What is actually going up.

Where the gains were

Splitting the same three years by what a card cost at the start says more than any single ranking does. Cheap cards did not drift up with everything else, they went nowhere, and they are most of the hobby by count.

And when the card was printed

The split by era is starker. Vintage rose and modern fell, and the line between them is somewhere around 2017, which is when print runs stopped being a constraint.

How to read this

The figures are ungraded sold prices, monthly, from December 2020 onwards. A card needs three years of them to carry a three year number, which 16,887 of them do. Cards with a shorter history simply do not appear in that window rather than being measured from whenever their series happens to start.

Cards worth under a dollar at either end are left out entirely. Bulk is floored at a cent, so a common that drifted from $0.01 to $0.40 reads as +3,900% and would sit above every card on this page. That is arithmetic rather than a trend, and it is the reason most “fastest rising cards” lists are useless.

Sales per year comes from the completed listings we hold, and the filter defaults to cards that trade at least monthly for a reason. A price is only worth what someone will pay today, and a card that changes hands twice a year has a number rather than a market. Turn the filter off and the top of the list fills with exactly those.

None of this is a forecast. It is what happened, and the honest version of that includes the part where the median card lost money. If you want to see what a specific amount would have done, the investment calculator runs it against a card or a whole set, net of the fees you would have paid to sell.