Welcome to CardFrame: what a card price actually means

CardFrame began as an iPhone app that could point a camera at a card and tell you what it is worth. This site is the other half of that idea: a public, searchable copy of the same catalogue — 123,659 cards across 15 trading card games — so a question you can answer in five seconds at the shop can also be answered from a browser tab.

This first post is the one we would want to read before trusting any price site. Where do the numbers come from, what do they actually claim, and how do you use them without getting burned in a trade?

What "market price" means

Every price on CardFrame is a TCGplayer market price, in US dollars, for one specific printing of a card. That is worth unpacking, because it is none of the three things people usually assume.

It is not the cheapest listing. The lowest asking price on any marketplace is a single seller's opinion, often attached to a heavily played copy, an overseas shipping fee, or a listing that has been sitting unsold for months.

It is not an appraisal. Nobody has examined your copy. The number describes a near-mint English card of that printing, and condition alone can move real-world value by 20 to 60 percent.

It is an average of recent completed sales, weighted towards the most recent ones. Somebody actually paid roughly that, recently, for a card like the one you are holding.

Three consequences follow, and each matters more than the number itself:

1. It looks backwards. A card that spiked this morning because it won a major tournament will not show that spike until sales at the new price clear. Prices confirm moves; they do not predict them.
2. It is a midpoint, not an offer. Buying, you will usually pay a little above market once shipping and fees land. Selling to a shop, expect somewhere around 50 to 70 percent of market, because the shop is buying your inventory risk.
3. It only exists if the card sells. For a chase card with steady turnover the number is tight. For a niche card that trades twice a month, one unusual sale drags the average with it. Thin liquidity means a noisy price, not a wrong one.

Why one card has several prices

The unit of pricing is not the card, it is the printing. A regular copy, a foil, an alternate art, a pre-release promo with a stamp, a reprint in a boxed set — same illustration, sometimes the same collector number, but the market treats each as a separate product with its own supply and its own price. Foils can run several times the non-foil, and occasionally below it when a set's foil print run was generous.

So when you look a card up, three things pin it down: the set, the collector number, and the finish. CardFrame stores each printing separately for exactly this reason, and the app lists a card's variants side by side so you can see the spread at a glance instead of guessing which one you pulled.

What actually moves prices

• Supply shocks. A reprint in a new product is the single most reliable way to halve a card's price overnight.
• Competitive results. A card that goes 9-0 at a regional gets bought out by people building the deck the following week.
• Rotation and bans. When a format changes, cards leave the demand pool without leaving the supply pool.
• Out-of-print games. Star Wars: Destiny is no longer printed at all, so its supply only shrinks. Discontinued games drift upwards for years, then move sharply when a small pool of sellers runs dry.
• Hype cycles. One Piece and Dragon Ball prices respond to anime arcs and merchandising in a way that competitive metagames never do.
• Grading. Every card slabbed by a grader is a card removed from the raw pool, which slowly tightens supply for the ungraded copy in your binder.

Reading a price sensibly

Look at the shape, not the point. A card page here shows the last 30 days of daily prices; a flat line and a sawtooth line at the same value mean very different things for a trade you want to make tomorrow.

Ask whether there is volume behind the number. A steady price on a card nobody trades is a price that has not been tested.

Adjust for condition honestly before you value your own copy — edge wear and whitening are what the buyer will see first, and it is the discount most collectors forget to apply to themselves.

And treat the figure as the opening position in a negotiation, not the settlement. Two people with the same market price in front of them still have to agree on condition, shipping and who takes the risk.

What we deliberately do not publish

CardFrame carries one market price per card, refreshed daily, plus a short daily history. It does not carry graded prices for PSA, BGS or CGC slabs. It does not carry euro or Cardmarket pricing. It does not stream live sales. We would rather show one number we can stand behind than a wall of figures that quietly stop updating.

The site also does not have a page for every card. We publish pages for the cards people actually look up — roughly the highest-value 1,600 in each game, plus everything in each game's two newest sets — because a page for a twelve-cent common is a worse answer than no page at all. The app carries all 123,659, priced, searchable, and available with no signal at the card shop.

That is the whole promise: scan the card, see what it is worth, know what the number means. More guides to come — set reviews, what to hold and what to move, and how the 15 games differ once you look at their price curves.