How your cards are valued

What VLTDCRDS does

VLTDCRDS is a vault for your trading cards. You add the cards you own, and we value them every day in pounds, so you can see what your collection is worth, which cards are moving, and how much you're up or down on what you paid.

You can also watch cards you don't own yet and get an alert when they hit your price, check whether a card is worth grading, and share a public page of your vault.

Where prices come from

We don't make prices up. Every value comes from real market data:

How we work out a price

Raw cards

For Pokémon we take the middle of Cardmarket's trend, 7-day and 30-day averages. A single odd sale can spike one of those numbers, and the middle of the three is steadier than any one of them. If a holo or reverse-holo price looks like a data error (a few pence next to a real price), we ignore it. If Cardmarket has nothing, we use TCGplayer's market price.

Each printing is priced separately: normal, holo, reverse holo, 1st Edition, foil, and each Yu-Gi-Oh! set code. The printing you pick when you add a card is the one we track.

Graded cards

Graded cards are valued from recent eBay sales of the same card in the same grade, e.g. PSA 10 or CGC 9.5. Slabs sell for very different amounts from raw copies, so a graded card never uses the raw price when a graded one exists.

Sports cards

There's no free catalogue of every sports card and parallel, so a sports card is identified by its description (e.g. "2024 Topps Chrome Haaland Aqua /199"). We value it at the median (the middle value) of matching eBay sales from the last few days, ignoring lots, breaks and reprints. The more exact your description, the more accurate the price.

Pounds

Prices in euros or dollars are converted to pounds with that day's exchange rate.

How often prices update

• When you open your vault, prices more than 6 hours old refresh automatically. You can also press Refresh prices.
• We save one price per card per day, which builds your value chart and the weekly movers.
• Price alerts on your watchlist are checked every time prices refresh.
• Graded prices are cached for 6 hours, and sports prices for an hour.

Holo, reverse holo, gold and grades

The shimmer and labels on cards (Holo, Reverse holo, Gold, Shiny, Foil, Refractor) are worked out from the printing you chose, the card's rarity and its name. It's a visual guide, so it can occasionally be wrong. The price always follows the printing you picked, not the label.

Why your price might be different

Our values are a good guide to the market, but what you'd get or pay can differ because of:

• Condition. Raw prices assume a card in good, near-mint condition. Played cards sell for less.
• Fees and postage. Selling fees, postage and payment fees come off what a seller actually takes home.
• Where it's sold. UK, European and US markets can price the same card differently.
• Asking vs selling. Listings show what people hope to get. Our graded and sports prices use real sales.
• Low sales. Rare cards sell less often, so one sale can move the price a lot.
• Exchange rates. A change in the pound can move a price even if the card's market hasn't moved.

Read the disclaimer before you buy, sell or insure anything based on these prices.

Profit and loss

Profit and loss only counts cards where you've entered what you paid. Cards without a price paid are still in your vault's total value, but they're left out of profit so an unknown cost doesn't show up as pure profit.

Credits

VLTDCRDS is built on the work of these brilliant data sources:

• TCGdex: Pokémon card data and images
• Scryfall: Magic: The Gathering card data and images
• YGOPRODeck: Yu-Gi-Oh! card data and images
• PokemonPriceTracker: graded Pokémon sales
• TheCardAPI: sports card sales
• Frankfurter: exchange rates

Magic: The Gathering prices on VLTDCRDS will always be free to view.