Cardmarket's Low Price: What That Number Actually Tells You

Where the low price comes from

The floor shown for a card, on our pages and everywhere else, is the cheapest active listing at capture time. A single listing. Sometimes the seller is in a hurry. Sometimes the condition is optimistic, or there is a typo in the price. And sometimes it is a real bargain that will be gone within the hour. Once it sells, the card's price appears to jump even though nothing changed for the other forty copies on sale.

What we measured

For every English-language card in our catalog with at least ten active listings, we compared the floor to the 75th percentile of the ask book, meaning the price three quarters of the offers sit below. With a median gap of +81.8%, a typical card whose floor reads €10 has a good share of its available copies offered around €18.

How to use this

• Buying: when the floor sits far below the rest of the book, check the condition and the seller before calling it a bargain. If that listing just sold, there is no point chasing a price that no longer exists.
• Selling: undercutting the floor by one cent means pricing against the single most aggressive listing in the book. Looking at where the rest of the book clusters gives a more realistic number.
• Every card page in our catalog shows the floor per language. Treat it as the bottom of the ask book.