How the numbers are made

How cards are grouped

A 1999 card and a 2024 card are not the same thing, so they are never averaged together. Cards are measured inside their own group.

Same card over time

same card, seen twice

The cleanest reading comes from watching the same card sell again and again, not from comparing one card to a different one.

Break-aways

Most cards move with their set. A break-away is a card whose price detached from that shared move, above it or below it. They are counted weekly against how many cards were screened, so the exceptions never hide the middle.

Thin data, and quiet

When a group has only a little data, its reading is shown softer. When it has none, it shows nothing rather than guessing. A fresh set shows as accruing until enough resales exist.

Two patterns the data keeps showing

On daily closes across every set, two regularities repeat. New sets settle down: prices move most right after release, and the calming is front-loaded, fast at first, then slower and slower. And value concentrates: in almost every set, most of the measured value sits in a handful of cards while the rest stays near the floor.

Both are descriptions of what has happened, re-measured as the archive grows.

The price index

Each set also carries a price index: the same card selling again over time, folded into one level, anchored 1.0 at the set's first measured week. It is built from daily market-price closes, combined into one point per week. A level of 1.20 means the set's resold cards sit about 20 percent above where they started.

A set with fewer than five distinctly resold cards shows accruing instead of a number: a level built from one or two cards is that card's story, not an index. The level says where resale prices sit against their own start.

The per-game composite

Each game's page carries one line drawn from every published set index in that game. For each period we take each set's own move, weight it by how many repeat observations that set contributed, and chain the weighted moves together from a starting level of 1.0. Weighting by observations means a set measured from thousands of repeat pairs counts for more than one measured from a handful.

Four things about it are stated on the chart itself rather than left implicit. It reads the same set list the game's headline percentage reads, so the two cannot disagree about which sets count. The number of sets contributing changes over the window as sets enter coverage, and the chart says the range. A period where fewer than two sets can be compared is carried forward unchanged instead of inventing a move, and the count of those periods is shown. Moves are combined on a logarithmic scale, so a rise and an equal fall cancel exactly.

What it is not: a separately published benchmark. It is a reading of the set indices, computed when the page renders, and it carries no weighting by how many copies of a card exist, because that number is not observable to us. The set indices themselves remain the published record.

Resolution, missing days, and revisions

Set charts offer two resolutions. Weekly folds daily closes onto a 7-day grid and covers the full history. Daily runs the same estimator on a 1-day grid and covers the window where daily closes have been accruing, so it is shorter; each chart footer states which grid it shows and the date its data runs through.

Missing days are not filled in. A day's level is estimated only from actual recorded closes; when no observation spans a day, that day is published as missing and the chart leaves a visible gap there, on a time-scaled axis that keeps the missing day's width rather than compressing it away. No interpolation, carry-forward, or synthetic price is inserted. Measured on 2026-07-27 across every game's published daily series, none of the roughly 83,000 daily points has an interior gap; the most recent day joins each series once its closes publish. When the same card's closes sit on either side of a short gap, the move between them is attributed across the gap by the repeat-sales regression, which is standard for this estimator family, and is disclosed here rather than smoothed over.

Levels re-estimate on every publish. As new closes arrive, the whole series is recomputed, so recent history can revise slightly rather than being frozen at first print. The published artifact is the record of what the estimator says today, and each file carries its own as-of date.

What this is not

A reading of how a set has moved. Not advice, not a price target, not a tip to buy or sell. An index level says where resale prices sit against their own start; it does not tell you what comes next.

See about for the product overview.

Citing tcgvibes.com

Reference the page URL and the as-of date shown on it. Every number on the site carries its window and date.

tcgvibes.com, page title, URL, as of the date shown on the page.