How prices are cleaned

Every price on Holo Returns is a sold price, not an asking price, and every one carries its source. The rules below are the same ones used to research each episode of the channel.

Where the numbers come from

• Sold listings: TCGplayer sales, eBay sold listings and PriceCharting's published sales.
• Supply: marketplace listing counts, sales pace and PSA population reports.
• Retail and MSRP: the retailer's or Pokemon Center's own product page.
• News: official Pokemon announcements and established Pokemon news sites.
• Never a source for a price: other creators' videos, forum posts or social media. Those show sentiment, not what something sold for.

What gets filtered out

Raw sales logs are messy. Before any figure is published, each listing title is checked and removed if it is:

• A preorder or presale listing.
• Titled with a different set's name.
• A Pokemon Center Elite Trainer Box in a regular Elite Trainer Box log, or the reverse.
• A graded card in a sealed or raw-card log.

How comparisons stay fair

• No preorder prices as a reference. A preorder price and a post-release price are different markets, so a change is never measured from a presale print. A release-month average that mixes both counts as presale.
• Same marketplace on both ends. eBay sales tend to print lower than TCGplayer, so a comparison uses one marketplace for both prices. Mixing them would overstate a drop.
• One sale is not a price. Day-level prices use days with three or more sales.
• Volume compares two neighboring weeks, never a week against a distant baseline or a partial week.

The market board

The market board uses PriceCharting's monthly sold prices: ungraded for cards, sealed for boxes. Each product is compared with the first month we track, always after its release month, or with its peak when it has come down from a high. It refreshes automatically every month.

Most expensive card rankings

The top 30 rankings by era and set use TCGplayer's market price for a raw, ungraded Near Mint copy, which TCGplayer calculates from recent sales. Each printing (1st Edition, Shadowless, Unlimited, Reverse Holo) is ranked on its own. Sealed product, jumbo cards, World Championship decks, trainer kits and giveaway promos are left out, and only released sets count. A card with no recent Near Mint sale has no market price and cannot appear. The rankings refresh every month.

Guides and reports

Guides and reports quote the prices from when their video was recorded, each with its source, so the article matches the video. Where it helps, the latest price sits beside them. Pokemon prices move fast, so a quoted price can be out of date by the time you read it.

Not financial advice.