Pricing Methodology

Where prices come from

Every price shown on Slab is a TCGplayer market price — the same market-price figure TCGplayer publishes for a listing, not a price we calculate ourselves. We don’t run a marketplace, set prices, or negotiate sales; we ingest and display what the market is already reporting.

How prices are ingested

Once a day, our server pulls TCGplayer’s public price data through tcgcsv, group by group, for every game and set Slab supports. When a card has more than one market-price row for the same printing (for example separate “Holofoil” and “Normal” entries), we prefer Holofoil, then Normal, then whichever price is available — the same order the app uses for its headline price. That daily pull also feeds the price-history charts: each ingest adds one more point to the line. Because it runs once every 24 hours, a price you see can be up to a day old — we don’t claim real-time pricing, and neither does the underlying TCGplayer data.

How variants and printings are mapped

Many cards were printed more than once — different rarities, holo treatments, or reprints in later sets. Each printing is its own TCGplayer product with its own price. Slab maps a scanned card to the specific printing product where we can tell them apart, and otherwise shows the printing TCGplayer treats as primary. The variant picker on a card’s page shows prices for every printing we know about, not just the default one.

Graded card values

Graded values (PSA, CGC, and BGS ladders, broken out by grade) are a different source than the raw market price above — not TCGplayer. Each grade’s price is an average of recent eBay sold listings for graded copies (rolling 7-day and 30-day averages), sourced through a third-party graded-market data provider. A full catalog walk refreshes the ladder once a day, the same daily cadence as the raw price ingest but a separate pipeline. Each grade is priced independently from its own eBay comps — a PSA 10 and a PSA 9 for the same card are never derived from each other or from the raw (ungraded) TCGplayer price. A card’s graded price-history chart is fetched and cached separately, refreshing at most once every 24 hours per card.

Currency

All prices are ingested and stored in US Dollars, matching TCGplayer’s own pricing. If you choose a different display currency in the app, we convert from USD using a live exchange rate at the moment you view the price — the underlying data point is still the USD market price for that day.

Not financial advice

Prices, price history, and graded values on Slab are provided for informational purposes only. They are estimates based on third-party marketplace data, can be delayed or incomplete, and the actual value of any card depends on its condition, printing, grading, and the market at the time of sale. Slab does not buy, sell, or appraise cards, and nothing here is financial, investment, or professional advice — see our Terms of Service for the full disclaimer.

Something look wrong?

If a price or card mapping looks off, tell us — see Contact for how to reach us, or use Report Wrong Scan from the info button on the scan screen in the app.