60 big card sales, and not one we could price

The 60 largest card sales we tracked on September 20 ran from $250,000 down to $9,302. Not one could be priced against comparable sales.

Every weekday this column picks the biggest confirmed card sale it can honestly price, then argues about whether the buyer did well. On September 20 it never got past the first step: 60 candidates walked, 60 refused.

Why it matters

The verdict is the product, and it only works when the same card, in the same grade, has recently sold. When the largest sales on the board carry no trading history, there is nothing to measure them against — so we publish the measurement problem instead.

By the numbers

• 1,119 — confirmed single-card sales we tracked on September 20 at $1,000 or above, worth $4,150,052.04 at a median of $2,000.
• 60 of 60 — candidates walked, from $250,000 down to $9,302. 55 had too few comparable sales to quote a median from; 5 returned pools too scattered to trust.
• 0 — matched sales behind the thinnest candidate in that walk. Not one recent sale of the same card in the same grade.

The intrigue

The six candidates we logged in full show why. A 1999 Japanese Vending Masaki promo Gengar in PSA 10 at $250,000, with exactly 1 matched sale behind it. A 2006 Black Star Promos Groudon at $80,000, also 1. A Team Rocket Returns Mewtwo at $75,000 and a 2003 Aquapolis Espeon at $60,000, both 0. These are not shoebox survivors — they change hands too rarely, in this grade, to leave any price trail. The top of this market is now a set of objects you can bid on but cannot appraise.

Reality check

This cuts against us too: our pull is a sample, not a census. Both category feeds returned the maximum rows we asked for, so there were sales on September 20 we never saw. 1,119 is what we tracked, not what happened; $250,000 is the largest figure in our own walk and nothing more; every count here is a floor. 4 candidates were rejected for free, off the listing alone, before we paid for any pull.

What's next

The deepest pool we built all day held 93 matched sales, and we threw it out anyway: the prices inside it were spread too far apart to be one card’s market. That is the problem in a line — where there is volume there is ambiguity, and where the card is unambiguous there is no volume. If you are buying at this end, that absence is the risk, and it appears nowhere on the listing.

How we track this

RazMania monitors completed eBay sales daily across Sports Trading Card Singles and Collectible Card Game Singles, filtering out multi-card lots, reprints, altered cards and Best Offer sales, where eBay publishes the seller’s asking price rather than what was paid. This edition scores no card and publishes no verdict, because no candidate cleared our comparable-sales test: a minimum of 8 matched sales of the same card, grade and parallel, with the spread between them inside our limits. No comparable-sale median is computed on this page and none is quoted. Sale counts are what we tracked, not a complete census of the market. eBay reports sold date, not sold time.