced 36-pack English booster boxes quoted on one day, the median ask runs from $290.44 under a year old to $10,000 past twenty. That is a cross-section of the boxes that survived, not a return.
- [Booster Box Expected Value Has Error Bars](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/booster-box-expected-value): Across 27 English sets with a real box and odds traceable to a published study, a box's contents are worth a median 0.380 of its ask, valued at asks on both sides. One bookkeeping assumption moves that by 47.5%.
- [The Cheapest Way to Buy Pokemon Packs, Measured](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/cheapest-way-to-buy-pokemon-packs): Only 271 of the 2,358 sealed SKUs we track can be priced per pack honestly, and where one set sells packs two ways the dearest costs a median 1.31x the cheapest.
- [How Long Do You Have to Hold a Pokemon Card?](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/how-long-to-hold-a-pokemon-card): On 175,130 hold windows across 2,766 continuously quoted cards, the median hold first clears a 13% round-trip cost somewhere between 150 and 155 days. Before that it loses money.
- [Four Ways to Index the Same Pokemon Cards](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/pokemon-card-index-construction): One basket of 27,810 cards, four standard index constructions, four answers from -1.99% to +7.72%. The weighting decides the number more than the market does.
- [How Far Do Pokemon Cards Fall? A Drawdown Census](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/pokemon-card-drawdowns): Across the 2,766 cards that stayed continuously quoted for 603 days, the median card fell 22.48% from its own peak, and 77.11% were still below that peak at the end.
- [How Concentrated Is the Pokemon Card Market?](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/pokemon-card-market-concentration): Across the 44,395 cards we price, 2.14% of them hold half of all market value. Price movement is more concentrated still: ten cards were a sixth of it.
- [What Predicts a Pokemon Card's Return?](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/what-predicts-a-pokemon-card-return): We tested six factors against 41,359 cards. Trailing momentum scores a rank correlation of -0.0016, and the median card returns exactly nothing.
- [Which Set Has the Most $100 Pokémon Cards?](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/hundred-dollar-cards-by-set): Skyridge holds 42 cards asking $100 or more, the most of 129 English sets. Base Set holds 3, Evolving Skies 13, 151 holds 3, and the median set holds four.
- [14,466 Cards With a Price and No Sale](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/cards-with-a-price-and-no-sale): 14,466 of the 21,416 priced English cards we track have no graded sale on record, 67.5%. Above a dollar the lookup is a census with no remainder, and 952 of the 4,879 cards asking five dollars or more still come back empty.
- [The PSA 10 Premium, Ranked Across 90 Sets](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/psa-10-premium-by-set): Fossil's median card sells for 120.98x its raw ask in a PSA 10. Unbroken Bonds' for 5.26x. The set decides the multiple more than the price tag does.
- [One Card, 60% of a Set: Chase Share in 129 Sets](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/chase-card-share-of-set-value): Giratina V is 60.6% of Lost Origin's priced value, the highest of 129 English sets. Umbreon VMAX is 28.0% of Evolving Skies, which ranks 33rd.
- [Which Pokémon Sets Are Mostly Bulk? 129 Ranked](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/pokemon-bulk-cards-by-set): Journey Together is 82.6% sub-dollar cards, the most bulk-heavy of 129 English sets. The share stopped climbing in 2014. Only the price kept falling.
- [Above $1,000, the PSA 9 Is the Grade That Trades](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/which-psa-grade-actually-trades): On 5,998 cards priced in both grades, 33.41% carry more recorded PSA 9 sales than PSA 10 sales. Where the PSA 10 clears $1,000, that rises to 74.62%.
- [The Chase Card Is a Secret Rare 61% of the Time](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/is-the-chase-card-a-secret-rare): In all 95 English sets we can test, cards numbered past the set total out-ask the rest. But the single dearest card in the set is one of them only 58 times.
- [Hard-to-Grade Cards Cost More, Until 2020](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/are-hard-to-grade-cards-worth-more): On 7,957 English cards with a registry of 50 or more slabs, the hardest to gem ask $44.43 against $3.84 in the middle. Inside modern sets the rule inverts.
- [A CGC 10 Sells for 42.50% of a PSA 10](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/is-a-cgc-10-worth-a-psa-10): Across 4,792 cards priced in both, the median CGC 10 fetches 42.50% of the PSA 10. The gap widens with price: 71.27% under $25, 21.04% above $1,000.
- [Is a PSA 9 Half a PSA 10? On 85% of Cards, No](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/is-a-psa-9-half-a-psa-10): On 5,998 cards priced in both grades the median PSA 9 sells for 24.54% of its PSA 10, and only 7.32% land anywhere near half. The gap tracks price.
- [Starter Pokemon Cards, Nine Generations Ranked](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/starter-pokemon-cards-by-generation): 1,046 measured starter printings across nine generations. Kanto asks 5.14x the cards beside it and Alola 0.93x. The dearest starter card is a $4,500 Torchic.
- [Every Charizard's PSA 10 Premium, Ranked](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/charizard-grading-premium-ranked): 82 Charizard printings carry a raw ask and a PSA 10 sold median. The multiple runs 1.45x to 60.37x, and what sorts it is not price but how often it trades.
- [Every Eeveelution Ranked, Raw and Graded](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/eeveelutions-ranked-raw-and-graded): Umbreon has the dearest raw ask of the eight Eeveelutions and the smallest PSA 10 premium: 6.95x against Flareon's 22.29x, on 20 to 26 printings each.
- [Does Reprinting a Pokemon Cost It Anything?](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/does-reprinting-a-pokemon-cost-it): Pikachu has 214 priced English printings. Across 302 species, the more a Pokemon is printed the higher its premium over its cohort. Rank correlation +0.425.
- [The Species Premium: What a Pokemon Name Is Worth](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-species-premium): Hold the set and the printed rarity fixed and the creature still moves the price. Across 302 species Gengar asks 11.31x its cohort, and Charizard is third.
- [Why Pokémon Card Prices Differ by Source](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/why-pokemon-card-prices-differ-by-source): One card carries four honest prices. On 316 cards holding all four, the highest and lowest sit 5.77 times apart, and the ask is the lowest on 246 of them.
- [How to Tell a Pokémon Card Price Is Stale](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/how-to-tell-a-pokemon-card-price-is-stale): Across 25,938 card-grade pairs, 78.5% of quoted prices that moved in four days moved with no new recorded sale behind them. Three checks tell you which.
- [How Many Pokémon Cards Have a Real Market?](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/do-pokemon-cards-have-a-real-market): 44,395 catalog entries carried a price on September 22, 2026. Only 11,747 carried a recorded sale. We checked the other 32,648 and found nothing there.
- [Pokémon Card Ask vs Sold Price, Measured](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/pokemon-card-ask-vs-sold-price): On 440 products holding both, the raw sold median runs 5.56 times the quoted ask under $5 and 1.05 times above $500. They agree only on expensive cards.
- [How Many Sales Does a Pokémon Card Price Need?](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/pokemon-card-price-sample-size): A sold median built on three or four sales moves 19.5% when it moves. One built on 100 or more moves 5.4%. Measured across 25,022 card-grade series.
- [What Share of Cards Get a PSA 10?](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/what-percentage-of-cards-get-psa-10): Half of all 22,274,556 slabs in 15,565 PSA registries are tens. The median registry is only 33.33% tens, and 56.51% of cards hold more nines than tens.
- [How Fast Do PSA Populations Actually Grow?](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/how-fast-psa-populations-grow): Watching 2,916 registries for a median 39 days, a quarter added nothing and the busiest 1% absorbed 29.87% of every new slab. The median grew 0.26% a week.
- [Does a Big PSA Population Lower the Price?](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/does-psa-population-lower-price): Across 3,606 cards, registry size and the PSA 10 premium correlate at -0.46. The premium falls from 18.07x to 3.87x by population quintile. The price does not.
- [Is Grading Pokémon Cards Worth It? 2,633 Answers](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/is-grading-pokemon-cards-worth-it): Netting a $20 fee against each card's own recorded gem rate, 90.7% of 2,633 cards clear it and the median clears by $31.43. At $50 all-in, only half do.
- [How Much a PSA 10 Adds, Across 8,676 Cards](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/psa-10-premium-distribution): The middle card's PSA 10 sells for 12.2 times its raw ask and $101.45 more in cash. Half of them sit outside 5.7x to 24.4x, so one quoted multiple fits nobody.
- [The Most Expensive Pokémon Cards Right Now](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/most-expensive-pokemon-cards): The dearest raw card in our tape asks $4,500. The dearest graded one sells for $30,895. Across the top 25 of each list, exactly one card appears on both.
- [Which Pokémon Has the Most Valuable Cards?](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/which-pokemon-cards-are-worth-the-most): We priced every English printing of all 1,025 Pokémon. Charizard's twelve dearest come to $11,340.18. Pikachu has 226 printings and ranks eighth.
- [Are Pokémon Cards a Good Investment?](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/are-pokemon-cards-a-good-investment): Our deepest price tape says the median card is up 90.1% in twenty months. That tape covers 13.9% of the printings we follow weekly, and the rest tells a different story.
- [Base Set Pokémon Card Price Guide: All 102 Cards](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/base-set-pokemon-card-price-guide): One near-mint copy of every priced 1999 Base Set card costs $2,218.19 today. Charizard is 41.5% of that. The median card in the set asks $2.53.
- [How Much Is a Charizard Card Worth?](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/how-much-is-a-charizard-card-worth): Our daily tape prices 114 English Charizard printings across 54 sets. The middle one asks $72.18, four ask $1,000 or more, and five ask under $5.
- [Ten Sets, Measured From the Day They Actually Went On Sale](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/what-a-set-does-after-it-goes-on-sale): Seven of the ten sets we can measure from their own release day recorded their highest price within ten days of going on sale, and every one of those seven is below its release price today. The only two trading above release peaked 362 and 375 days later. Whether a set can make a new high after its first fortnight is, on this cohort, the thing that separates the two outcomes.
- [Five Cards in Six Trade on a Single Listing](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/five-cards-in-six-have-only-one-price): Across 52,282 card lines, 83.5% have a single listing setting the price: the cheapest copy for sale IS the market, to the cent. Being expensive does not buy you a second seller. Above a dollar the share is flat at 89% to 92% at every price level, including 91.8% of cards over $100. It matters because a quoted price backed by one listing moves the moment that listing sells.
- [The Same Card, Two Slabs: a PSA 10 Is Worth 2.42 Times a CGC 10](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-label-is-worth-more-than-the-grade): On the 4,547 cards our graded tape prices in both a PSA 10 and a CGC 10 on the same day, the median PSA 10 sells for 2.42 times its CGC twin, and PSA is dearer on 92.9% of them. The gap holds one grade down (1.90x at the 9) and against BGS (2.11x versus a 9.5). Whatever you are buying when you buy a slab, a meaningful part of it is the label.
- [Fifteen Tens From 12,323 Tries: the Cards PSA Almost Never Gems](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/fifteen-tens-from-twelve-thousand-tries): Across 5,325 cards carrying 500 or more PSA submissions each, 24,950,782 submissions in total, the overall gem rate is 52.7%. That average hides both ends. 133 of those cards gem under 1% of the time and 702 gem over 80%. At the hard end the market stops trading the grade everyone chases: on the 100 hardest cards only 10 in 100 have a recorded PSA 10 sale while 82 have a PSA 9 sale, and on the 100 easiest that inverts to 74 and 25. On a hard card the 9 is the product.
- [If You Had to Buy One Set Right Now](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/one-set-to-buy-right-now): A screen, not a hunch. Ten sets on our tape have a usable history from their own release day. Require 180 days of it, require the set not to be printing new lows this week, require it to be trading below its release price, and four names survive. The two deepest discounts are the two weakest candidates, for a reason that is visible in the data rather than arguable. The answer is Destined Rivals, at the shallowest discount of the four, and this piece states in advance the reading that would prove it wrong.
- [Destined Rivals Costs 3.7x Journey Together, and It Is Not Because It Is More Top-Heavy](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/destined-rivals-versus-journey-together): Two Scarlet and Violet sets, released nine weeks apart. Destined Rivals is worth $1,750.98 on our tape and Journey Together $478.17. The obvious explanation is that Destined Rivals has a bigger chase card carrying the index, and the chase card is indeed 4.4 times dearer. But the two sets hold almost exactly the same share of their value in their top five, 58.3% against 57.2%. Destined Rivals is bigger everywhere at once. Its cards outside the top ten are worth $487.23, which is more than the whole of Journey Together.
- [Destined Rivals Is 7.8% Below Its Release Price, and It Was 10% Cheaper in January](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/destined-rivals-back-to-its-release-price): The claim going round is that Destined Rivals is almost back to where it started. On our tape that is close to true: the set read $1,898.13 three days after release and read $1,750.98 on September 17, 2026, 475 days later. What the round trip hides is the route. It was 30.7% above the release price in September 2025, 17.2% below it in January 2026, 19.0% above it again in June, and it has lost 22.5% in the 95 days since. Close to the release price is not the same as close to the floor.
- [Played in 91% of Decks, Worth 24 Cents](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/does-competitive-play-pay): We joined eight weeks of tournament deck lists against three weeks of daily prices for 688 cards. Competitive play has a weak positive relationship with a card's cheapest printing (Spearman +0.248) and essentially none with its most expensive one (+0.011). The game decides the floor, barely. The artwork decides everything above it.
- [The Frozen Catalog: 7,795 Cards Held Exactly One Price for Twenty-One Straight Days](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-frozen-catalog): We recorded 994,132 daily prices across 52,542 cards over three weeks. Among the 35,507 cards priced on every single day, 22.0% never changed by a cent. The frozen share is not worst among the penny commons, as you would expect. It is worst at the top: half of every card above $500 held one number for the entire window.
- [The Refusal Census: We Scored 25,471 Cards and Declined to Rate 22,039 of Them](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-refusal-census): Every card our target model touches gets one of two things: a price target, or a recorded reason why not. On September 19 the reasons outnumbered the targets 6.4 to 1. Here is the full census, including the era where we rate essentially nothing, the top of the market where we rate nothing at all, and the 24 rows where our own code failed to write down why it stayed quiet.
- [Japanese Cards Are Cheaper, and Also Dearer. Which One Depends Entirely on the Price](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-japanese-price-flip): Across 1,373 cards that exist as a single English printing and a single Japanese one, both carrying a live price, the Japanese copy is the more expensive of the two 832 times. That is the opposite of what the hobby says. It is also not the whole story, because the direction reverses cleanly as the card gets dearer: under a dollar the Japanese print runs at 4.75 times the English one and is dearer 90% of the time, and above $100 it runs at 0.30 and is dearer 5% of the time. Both halves of the folk wisdom are true. They are true about different cards.
- [We Put a Price Target on the Whole Book. It Refused Four Cards in Five](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-target-book): A disclosed valuation model now runs nightly across 21,974 cards. It produces 3,228 targets and 18,746 refusals, and prints the reason for every refusal on the card's own page: 8,729 sit below the $1.50 signal floor where postage swamps demand, 7,679 have no verified PSA 10 median to anchor to. Of the cards it will value, 1,820 targets sit below today's price against 1,401 above, and two thirds of the calls are HOLD. We also print the one place the number can disagree with our own Market Report, because a reader would otherwise find it themselves.
- [Easy Grades Are Cheap Grades: the PSA 10 Premium Falls From 25x to 4x](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/easy-grades-are-cheap-grades): Across 4,106 cards with a trustworthy gem rate, 50 or more graded copies and a PSA 10 median on the tape, every column moves in order. As gemming gets easier the average PSA 10 price falls from $4,977.80 to $86.90 and the registry more than triples. But the raw price of the same cards falls too, so most of that 57x is era rather than grading. The number that isolates the grade is the multiple, and it collapses from 24.7x to 3.8x.
- [A 191-Card Set Nobody Printed: the Delta Species Run](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-delta-species-run): Between 2005 and 2007 the game printed cards whose type was deliberately wrong, marked only by a small δ. They were scattered across eight sets instead of gathered into one, so the run is a set that exists only if you go looking. We price 191 of them in English, every single one, averaging $95.71, with two sets carrying 131 of them and a Dragon Frontiers gold star Mew at $3,500 on top. It is also the mechanic that broke our own cross-language matching, because the Japanese prints spell out what the English prints mark with a symbol.
- [The Numbers We Do Not Print: 4,250 Withheld Populations](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-numbers-we-do-not-print): We track 24,200 PSA registry lines and publish a population for 19,950 of them. The rest are measured and deliberately withheld, because the feed re-points product ids at different registry lines and sometimes serves one line to two cards at once. Base Set Venusaur read 314 graded copies one week and 46,802 the next. Four different Arceus cards read the same 36,048 on the same day. This is what those failures look like and what refusing to print them costs.
- [Three Weeks of 30th Celebration Prices, and Not One Recorded Sale](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-forty-nine-ninety-nine-plateau): 30th Celebration released on September 16, so all but one day of this tape is preorder pricing. The set is down hard: on the 40 cards priced on both days, the median fell 34.2% between September 15 and 16 alone, and the Pikachu Rares are down 67.3% from their own preorder peaks. But before the fall, six of those cards were quoted at exactly $49.99 for up to seventeen straight days, and Mewtwo ex sat at exactly $1,000.00 for twenty-eight. Across all 159 tracked cards in the set we hold zero recorded sales, so every one of these numbers is an ask. Including ours, which on 92 of the cards is still the stale one.
- [A Mew That Went On Sale Today Has Had Six Prices, and None of Them Is a Sale](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-thirtieth-celebration-mew): Mew ex 158/128 from the 30th Celebration set last read $1,158.37, which would make it the 37th most expensive English card we price. Its entire recorded history is sixteen daily readings containing six prices: $3,166.50, $3,333.00 held for six days, $2,466.50, $1,977.66, $1,808.25, then $1,158.37. That is 65.2% off the peak in twelve days, in five steps rather than a decline. We hold no sold comps for it at all, and the cheapest copy you can actually buy costs 11.4% more than the price we quote. Restated September 17 after we found our own figure was stale.
- [Nobody Has Published Odds for 30th Celebration, and the Numbers Filling the Gap Disagree by 63% on the Only Tier That Matters](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-thirtieth-celebration-pull-rates): The Pokémon Company published no pull rates for this set in either language, and TCGplayer ran no study. Every figure in circulation is a community count. Those counts agree closely on the tiers that decide nothing: a double rare about 1 in 4 packs, an illustration rare about 1 in 5, a Classic Collection reprint about 1 in 10, a special illustration rare about 1 in 19. On the Futuristic rare tier, the two cards the whole set is priced around, they range from 1 in 82 to 1 in 134. We put the set into our pull-rate table with that disagreement written into it rather than averaged away, because it is the difference between chasing Mew ex for $3,128 and chasing it for $5,112, against $1,289.90 to simply buy the card.
- [The Float: 1.1 Million Copies on the Shelf, a $17.5 Million Shelf Price, and the $3,500 Card With Nobody Selling It](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-float): Every card page shows a price. Almost none show how many copies are for sale behind it. We now record the active TCGplayer listing count for every card in our graded universe, 6,527 English cards, and the shelf is deeper than most people assume: the median card has 95 copies listed, 3,158 have a hundred or more, and the whole shelf sums to 1,096,886 listings worth $17.5 million at market. It is also thinner where it matters: 52 of the 120 cards priced $500 and up have fewer than ten copies listed, and a $3,500 Mew Star has none. A week of float changes tracked nothing in the same week's price. Here is the supply side of the market, counted.
- [Where the New Slabs Go: 339,436 PSA Submissions in a Month, 42% of Them Japanese, and the Cards Being Graded Fastest Are Gemming Less](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/where-the-new-slabs-go): Our daily PSA population snapshots now span six weeks, long enough to watch the registry grow card by card. Across 3,248 lines with two readings at least three weeks apart, PSA added 339,436 slabs, 2.7% growth, about 9,634 a day. Japanese cards took 42% of that inflow on 30% of the stock; the year-old Mega Evolution era grew 9.6% in a month; Ascended Heroes grew 32.7%. A hundred cards absorbed nearly half of everything. And the new submissions gem less than the old stock: for Scarlet & Violet cards the slabs added this month came back PSA 10 at 19.5% against a 32.2% stock rate. Here is the grading queue, read from the registry.
- [Breadth: The Index Rose 4.8% in Sixteen Days, 120 of 156 Sets Rose With It, and the 300 Most Valuable Cards Did Not Move](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/market-breadth-september-2026): Our daily price store now covers every priced card, so for the first time we can ask a breadth question instead of an index question: how many cards actually went up? Between August 30 and September 14, 37.7% of 20,915 English cards rose more than 2%, 25.5% fell and 36.8% were flat, while the moonstone Index rose 4.8%. The rise was broad but not at the top: of the 300 most valuable cards, 73% did not move. It was also not the new product: half the Mega Evolution era fell. And it was vintage: WotC cards rose more than three to one, 40.3% up against 12.3% down. Here is the market as a headcount rather than a level.
- [Will the Pokémon Market Crash? Eight Readings From Our Own Tape, and the One Thing It Cannot Tell You](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/will-the-pokemon-market-crash): A widely shared video asks whether the Pokémon card market is about to crash. It is the right question and it deserves numbers rather than a vibe, so here are ours. The moonstone Index is up 135% since March 2025, has risen in eighteen consecutive months and has never fallen 2% from a high. Breadth is positive, sealed is rising again, the PSA 10 premium is not compressing, graded sales are up 8% and the registry is growing 2.7% a month. Against that: the market's 300 most valuable cards have stopped moving, the newest sets are falling, and 79% of cards priced $5 and up set their high in the last four months. We list what a crash would look like in these same numbers, so the reading can be checked rather than argued. And we say plainly what an eighteen-month series from a boom cannot know.
- [The Commons That Are Not Bulk: 315 Set Commons Are Worth $5 or More, and Every Skyridge Common Is One of Them](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-commons-that-are-not-bulk): We priced 5,153 English commons from regular sets. The median is 24 cents and half sit under a quarter, which is what bulk means. But 315 of them are worth $5 or more, 77 are worth $25 or more, and six clear $100, led by an Aquapolis Psyduck at $204 and a Skyridge Pikachu at $176. Three e-Reader sets supply half of the list: all 73 Skyridge commons are $5 cards, with a median of $25. The rest of the money is holo basic energy, a run of Delta Species Dittos, and the starters. Since 2014 exactly five commons from the main-line sets have reached $5, and one 2016 side set adds twelve more. Here is the top of the bulk pile, sorted.
- [The Least Graded Cards in Pokemon: Thin Registries Outran Deep Ones in Every Price Band Above $5 This Year](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-least-graded-cards-in-pokemon): Of the 23,110 registry lines we can price, 12,980 have fewer than 100 PSA slabs and 7,071 have fewer than ten. The median one is worth 39 cents. But 118 cards priced above $100 sit under 100 slabs, they are mostly staff stamps and championship cards, and in every price tier from $5 up the thinly graded card outran the deeply graded one over the past year: $25 to $100 cards with under 100 slabs rose a median 107% while their 10,000-slab peers rose 13%. The PSA 10 premium runs 21.6x at the thin end and 4.3x at the deep end. Here is the bottom of the registry, what it did, and why that is not quite a buy signal.
- [Hard to Gem: 22.8 Million PSA Slabs Say the Decade Decides, Texture Helps, and the PSA 10 Premium Runs the Other Way](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/hard-to-gem): We pooled the PSA registries of 17,730 cards. Half of every slab ever returned on them is a 10, but that average is two markets stapled together: Japanese cards gem at 73%, English cards at 36%. Inside English, the era decides: WotC rares gem at 4%, Neo Genesis Lugia at 0.12%, while Sword & Shield secret rares gem at 61% and the new Mega-era special illustration rares at 62%. Rarity matters less than the decade and in the direction collectors do not expect: textured special illustration rares gem more often than the plain illustration rares in the same sets. And the money moves against the gem rate: cards that gem under 10% of the time carry a median PSA 10 premium of 28x raw; cards that gem three times in four carry 5x.
- [The Drawdown Book: Among $5 Cards, Two in Three Sit Within 5% of Their 18-Month High, and Buying the Dip Trailed Buying Anything for a Quarter](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-drawdown-book): We measured every peak-to-trough fall in 2,417 continuously recorded price curves since January 2025. The median card gave back 22.6% from a running high at some point; one in three fell 30% or more. Among cards priced $5 and up, 64% now sit within 5% of their high and 79% set that high since June. The test collectors want is the dip: after a card first fell 30%, its median 90-day return was +5.9% with 63% of cards positive, against +9.7% and 76% for any 90-day window in the same cards. Cheap cards fell hardest and, except at the very top of the price list, rose least: the under-$1 tier gained 67.0% at the median against 94.9% for the $25-to-$100 tier, though the $100-and-up tier gained less than either at 57.5%. Sword & Shield cards drew down twice as deep as Sun & Moon. Here is the book.
- [The Most Graded Cards in Pokemon: a Japanese Promo Pikachu Has 329,337 PSA Slabs and Nothing Else Is Close](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-most-graded-cards-in-pokemon): Across the 24,174 provider registry lines we snapshot, PSA has graded 29.4 million copies, and five distinct cards have crossed 100,000. The deepest registry is not a Charizard. It is a Japanese promo Pikachu with 329,337 slabs, 87.6% of them tens, still adding 268 a day. Base Set Charizard sits at 105,288 with a 0.5% gem rate. Here is the whole top of the registry, who is adding slabs fastest, and the provider collisions we had to remove to say any of it.
- [We Remeasured First Edition With Four Times the Data. The Premium Held. The Fine Print Did Not.](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-first-edition-census-four-times-over): Three days ago we published a 1st Edition premium of 2.63x from 195 same-day pairs. After filling in printing rows for 1,342 vintage cards, the census is 838 pairs, and the median is 2.59x. But the bigger sample overturns the old footnote: the premium DOES compress with price, falling to 1.81x above $100, and seven of the eighteen inversions sit in one set.
- [The Reverse Holo Beats the Holo on Penny Cards and Loses Where the Money Is](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-reverse-holo-versus-the-holo-itself): On 350 cards printed in both finishes, the reverse holofoil out-prices the regular holo 75% of the time, at a median of 1.21x. Then you look at the pairs where either side is worth $20 or more, and the lead flips: the holo wins 64% of them. And in the oldest block we can measure, the holo won 86% of the time.
- [The $0.69 Dark Ampharos and the $899.99 Zapdos: Two Lies on One Shelf](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-two-lies-on-one-shelf): Eighteen English cards carry both a Holofoil price row and a plain Normal row on the same product, and sixteen of them live in one 2004 set. On some, the featured figure is a theme deck copy worth 1/167th of the card. On others, the cheap-looking row IS the card and the Holofoil row is a ghost asking 5.5x the market. Same shelf, opposite lies.
- [Launch, Mania, Markdown: the Mega Era on Our Own Tape](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-mega-era-round-trip): Social media is full of graded-crash charts this week. Our raw-market tape tells the fuller story on five 2025-26 chase cards with deep recorded history: the Mega Hyper Rare Darkrai ex is down 55 percent from its July debut, Surging Sparks' SIR Pikachu ex is down 39 percent since January 2025, and yet Ascended Heroes' Pikachu ex still trades at double its launch price after giving back a quarter from its May peak.
- [The Big Hit Went From One Per Box to One Every Third Box](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-pull-rate-squeeze): In mid-2023, a Special Illustration Rare fell about once every 32 packs: better than one per booster box. By late 2024 the measured rate was one in 86 to 90 packs, thinning to 1 in 94 by mid-2025, and the Mega era runs one in 70 to 101. Same $4 packs, a third of the jackpots. Meanwhile the consolation prizes got more common. The studies that measured it, set by set.
- [Pulling the Chase Costs 6x to 86x More Than Buying It](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-rip-tax): Across sixteen sets where a large-sample study has measured pull rates and we track the booster box price, ripping packs until the set's priciest pull appears costs between 6.3x and 85.7x the card's market price. The median across the board is 26.1x. The famous trap is Evolving Skies: about $136,584 of packs for one alt-art Umbreon VMAX that sells for $2,298; the mathematical trap is Mega Evolution's gold Mega Lucario ex at 85.7x.
- [The Gem Rate Curve: 15.7 Million PSA Submissions, and the Era Nobody Expects to Be Hardest](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-gem-rate-curve): We now hold PSA registry counts for 8,590 English cards carrying at least 50 submissions each, covering 15,708,231 graded submissions and 5,904,682 PSA 10s. Across that subset the gem rate is 37.6 percent. The era that grades worst is not Base Set. It is Diamond and Pearl, at a median of 3.8 percent, more than five times harder than the 1999 cardboard everyone assumes is the difficult one.
- [Momentum Does Not Persist in Pokemon Cards: 65,685 Observations Say So](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/we-were-wrong-about-momentum): On 65,685 observations across 52,041 cards and a 729-day span, a card's recent strength tells you nothing usable about its next move. The effect that shows up on a smaller sample does not survive the bigger one, which is the ordinary fate of momentum findings and the reason we re-run them at scale before acting on anything. The full method, the sample and the counter-result are below.
- [The Trainer Box That Costs More Than Its Booster Box](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-box-is-the-product): An Elite Trainer Box holds a fraction of a booster box's packs, and across the 44 sets where we track both, it costs a median 0.39x the box. The spread is the story: from 0.21x on Evolving Skies to 1.53x on Steam Siege, where the accessory outgrew the product it was packaging. And when the same trainer box carries a Pokemon Center stamp, the median markup is 1.71x for identical contents.
- [Does Momentum Work in Pokémon Cards? 28,288 Observations Say Yes, With a Catch](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/does-momentum-work-in-pokemon): We ran a point-in-time backtest over 28,288 card-month observations from our recorded price curves. A card up 25 to 50 percent over the prior 90 days beat its cohort by 4.7 points over the next 90; a flat card lagged by 4.0. Momentum persists. The catch: in the modern era, a card already up more than 50 percent reverses hard, losing 10.6 points.
- [The Same Pack Costs 40% More If You Buy Six of Them](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-convenience-tax): Across the 17 sets where we track both a booster box and a booster bundle, the bundle costs 1.40x more per pack. It is more expensive in 16 of the 17. Meanwhile a loose single pack is CHEAPER than the same set's box-price-per-pack in 29 of 47 sets, which says something specific about what a sealed box is actually being priced for.
- [In 41 of 48 Sets, the Best Card Costs Less Than the Box You Would Open to Find It](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/cheaper-than-the-box): We compared every set where we track both a real 36-pack booster box and a priced card list: 48 sets. In 41 of them the single most valuable card in the set is worth less than one sealed box of it. The median chase card is worth 0.314 of its box. In Legendary Treasures the best card in the set does not cover a single pack.
- [Japanese Registries Are Twice as Deep, Their Slabs Trade a Third as Often, and the Gem Premium Is Flatter](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/japanese-slabs): On September 4, 2026, across 346 Japanese cards with a usable PSA ladder against 337 English ones, the median Japanese PSA 10 population was 645 against 270, lifetime verified comps 4 against 13, and the 10 over 9 premium 3.20x against 4.28x.
- [Twelve Percent of the Sold Record Is Thrown Away, and the Worst of It Is Where the Cheap Slabs Live](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/twelve-percent-of-the-tape): Behind every published graded price sits a pile of listings that were rejected as not-the-card. Across 183,466 kept comps there are 25,176 rejected, 12.07% of everything. On PSA 7 the rejection rate is 26.76%. And a Base Set Charizard PSA 10 is quoted from one verified sale that happened 308 days ago.
- [The Set Inside the Set: a 70-Card Annex Holding 90% of the Release's Value](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-set-inside-the-set): Crown Zenith's Galarian Gallery is 30% of the checklist and 90.18% of the set's card value. Its median card is $13.16 against $0.20 in the main set, a factor of 66. Across eight subset and parent pairs, two formats behave in opposite directions.
- [First Edition Is Worth 2.63x, and One English Card in Twelve Is Published at the Wrong Printing](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/what-first-edition-is-actually-worth): On 195 products where the same feed prices both printings on the same day, the 1st Edition premium is 2.63x and only two pairs invert. The same audit shows the collapsed market figure quoting the dearest printing on 8.1% of English cards, by a median of 1.10x and a 99th percentile of 5.41x.
- [The Reverse Holo Is Worth Double the Card It Copies, and 48x in Legendary Collection](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-reverse-holo-is-not-filler): Across 4,528 products where TCGplayer priced both printings on the same day, read September 4, 2026, the reverse holofoil was worth more than the ordinary printing 95.54% of the time, at a median 2.03x. A per-printing backfill has since nearly tripled that sample: on 12,858 pairs read September 22, 2026 the same rule gives 2.44x, and Legendary Collection alone runs 48.22x.
- [Painter or Pokemon: the Artist Predicts 14% of a Card's Rank, the Creature Predicts 40%](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/painter-or-pokemon): Knowing only who painted a card explains 12% of where it lands in its own set, out of sample, against a placebo of minus 2%. On the 12,671 test rows the species model also sees, the artist figure is 14% and the species figure is 40%: the creature wins by roughly three to one on identical rows. And the concentration of chase work in a few hands has collapsed from 81.7% to 15.5% across eight eras.
- [TAG Now Out-Trades Beckett, Its 10 Prices at PSA Parity, and a BGS 10 Beats Both](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-challenger-stamps): PSA still writes 79.88% of the graded tape. But on the same card, a TAG 10 trades at 0.99x a PSA 10, a CGC 10 at 0.49x, and a BGS 10 at 1.48x. Across 183,466 verified comps, TAG has quietly passed Beckett on volume.
- [The Basement of the Registry: at PSA 7, the Slab Stops Being Worth More Than the Card](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-basement-of-the-registry): A PSA 10 trades at 10.89x the raw price. A PSA 9 at 2.50x. A PSA 8 at 1.35x. At PSA 7 the median lands on 0.96x, and 52.8% of the cards we can measure are worth less in the slab than out of it. Nearly a quarter of the 1.58 million PSA slabs we hold population for sit below a 9.
- [The Frozen Tape: 38% of Card Prices Are Last Week's Price](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-frozen-tape): As of September 2, 2026 we held 756,262 price observations across 7,014 cards. Compare each card's price to the same card's price exactly seven days earlier, inside the era where the feed runs daily, and 37.5% of the time the number has not changed by a cent. At one day apart it is 72.0%. The median card in the sample spent a 28-day stretch of the last year completely still. A price that does not move is not a stable price. It is a price with nothing behind it.
- [Nothing Moves Together: A Year of Weekly Prices Finds No Pokémon Market Factor](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/nothing-moves-together): Take 741 cards that started above $5 and carry a complete year of weekly tape. The average pair of them moves with a correlation of 0.026, and the median card shares 2.8% of its week-to-week variance with the market it sits in. Yet the equal-weight index of those same 741 cards rose 41.0% and fell in only four weeks out of fifty-one. Both facts are true at once, and together they describe an asset almost nobody is holding correctly.
- [The Fee Is a Fixed Cost: A PSA 9 Pays the Grading Bill on One Card in Three](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-fee-is-a-fixed-cost): On 192 English cards with a live raw price and a PSA 9 median built on eight or more verified sales, the median 9 fetches 2.03 times the raw card. It still fails to cover raw plus a $25 fee on two thirds of them, because a multiple is not money. Halve the fee and half the board clears; that single assumption moves more cards than any property of the cards themselves.
- [The Same Card, the Same Grade, Four Times the Price](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-same-slab-four-times-the-price): On the 33 English cards whose PSA 10 tape holds between 20 and 40 verified sales, the highest sale is a median 4.00 times the lowest. On 98 English cards with 20 or more verified sales in both grades, a PSA 9 sold for more than the cheapest PSA 10 on 55 of them. The median is the right summary of a graded card's price. It is not the price.
- [The 10,872 Cards That Look Like Other Cards](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/cards-people-misidentify): Our catalog holds 58,907 printings. 10,872 of them share a name with another card in the same set, and the median price gap inside those groups is 11.5x. This is the map of every way a Pokémon card can be mistaken for a different Pokémon card, measured, with what being wrong costs.
- [Japan Prices the Same Cards on a Flatter Ladder](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-flatter-ladder): Take eleven sets that exist in both languages and match them card by card, both legs quoted by the same Western marketplace. Japanese commons cost more than English commons. Japanese chase cards cost a fraction of English chase cards. The Japanese price rises with only the 0.73 power of the English price, which means the gap is not a discount. It is a different slope. And on the median card there is barely a gap at all.
- [What Completing a Set Actually Costs, and Why It Is Two Purchases](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-completion-bill): We summed every priced card in every set on one day: $909,227.42 across 51,843 rows and 647 set buckets. Across the checklists deep enough to measure, the median completion bill is $1,224 and the median top-ten share of a bill is 68.8%. But the checklists whose every card holds value are not sets at all. They are the promo bins, where nothing ever fell out of a pack.
- [260,000 Simulated Boxes: Not One Set Pays for Its Own Box](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/no-box-pays-for-itself): We ran the full Monte Carlo across 26 sets, 10,000 boxes each, pricing every card that falls out at its live market value. Expected value never reaches the box price. Neither does the median. What actually differs between sets is the SHAPE of the loss, and that difference is worth more to a buyer than the averages everyone quotes.
- [Ninety Percent of Decks, Twenty-Six Cents: The Game and the Market Are Different Economies](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/ninety-percent-of-decks-twenty-six-cents): Boss's Orders appeared in 2,330 of the 2,586 tournament decklists we sampled on August 31, 2026, and its cheapest printing costs $0.26. Across 655 played card names matched to live prices, the correlation between how heavily a card is played and what its cheapest printing costs is 0.14, and against its priciest printing 0.09. Of the 200 most expensive English printings we track, 20 have a name that appeared in competitive play at all.
- [The Casting Premium: A Charizard's Advantage Is Decided Before the Card Is Printed](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-casting-premium): Across 21,153 priced English cards, knowing only which Pokémon is on the card predicts 35.4% of where an ordinary printing lands among the other ordinary printings in its set, out of sample. Inside the chase tier the same test predicts 16.8% against other chase cards and nothing at all against the set as a whole. And the largest expression of character demand is not what buyers pay. It is casting: 63.0% of Charizard's printings are given a mechanic slot, against 27.2% of Pikachu's and 0% of Chinchou's.
- [The Book at Thirty Days: Every Position We Own, Marked, Including the Pair We Had to Suspend](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-book-at-thirty-days): Ninety-seven published picks collapse to 28 distinct positions, of which 18 have been held long enough to mark and 2 are suspended for contaminated comps. The 16 live marks average minus 2.70% with a median of plus 0.33%, the damage concentrates entirely above $1,000 a position, and one rule appears on 15 of the 16 tickets, which means our factor attribution currently cannot identify anything. Here is all of it.
- [The Gate Is the Market: 316 Desk Notes and a 62-Call Machine Converge on One Number](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-gate-is-the-market): Our desk published 111,864 words of card-by-card opinion, drafted by our research system under editorial direction with every figure checked against the recorded tape. A separate rating engine scored the same cards from disclosed formulas with no access to the prose. Line them up and the correlation between a card's lifetime gem rate and the machine's implied upside is -0.754. Two instruments reading one field: how hard the card is to gem.
- [The Half Point: A BGS 9.5 Is Worth More Than a CGC 10, and the Tape Now Proves It](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-half-point): On 90 cards where all three graders have real sold tape, the median CGC 10 fetches 51.1% of the PSA 10 price and the median BGS 9.5 fetches 53.6%. Head to head on 91 cards, the BGS half point beats the CGC whole point on 52 of them. A CGC 9.5, meanwhile, is worth about a quarter of a PSA 10. The grade on the label means nothing until you know whose label it is.
- [The Multiple Ladder: A Gem Premium Is Mostly a Statement About the Price Tag](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-multiple-ladder): Across 306 cards carrying both a live raw price and a deep PSA 10 tape, the gem multiple falls from 16.02x in the $4 to $8 band to 2.63x above $256, and then stops falling. A PSA 10 price rises with only the 0.61 power of the raw price, which is why the multiple has to fall; price and grading difficulty together explain 74.5% of where a PSA 10 lands. Most of what the hobby calls a card's grading upside is arithmetic it shares with every other card at its price.
- [Ninety Days to Our Own Grave or Trophy: 466 Dated Calls Are Now on the Books](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/ninety-days-of-our-own-grave-or-trophy): As of this week, every verdict our card reports print is frozen as a dated call with a written falsifier, and in about ninety days the first batch gets scored against recorded data whether we like the result or not. 466 calls across 219 cards are on the books. Misses will be listed first. This is the pre-announcement, written while we can still be wrong.
- [Seven Cards We Refused to Rate](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/seven-cards-we-refused-to-rate): A famous Lillie with one grade row. A Scizor priced off five stale comps. A Mudkip whose nine costs double its ten. Our competitors print a confident number for all of them. We wrote stubs instead, and this is the argument for why an honest desk sometimes says: we do not know yet.
- [The First Negative Stamp: The Card You Lose Money Grading Even When It Works](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-first-negative-stamp): The Wizards promo Eevee has 31 PSA 10s out of 10,685 slabs ever graded, a 0.29% gem rate against a 2.23% break-even. Its expected value per submission is minus $3.97, the first negative stamp on our desk, and at registry-average outcomes that is not bad luck. It is the arithmetic working as printed. Here is what makes a card structurally ungradeable, and the ranked list nobody should mail.
- [The Ask Is Lying to You: What Raw Listing Prices Get Wrong by Construction](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-ask-is-lying-to-you): A raw ask is a hope with a price tag. A graded sold median is a fact with a receipt, and the two describe different objects. On 55 of 152 deep-tape cards the PSA 9 sold median sits BELOW the raw ask, which is a gap worth pricing rather than a contradiction. Demand a 15% cushion before you underwrite it, and 14 popular grade-the-nine trades die on the spot, Giratina V and a $743 Mega Charizard nine among them.
- [The Eight-to-One Stamp: What a CGC 10 Is Actually Worth in PSA Terms](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-eight-to-one-stamp): The same Entei promo, the same gem grade, two labels: $1,171.86 in a PSA slab, $145.25 in a CGC one. We ran the comparison across every card where both graders have real tape. The median CGC 10 fetches about 47 cents on the PSA 10 dollar, and the spread between the widest and narrowest gaps is a map of where PSA's gate actually binds.
- [The Thirtieth Anniversary Slate: What the 25th Already Priced In](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-thirtieth-anniversary-slate): A first-ever simultaneous worldwide release on September 16. A preorder board of 41 tracked products averaging −23.6% in 30 days, with exactly one climbing. A Japanese chase card that roughly halved in its first week. The 30th anniversary is arriving on a tape we have seen before, because we recorded the last one.
- [Bulk's Hidden Floor: A Quarter Century Later, the Worst WotC Cards Are Worth 33x the Worst Modern Ones](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/bulks-hidden-floor): The bottom tenth of Sword & Shield era cards trades at seven cents. The bottom tenth of WotC-era cards trades at $2.34. Same game, same rarity tiers, one difference: twenty-five years of attrition. This is what a floor forming actually looks like, decile by decile.
- [The Gem Rate Drift: PSA Is Getting Stricter, and We Can Prove It Card by Card](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-gem-rate-drift): Across 99 heavily-submitted cards, new slabs gem at 58.6% against a 62.0% historical rate. The extremes are stark: the Van Gogh Pikachu gemmed 42.9% of its life and 21.9% of its last 736 submissions. Grading standards drift, and daily registry tape makes the drift measurable.
- [The Registry Is Closed: Dark Charizard and What Happens When Demand Meets a Finished Population](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-registry-is-closed): Team Rocket's Dark Charizard adds 34 slabs a week to a registry of 9,591, a third of a percent. When buyers arrived, its PSA 10 median went from $1,563 to $3,475 between our July 27 and August 3, 2026 readings, because there was nothing else that COULD move. This is the vintage thesis in one card, on six recorded sales rising to fifteen.
- [The $7,500 Card That Never Trades: Crystal Kingdra and the Illusion of the Trophy Price](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-7500-card-that-never-trades): Aquapolis Crystal Kingdra in PSA 10 carries a $7,544 median built on seven lifetime verified sales, and in our entire measurement window it recorded zero. It is one of 53 high-value slabs in our ledger that simply do not trade. Here is what a price means when the market never opens.
- [PSA Changed Its Mind About the Felt Hat: The Van Gogh Pikachu's Gem Rate Fell by Half](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/psa-changed-its-mind-felt-hat): Across its whole registry to August 2026, Pikachu with Grey Felt Hat gemmed 42.9% of the time. Across its most recent 736 submissions, 21.9%. Same card, same sleeve-to-slab pipeline, half the tens. Something changed, and it was not the card.
- [Anatomy of a Mania, Recorded Live: Mega Charizard X ex Is the Fastest Tape We Have Ever Tracked](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/anatomy-of-a-mania): The Phantasmal Flames chase adds 730 slabs to its registry every week, clears 43.8 verified PSA 10 sales weekly, and still carries a +$796 grading EV. Manias usually get documented after they end. This one is being recorded while it runs.
- [The Umbreon Standard: One Card, Six Datasets, and Everything the Modern Market Believes](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-umbreon-standard): No card in the game is better documented than the Evolving Skies Umbreon VMAX alt art. Pop 30,967 and growing. 69.4% gem rate. 36.8 verified PSA 10 sales a week at $4,300. A positive grading EV of $1,281. And the worst lottery ticket in modern ripping. This is the full dossier.
- [Same Picture, Ten Times the Price: A Buyer's Guide to the Twins Our Scanner Untangles](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/same-picture-ten-times-the-price): Lost Origin printed two Volos from one illustration and they trade ten to one. Base Set and Base Set 2 Poliwrath share one painting and trade about two to one. Fossil Moltres has a Japanese twin, and sellers mix all of them up, sometimes innocently. Here is the twin field guide, from the machine that tells them apart for a living.
- [Everyone Grades the Freebies: MEP Black Star Promos and the Deepest Registries in the Game](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/everyone-grades-the-freebies): The MEP Black Star family sits on the deepest registry line we track, a 38,076 average across its three cards with a pop above 100, deeper than Celebrations and deeper than any chase set. That line is shared by several products and one card is 93% of it, so it is a stratum reading, never a card population. The cards are free with a purchase. The slabs are a business. And one of them was so new we had to add it to our own catalog from a reader's photo.
- [The Handout Grails: Wizards Black Star Promos and the Cards Nobody Paid For](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-handout-grails): A stadium card handed out free at Wizards-era league nights is worth $1,284. The promos Wizards gave away free now anchor four-figure prices on registries growing at under half the market's rate, and on gem rates as low as 4.6%. Accidental scarcity beat deliberate scarcity, and the receipts are in the registry.
- [Prismatic Evolutions vs Its Own Arithmetic: The Most Hyped Set of the Era Is Losing to Its Registry](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/prismatic-vs-its-own-arithmetic): Umbreon ex adds 190 slabs a week while its PSA 10 median slid from $6,775 to $6,225. The set's Pikachu ex is one of the few cards in the game gemming EASIER over time. Prismatic is beloved, scarce on shelves, and mathematically ordinary, and the tape shows all three at once.
- [151 Proved the 90-Day Rule Twice: The Set That Crashed, Doubled, and Got Harder to Gem](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/151-proved-it-twice): Scarlet & Violet 151 fell 32.2% between January and June 2025, then more than doubled off the bottom to $2,059. Its Pikachu now gems at 8.5% against a 26.9% lifetime rate, one of the sharpest drifts in the set. One beloved set, two of our datasets, three lessons.
- [The Set That Ate the Modern Market: Evolving Skies, Five Years On](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-set-that-ate-the-market): A $2,445 booster box. A top 1% of cards holding 48.7% of the era's value. A simulation where 73.9% of boxes return less than half their cost. Evolving Skies is not a set anymore. It is a two-card index fund with 200 pieces of cardboard attached.
- [The Autopsy: Every Weekly Buys Pick That Went Wrong](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-autopsy-weekly-buys-losers): Our picks ledger is append-only, so the losers are permanent residents. Here is each one, what we believed at entry, what the market did instead, and the gate we built from the wreckage. Content marketing hides this stuff. We think it is the most useful page we publish.
- [The Same Card, Two Oceans Apart: JP vs EN Pricing](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/same-card-two-oceans): A Base Set Charizard costs about the same in Tokyo and Texas. The same Umbreon VMAX artwork trades thirty-seven to fifty-six times higher in English. The Japanese and English markets price identical cardboard by completely different rules, and the pattern is learnable.
- [The Twin Problem: The Cards That Fool Every Scanner](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-twin-problem): Two cards, one artwork, prices 10x apart, and the only difference is a set code smaller than your fingernail. Inside the identification problem nobody in card tech talks about, and the loop that took our binder scanner from 66.7% to a repeated 15 of 15.
- [The Lottery Ticket Index: Where a $4.73 Pack Chases a $288 Card](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-lottery-ticket-index): We divided every set's top chase card by its real cheapest pack price. The spread is absurd: some packs cost $68 to chase the same tier of card that other sets sell for $4.73 a ticket. Here is the full ranking, and the honest math about why ripping is still usually a losing trade.
- [Print-Run Archaeology: What Registry Depth Says About How Much Was Actually Printed](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/print-run-archaeology): Nobody outside The Pokémon Company knows real print runs. But 203 sets of registry data sketch the fossil record: the average deeply tracked MEP promo has 38,076 slabs, on three cards and one enormous registry line. The average deeply tracked Rising Rivals card has 234. That 160-to-1 spread is the closest thing to a print-size map the hobby has, and it is a map of grading, not of printing.
- [The Grading Throughput Index: 44,000 New Slabs a Week, and Half of Them Are Tens](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-grading-throughput-index): Our registry tracker recorded 82,723 new PSA slabs across just 1,097 tracked cards inside a 25-day window. Each card is snapshotted over part of that window, not all of it, so the rate those series imply is about 44,000 a week of certified supply, 53% of it gem mint, and it is pointed straight at the cards people are buying for scarcity.
- [The Liquidity Ledger: The Market's Hottest Slabs Trade 40 Times a Week. Its Trophies Trade Four Times a Year.](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-liquidity-ledger): We started recording how often every tracked slab actually changes hands. The spread is brutal: chase PSA 10s clear 34 to 44 sales a week while 53 high-value card-grade pairs in our ledger, across 46 distinct cards, did not record a single sale all window. Price is what a card asks. Liquidity is what it answers.
- [Buy This, Not That: Grail Cards and Their High-Growth Understudies](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/buy-this-not-that-grails): The grails are gorgeous and mostly grown. For each icon, the market usually holds a structurally similar card with the same collector pull, a fraction of the entry, and measured signals actually pointing up. Five pairs, every number verified.
- [Reading a Display Case: A Field Guide to Shop Prices](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/reading-a-display-case): The sticker in the case is an ask, not a price. Three questions separate the fair deals from the tourist tax: what do verified solds say, which printing is it actually, and what does the grade really add? Now you can also just photograph the case and ask Cynthia.
- [We Grade Our Own Homework: Inside the Weekly Buys Ledger](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/we-grade-our-own-homework): Every pick we publish is logged at its entry price, forever, and marked against live sold data every week, including the losers and the marks we had to suspend. What an honest track record looks like, and why most card content never shows you one.
- [What 56,000 Cards Say About How Sets Hold Value](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/what-56000-cards-say-about-set-design): Across 212 sets with full price coverage, the top five cards hold 56% of a set's entire market value on average. Some sets are lottery tickets where five cards are 90% of the pie. Others spread value across the whole checklist. Which kind you buy changes everything.
- [The Sealed Freeze of 2026: 651 Products, Six Gainers](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/sealed-freeze-2026): The sealed Pokémon market is not slow this summer. It is frozen. Of the 651 products in the $100 to $550 band that carried a 30 day change on 2026-08-26, six showed meaningful momentum and the tape median was a rounding error above zero. What a genuinely dead market looks like, and what usually thaws one.
- [How Many Sales Is a Price? A Census of Our Own Numbers](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/how-many-sales-is-a-price): A price backed by two sales is a rumor wearing a number. We ran a census across every PSA 10 price series we publish: the average is 156 recorded sales, and anything under three never gets published at all. Here is why sample size is the first thing to check.
- [Which Market Price? The Same Card Has Three Honest Numbers](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/which-market-price): Fossil Moltres is a $193 card, a $61 card, and a $200 card at the same time, and none of those numbers is wrong. Which one matters depends entirely on what you are about to do. A field guide to the three prices every card carries.
- [Sellers Say, Pixels Decide: What 1,350 Listings Taught Us](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/sellers-say-pixels-decide): We hand-verified about 1,350 eBay card listings against the photographs, one by one, while certifying our scanner. The titles lie constantly: wrong sets, wrong numbers, phantom printings. Here is the field guide to reading listings like an adjudicator.
- [The $479 Lie: How Mixed Printings Corrupt Vintage Prices](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-479-dollar-lie): Every price site said Fossil Zapdos PSA 9 was worth $479.50. Then we verified all 192 sales behind that number, listing by listing, and found the real Unlimited price is $120. Here is the mechanism that inflates half the vintage market, and how to spot it.
- [What the Scanner Sees: How We Taught a Camera to Outvote the Seller](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/what-the-scanner-sees): A seller's title says PSA 10 Base Set. The pixels say Base Set 2, and the pixels are right. Inside the accuracy loops that took our scanner from 66.7% to repeated 100% on binder pages, and the rule that governs everything we build: the photograph outranks the paperwork.
- [The Condition Tax: LP Costs You a Quarter, Damaged Costs You Two-Thirds](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-condition-tax): Across 4,915 cards with live per-condition prices, a lightly played copy fetches a median 76% of near mint, moderately played 54%, damaged 32%. And the more valuable the card, the harder the tax bites: on $50-plus cards, LP drops to 71%. The spread between those numbers is where careful buyers eat.
- [Does Pokémon Have a Season? Nineteen Months of Index Tape Says: Not Yet](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/does-pokemon-have-a-season): The moonstone Pokémon Index has not printed a single down month in 19 months of history, rising from 100 to 231. The seasonal folklore says summer lulls and January dips. The tape says the quietest months were January (+1.8%) and November (+2.2%), and even the lulls went up.
- [Where the Money Sleeps: 1% of Cards Hold 45% of the Market's Value](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/where-the-money-sleeps): We summed the live market price of every English card with a current listing price in our daily sync: 5,723 cards, $99,150. The top 57 of them hold $44,965 of it. The median Pokémon card is worth 49 cents, and more than half the catalog trades under a dollar.
- [Grading ROI, Computed Honestly: The Registry Already Ran Your Experiment](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/grading-roi-for-the-cards-you-own): Take the raw price, the real gem rate from 500-plus graded populations, verified 10 and 9 medians, and a $20 fee. On the 19 heavily-graded cards we can fully measure, expected value is positive on every one. That is not a free lunch. It is survivorship, and it is the whole lesson.
- [The PSA 9 Discount Curve: Vintage 9s Cost 18 Cents on the Dollar, Modern 9s Cost 38](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-psa-9-discount-curve): Across 78 cards with verified sold medians in both grades, a PSA 9 costs a median 31% of the PSA 10. But the era split is the real finding: WotC and EX-era 9s trade near 17 to 18 cents on the PSA 10 dollar while Sword & Shield era 9s cost 38. One of those discounts is mispriced.
- [The Population Growth Tax: Watching the Registry Eat the Premium in Real Time](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-population-growth-tax): We record PSA population counts daily and verified sold medians beside them. Across registry windows running roughly August 3 to August 20, 2026, the cards whose registries grew fastest returned 4.2% on average against price readings from July 21 to August 10, while the slow growers returned 10.1% on the back of a single card. Here is the tax, and here is how thin the tape under it is.
- [Japan-Only: We Built an Index for Japanese-Exclusive Cards. Here Is What It Says.](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/japanese-exclusives-index): 8,858 Japanese cards in our catalog have no English printing at all. We put the 25 most valuable into a tracked index, measured its full run of real prices, and pulled three buy ideas from the movers, every number live as of August 19, 2026.
- [The Five Grails of 2031: What the Market Will Chase Five Years From Now](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/top-five-grails-2031): A prediction, argued from live market data: the five cards we believe will define the hobby's want lists in 2031, anchored to what each one actually costs today, August 18, 2026.
- [The Best Pikachu Cards to Buy Right Now](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/best-pikachu-cards-to-buy): Six Pikachu cards worth buying in August 2026: the most liquid modern chase down 17% from its high, a WOTC promo up 31% on the quarter, and a Base Set sleeper that has doubled in 90 days.
- [The Best Snorlax Cards to Buy Right Now](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/best-snorlax-cards-to-buy): Six Snorlax cards worth your money in August 2026, from a $342 Jungle holo anchor to an $11 budget V, each with its real market price, its 30 and 90 day move, and the sales activity behind it.
- [The Daily Tape: Which Pokémon Cards Actually Sell Every Single Day](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/daily-liquidity-leaderboard): We counted every recorded eBay sale for 500 of the market's busiest cards over 30 days: 6,041 sales, 42% of them in just ten names, and a wall of 3,000-listing commons that never traded once.
- [The Nickname Premium: Do Cards Like Moonbreon Actually Outperform?](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/nickname-premium): The community treats a nickname as a buy signal: if a card earned its own name, the thinking goes, it must outperform. We tested it against every alternate art in three sets with full price histories. The nicknamed cards lost, and the reason why matters more than the scoreboard.
- [The Summer Dip Is Real. Your Index Says Otherwise. Both Are True.](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/summer-dip): Collectors everywhere are calling this a summer slump, yet the moonstone Pokémon Index made new highs in every month of it. We measured 211 sets to reconcile the two, and the answer is a rotation story: the cards most people hold fell while the cards fewest people hold rallied.
- [The First 90 Days: When to Buy Into a New Set](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/first-90-days-new-set): We indexed ten straight set launches from release day and measured where the bottom actually is. There is a trough, it is deep, and it is skippable, but one set never traded below its release price and two more bottomed within a point and a half of it, and knowing which kind you are looking at is the entire game.
- [The Grading Tax: When a PSA 10 Is Worth It, and When Grading Destroys Value](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/grading-tax): We joined our PSA sale medians with real gem rates and raw market prices for every card where all three exist. The result is an expected-value table for the most common decision in the hobby, and the math is rougher on PSA 9s than anyone wants to admit.
- [The Art Floor: What 480 Price Histories Say About Every Foil and Rarity Tier](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/art-floor-foil-tiers): We tracked eighteen months of daily prices across seven sets and grouped every card by its rarity tier. Illustration Rares are not just winning, they are accelerating, gold cards are the quiet loser of the modern era, and the cheapest corner of the best tier is hiding in plain sight.
- [The $100 Million Card: Ranking Pokémon's Biggest PSA Market Caps](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/psa-market-cap): Multiply every graded copy by what its grade actually sells for and you get a market cap, the total dollar value locked in a card's slabs. We computed it across fourteen of the hobby's heavyweights on August 6, 2026, and the biggest pool of graded money among them is not a vintage Charizard.
- [The Scarcity Tax: Three Years of SIR vs IR Returns](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/sir-vs-ir-scarcity-tax): Everyone assumes Special Illustration Rares outperform because they're rarer. We priced 403 of them across fourteen Scarlet & Violet sets through real TCGplayer history. The rarer card lost. Badly. Scarcity turns out to be something you pre-pay for, not something you earn.
- [The Summer Dip on Trial: What the Data Actually Shows](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/summer-dip-audit): Collectors talk about the summer dip like a law of nature: prices sag in June, buy the discount, thank yourself in December. We put the folklore against 190 set histories and a hundred tracked cards. The dip exists. It just isn't what anyone thinks it is.
- [Ten Rules for the New Pokémon Investor](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/ten-rules-new-pokemon-investor): Everything on this list was learned from our own published measurements, not vibes: four hundred simulated packs, four hundred graded-return calculations, a public buy ledger, and the mistakes the data caught us making. Start here before your first serious purchase.
- [The $15 Flood: Anatomy of a Fake Market](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-15-dollar-flood): One seller's liquidation habit put 234 identical "sales" into the price record across ten days, and briefly made a $6,500 slab look like a $15 one. A forensic walkthrough of how sold-price data gets poisoned, and how we filter it.
- [The Grading Frontier: The 10 Pays, the 9 Decides](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-grading-frontier): Expected value says grading usually wins. Then we priced what actually happens most of the time, the 9, and found that on roughly half these cards, the most likely outcome loses money. This is the map of both sides of the bet.
- [Rip or Hold? 400 Simulated Packs Settle the Sealed Debate](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/rip-or-hold-sealed): We opened 400 packs through our own simulator, sourced pull rates, live card prices, and priced both sides of the oldest argument in the hobby. The answer isn't a side. It's a schedule.
- [Population Giants: What 77,674 PSA 10s Do to a Price](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/psa10-population-giants): Supply is supposed to be gravity. We pulled the biggest PSA 10 registries we track, priced every one through our verified comp filter, and asked whether the crowd is actually paying for scarcity. Half of the answer is exactly what theory predicts. The other half isn't.
- [State of the Pokémon Market: August 2026](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/pokemon-market-status-august-2026): The index has nearly two-and-a-half-timed in eighteen months, but underneath the headline, the market is rotating out of new product and into closed print runs.
- [The Chase-Card Halo: Does a New Set Lift the Old Prints of Its Star?](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/chase-card-halo-effect): A reader's hypothesis, when a new set's chase card revives an old Pokémon, that Pokémon's vintage prints rise, put to two real launches with our daily data, then applied to Delta Reign's Mega Rayquaza. The effect is real, sharp, and shorter-lived than it looks.
- [The Waifu Tax: Is Pokémon's Most Whispered-About Premium Actually Real?](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/pokemon-waifu-tax-measured): In One Piece and Yu-Gi-Oh, cards of popular female characters visibly out-price their male counterparts. Collectors insist Pokémon has no such tax. We measured every full-art trainer card in the game, same set, same rarity, human versus human, and the answer is: it's real, it's big, and it is already priced in.
- [The Stamp Tax: What a Pokémon Center Logo Is Actually Worth](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/pokemon-center-stamp-premium): Same card, same art, same print sheet, plus a small gold logo. We priced all 26 stamped ETB promos against their plain twins: a 10× median premium, a $20 floor under dead cards, and the closest thing modern Pokémon has to a 1st Edition experiment.
- [Illustrator Spotlight: Mitsuhiro Arita, the Man Who Painted the Hobby](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/illustrator-spotlight-mitsuhiro-arita): He painted Base Set Charizard, Pikachu, and the first Pokémon card art ever printed, and he's still working thirty years later. Four hundred cards, a $23,000 index, and a market that prices his name in two completely different ways. Our verdict: selectively bullish.
- [The Launch Curve: What Chase Cards Actually Do After Release Day](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/launch-curve-chase-card-decay): Everyone knows the shape, spike, then slide. We measured it: nine sets, a hundred chase cards, day-by-day. The trough isn't days after launch, it's month seven. And there's a day-90 signal that has separated the winners from the sliders every time.
- [The Print Clock: When Pokémon Sets Stop Printing, and How to Read It](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/pokemon-print-clock-status-model): Nobody publishes the printing schedule, but the presses leave fingerprints in sealed prices. We reconstructed the print calendar from a decade of documented patterns, then built a status model that reads the market and calibrates perfectly against known truth.
- [Ash's Original Team as an Investment Portfolio](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/ash-original-team-vs-stocks-gold): Pikachu, Butterfree, Pidgeotto, Bulbasaur, Squirtle, Charizard, if you'd bought the Kanto starters' 1999 cards in PSA 10 when nobody wanted them, how would the team have stacked up against the S&P 500 and gold?
- [Cute vs. Strong: Which Pokémon Actually Pay?](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/cute-vs-strong-pokemon-investing): The market trades Charizard and cuddles Pikachu, so we split fifty species into a cute camp and a strong camp, scored 207 of their tracked cards on popularity and returns, and let the data pick a winner. It isn't who you'd guess, and neither is the runner-up's consolation prize.
- [The Velocity Report: What Actually Sells, and Why the Most-Traded Cards Made the Least Money](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/most-traded-pokemon-cards-velocity): Recorded eBay sales across 9,261 cards reveal where the hobby's trading volume concentrates, and an uncomfortable pattern: liquidity and returns have been negatively correlated.
- [Where Money Went to Die: The Worst Pokémon Investments](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/worst-pokemon-investments-decade): Winners get the headlines; losers teach the lessons. Round-trip singles, negative-EV grading submissions, and the sealed products that quietly lagged for a decade, every failure mode, measured.
- [The Month in Pokémon: Where the Money Went in July 2026](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/best-pokemon-investments-july-2026): Singles, slabs, and sealed, scored the same way: median moves, winners, and the BW-era rotation nobody was watching. Slab figures are dated sold comps; raw and sealed figures are asks from daily price history, and the two are never mixed inside a number.
- [The Grade Ladder: What PSA Populations Actually Say About Price](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/psa-grade-ladder-population-economics): We priced 520 cards across eight eras against the PSA registry itself, how a 10 relates to a 9, a 9 to an 8, and where the population data says a graded card is trading away from fair value.
- [The Best Pokémon Investments of the Past 30 Years](https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/top-pokemon-investments-30-years): What three decades of market data says about where the returns actually came from, and the patterns that still matter for the next decade.