Investment calculator.

Why the fees are the whole point

Every return you read about a card is a gross return. eBay takes 13.35% plus $0.40 of the final price including what the buyer paid for postage, TCGplayer takes 10.25% plus $0.30, and grading starts at $79.99 a card before you post anything and climbs with what the card is worth. On a card that doubled that is the difference between a good year and a flat one, and on a card that rose 20% it is the whole gain. The default here is eBay because that is where most singles actually change hands.

Where the numbers come from

Cards are priced on completed sales, monthly, back to December 2020, which is what draws the price history on every card page. Where a card has no long sold history the run falls back to our own record of TCGplayer's market price, weekly, back to February 2024. The two are never averaged, because they are different marketplaces and the gap between them is real.

A set is measured on its median card rather than its total. A set total is one chase card wearing the set's name, and it tells you nothing about the copy you can afford. If the run starts later than you asked for, the card's history simply does not reach that far back, and the page says so rather than filling in a price nobody recorded.

Buying whole sets, three years on

The same maths across every set, on the median card, is the clearest thing in the data. The winners are small, hard to pull subsets, and the losers are the big base sets people opened by the case.

What this cannot tell you

It cannot tell you what happens next. Three years of gains on the e-Card sets is a fact about 2023 to 2026, not a rate that continues, and the sets at the bottom of that table were the ones everybody was sure about when they came out. The useful thing a backtest does is kill the stories that are simply false, and the trends page has the rest of them: the median card fell, bulk under $5 fell hardest, and the cards that rose were mostly the ones that already cost twenty dollars.