Pokémon Card Market Index: How to Read the Era Indexes

What the Modern, Mid-era, Vintage and Sealed indexes track

Cardmatic splits English Pokémon cards into three eras by series, not by calendar year, so every card belongs to exactly one era. A fourth index follows sealed product across eras. Japanese cards are not part of the indexes yet.

Edge cases follow the series. Sword & Shield promos released in late 2019 count as Modern because they belong to the Sword & Shield series, and McDonald's collections are placed by their year. A card whose set Cardmatic cannot place stays off the board rather than land in the wrong era.

How Cardmatic builds each index

Each index is a fixed basket of 10 items. Every era basket holds 3 grails, 4 fan favorites and 3 affordable staples, all raw (ungraded) near mint cards, and each card was picked with at least 12 near mint sales on TCGplayer over 52 weeks, so thinly traded cards stay out. The sealed basket holds 10 booster boxes, Elite Trainer Boxes, bundles and packs. The page lists the 10 items behind every index, and a change to a basket gets a new base day and is announced on the page.

• Every index starts at 1,000 on its base day, the earliest week in the year of TCGplayer price history Cardmatic loaded where all 10 items had a price. That date is set once and never moved.
• Each day, every item's price is divided by its own price on the base day. The index is 1,000 times the average of those 10 ratios.
• That makes it equal weighted: a $20 card counts as much as a $2,000 card. If one card doubles while the other nine stay flat, the index rises 10%, whatever that card costs.
• Prices are the TCGplayer market price for the exact printing, in US dollars, read once a night from TCGCSV, a public daily export of TCGplayer's prices. History from before the daily reads began comes from TCGplayer's weekly price history.
• A missing price is carried forward for up to 3 days. After that the index skips the day instead of guessing, and the index card says it shows the last day all 10 items had a price.

TCGplayer says its Market Price averages recent sales on its marketplace rather than relying on current listing prices, and ignores outliers. Equal weighting is also why an index can disagree with the dollar total of its basket: if the cheaper items rise while the priciest one falls, the index can go up while the total value goes down. The How it's calculated sheet on each index lists every item's base price, current price and change, so you can see which items moved the number.

Is the Pokémon card market going up? How to read the charts

Each index card shows its value, a one day change, and a plain line saying how far it is up or down since its base day. Because every index started at 1,000, a value of 1,100 means the items in that basket are up 10% on average since the base day, and 900 means they are down 10% on average. Change chips for 7 days, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months and 1 year switch the chart and show the move over that range.

The era chart works differently. It puts Modern, Mid-era and Vintage on one chart rebased to 100: each line is divided by its own value on the first day of the range you pick, so all three start at 100. A line that ends at 104 is up 4% over that range, and one that ends at 97 is down 3%. The legend shows where each line ends, and a dashed line marks 100. Signed in members who have added cards can switch on a dashed My cards line on the same scale.

• Compare percentages, not index points. A 50 point move is 5% on an index at 1,000 but 2.5% on one at 2,000.
• Rebased lines show change, not price. Vintage ending above Modern means Vintage rose more over that range, not that vintage cards cost more.
• The start day matters. A line can sit below 100 on the 1 month view while its index is still up since the base day, so check more than one range before calling a trend.
• The 1 year view is drawn from weekly values, while the 7 day and 1 month views use daily values, so day to day swings only show on the short ranges.
• Open How it's calculated before treating a big move as a market trend. With 10 items, one card can move an index a long way.
• Sealed has its own index and chart and is not on the era chart. Compare it using its own change chips.

What weekly movers and sales counts tell you

Movers looks at the whole English catalog, not just the index baskets. Every printing with a current TCGplayer market price, at most 3 days old, and a real price from 7 days before that (or up to 2 days earlier when that day is missing) gets a 7 day move. A holo and a reverse holo of the same card are separate rows.

• Biggest move ranks the largest 7 day price changes, up or down. Cards priced under $10, and moves smaller than $1 or 1%, are left out of this ranking.
• Most sold ranks copies sold in the last 7 days.
• Most $ traded ranks an estimate of dollars traded in 7 days: copies sold each day times the middle of that day's sale price range.

Guests see the Biggest move top 10. A free account opens the top 30 under all three rankings.

Sales counts are your check on a move. A card that rarely trades can jump on a single sale, so a row says how many copies sold this week whenever that count is known. The default 2+ sales filter hides moves with fewer than 2 sales in 7 days. All moves shows them too, with thin sales marked in gold, and a row marked Sales not checked yet has no sales count yet.

The counts come from an hourly check that reads near mint sales from TCGplayer's price history, a small batch of cards at a time. It covers the index items, the most valuable cards in each era and the biggest movers, not every card, and a count read more than 48 hours ago is not used. They are TCGplayer sales only, so treat them as a sample of demand rather than the whole market.

The release calendar: MSRP vs presale

The calendar lists sealed Pokémon products releasing in the next four weeks, built from TCGplayer's own set list through TCGCSV rather than typed in by hand. It covers booster packs, sleeved booster packs, booster bundles, booster boxes, Build & Battle Boxes, Elite Trainer Boxes and Pokémon Center Elite Trainer Boxes. Cases, half boxes, art bundles and blisters are left out. When TCGplayer gives a product its own release date, the calendar uses it, because a Build & Battle Box can follow its set by two weeks.

• MSRP is the US retail price Cardmatic uses for that kind of product. Cardmatic lists a booster box as 36 packs at the pack MSRP.
• Presale is the TCGplayer market price before release, from the same nightly feed as card prices. It reads No price yet when there is none.
• The multiple is presale divided by MSRP. A product at 2.0× MSRP is selling for twice its retail price in TCGplayer presales.

A high multiple tells you early buyers are paying well above retail. It does not tell you what the product will sell for once it is out, or whether you will find it at retail. As the calendar itself says, a multiple is a fact, not advice. Signed in members can choose Remind me to get an email the day before a release, and Pro members can also get a phone alert.