Resources

Pricing

How we price your cards

Our offer isn't a guess. For every card you submit, we blend three live signals — recent sold-listing average, current market price, and market trend (which way the card is moving) — and use that as the anchor.

Graded slabs get matched against grade-specific comps (PSA 8 / 9 / 10, CGC, BGS) so a slab offer never gets anchored to raw-card data.

From there we apply a condition adjustment for played wear, then your rate from the payout matrix. The number you see is what we'd pay today — not a placeholder we'll renegotiate later.

Grading

Should you grade your Pokémon card?

By the time you factor in PSA submission fees, round-trip shipping, insurance, and prep, grading a single card can easily cost $35–$50+. For a card to make financial sense strictly as a flip, it often needs to sell well above that after fees — and that's assuming it grades the way you hope.

We grade a card when at least one of these is true:

• It's a vintage holo or 1st Edition card from 1999–2003 in clean condition.
• It's a modern chase card (alt art, SAR, IR, secret rare) where PSA 10 trades at 3–5× raw NM.
• The raw card is already worth $40+, so a successful PSA 9 or 10 clears the fee floor with room to spare.
• The card has sentimental value and you want it in a slab regardless of profit math.

When you submit to our Grading Prep, every card you add gets a live profit-margin panel showing exactly which grades would clear the $30+ fee floor — so you can yank cards out of the order before paying for a submission that breaks even at best.

Conditioning

How to read your own cards before shipping them

Customers consistently grade their own cards too high — usually by one full step. The card you think is "Near Mint" because you got it out of a pack last week probably has a faint corner wear or a 60/40 centering issue. Here's the working scale we use, TCGplayer-aligned:

• Near Mint (NM) — pack-fresh or sleeved-since-pull. No whitening on the back edges. Sharp corners. Centering within 60/40 on every side.
• Lightly Played (LP) — minor edge wear, faint corner whitening, or a single small scratch. Card still presents clean from 2 feet away.
• Moderately Played (MP) — visible whitening on edges and corners. Small surface scratches. Maybe a faint print line. Still totally playable, not pretty.
• Heavily Played (HP) — heavy whitening, scuffs, possibly a soft crease or a clouded surface. The card is recognizable but rough.
• Damaged (DMG) — bends, water damage, ink marks, hard creases, missing layers. We still buy these at the bulk floor.

When in doubt, drop down a grade. We'd rather you under-grade and we pay you more than over-grade and we have to revise your offer.

Local

Selling to a Florida-local shop vs. a national buyer

We're not the biggest buyer in the country — some national players can move bigger collections faster than we can. But here's where we beat them for Florida collectors:

• You can hand off in person. We vend all over the country, primarily in Florida. Check the schedule, bring the cards, walk out with a check or store credit the same day. No insured FedEx label, no anxiety about high-value mail.
• Same-day handoff for high-value lots. If you've got a $5,000+ collection and you're within driving distance of central Florida, DM us — we'll come to you or set up a meet at a public location.
• Live published rates. Most national buyers won't tell you how they price. We do — every offer is itemized on your trade-in request so you can sanity-check it against TCGplayer or eBay before saying yes.

Inventory

Why a card on our site sometimes sells before checkout

We're local vendors. We sell at Florida card shows and on the site. If a slab or sealed product is sitting on our shop page, there's a small chance it just sold at a booth and our Square inventory hasn't synced yet (usually within an hour, sometimes longer at a busy show).

Every order is reviewed before we charge. If something sold in person between when you ordered and when we packed it, we offer same-day: full refund, swap for a similar product, or a hold for the next batch. Apparel and merch are print-on-demand so they never go out of stock — only graded, sealed, and singles can lag.