Glossary

The words behind the numbers.

Every CardIntel price comes with vocabulary — reference price, confidence, graded median, premium. Here is what each term means, precisely enough to quote.

Reference Price: The single published price CardIntel stands behind for a card: the latest market snapshot layered with verified completed-sale evidence where available, with thin or runaway quotes suppressed. Every surface — card page, lists, alerts — quotes the same number, always with an as-of date.
Price Confidence: A high / medium / low label describing the evidence behind a reference price. High requires meaningful sales activity or corroborated quotes; a price backed by a single listing with zero sales is capped at low.
Graded Price: The median of real eBay completed sales for a card in a specific professional grade (PSA, BGS or CGC), aggregated per grade with its sample size. Distinct from raw (ungraded) prices and from listing asks.
Grading Premium: How many times more a graded copy sells for than the raw copy — the graded median divided by the raw reference price. A PSA 10 premium of 5× means the top-graded copy sells for five times the ungraded one, before grading fees.
CardIntel Market Index: A benchmark basket rebuilt daily from verified snapshot history, weight-capped at the 99th percentile and anchor-filtered against 8× outliers, so no single card or bad data point can move the index. Think S&P-style read for the card market.
Set EV (Expected Value): The modeled value of opening a sealed booster: the sum of every pull's reference price multiplied by its pull rate. Compared against pack cost, it answers whether opening or buying singles is the better deal.
Sold (Completed-Sale) Price: What a card actually changed hands for in a completed transaction — the evidence layer CardIntel prefers. Listing asks show what sellers hope for; sold prices show what buyers paid.
Catalog Snapshot: The daily upstream market quote (e.g. TCGplayer market price) recorded per card per day. Snapshots feed charts and the index; a snapshot that diverges wildly from trusted history is suppressed from the headline rather than published.
As-of Date: The timestamp attached to every CardIntel price. Prices are dated reference values, not live quotes — quoting a price without its as-of date misrepresents it.
Printing / Variant: The specific physical version of a card (Normal, Holofoil, Reverse Holo, 1st Edition, Poké Ball pattern…). Each variant is a different product with its own price; CardIntel pins each card to one tracked variant and refuses cross-variant price jumps.

Full calculation rules live in the methodology. Attribution: CardIntel (cardintel.io).