The sources
CardBroker does not set its own prices. It reads what is actually happening on the markets where European collectors trade.
- Cardmarket is the main source for raw cards. It is the largest European marketplace for trading cards, and its prices are in euros — not converted from dollars, which would add a second source of error on top of the first.
- Sold eBay listings supply the values for graded cards. For a PSA 10 what counts is what somebody last actually paid, not what a seller is hoping for.
- TCGdex supplies card identity: name, set, number, rarity, image, in six languages. Deliberately kept separate from the price provider, so that changing where prices come from does not destroy every card's identity along with it.
An asking price is not a value
The most common mistake in valuing a card is treating the cheapest listing as the value. A listing is a claim; only a sale is a price. So what we show is the market value — the average of completed sales — not the cheapest open auction.
Then there is condition. The same card in Near Mint and in Played are economically two different things. CardBroker scales the market value by a condition factor onto the card you actually hold, rather than quoting you an ideal it is not in.
Why the variant matters more than the name
A Charizard is not a Charizard. The same artwork appears across sets, languages and print variants — normal, holo, reverse holo — and between those the gap is routinely a multiple rather than a percentage.
So the unit of pricing in CardBroker is not the card but the variant. Currently 42,593 variants carry a price, spread across 33,685 single cards and 2,016 sealed products from 315 sets.
The language a card was printed in
A German and an English copy of the same card are not worth the same — English printings have the larger market, German ones the smaller and, in some sets, the scarcer supply. Language is therefore tracked as its own attribute, backed by 464,110 language-specific offer records.
The language effect is only reliably measurable between German and English so far. French and Spanish do show deviations in the raw data, but they are explained by supply — too few listings, too volatile. We therefore deliberately do not apply a language factor to those, rather than fake a precision the data does not support.
How often it refreshes
A nightly job re-prices the whole catalogue. On top of that, every live lookup is written into the price history, so the curve gets denser over time instead of gaining one point a day.
| Measure | As of 15 Sep 2026 |
|---|---|
| Stored price points | 1,322,914 |
| Priced variants | 42,593 |
| First day recorded | 26 July 2026 |
| Days with measurements | 52 |
| Refresh | nightly, whole catalogue |
Where the data is thin
Three limits worth knowing before you act on a number from CardBroker:
- The price history is young. It starts on 26 July 2026. Seven weeks of history shows movement, not a multi-year trend. Anyone valuing a card as a long-term hold needs a longer series as well.
- Rare cards have thin markets. For a card that trades twice a month, each individual sale is the market. Those prices swing, and that is not a malfunction — it is the market.
- An estimate is not an appraisal. Judging condition from a photo has limits a person holding the card does not have. For insurance, or a sale above a certain value, CardBroker does not replace a professional valuation.
Independence
We do not sell cards, do not broker sales, and earn nothing when you buy or submit a particular card. The only revenue is the Pro subscription. A grading recommendation that talks you out of something costs us nothing — and that is deliberate.
Check the numbers yourself
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