$9,200: Genius or Idiot?

A Mario Pikachu promo cleared at $9,200 — $274.50 under the median of 16 matched sales of the same card and grade.

Someone paid $9,200 on October 8 for a 2016 Japanese XY Promo #293 Mario Pikachu in a PSA 10 slab — a fixed-price listing, taken with no bidding. Against 16 matched sales of the same card and grade, that is $274.50 below the $9,474.50 median.

Why it matters

A buyer who clears under the comparable median has not overpaid. But this one clicked buy-it-now rather than winning an auction, so the price reflects one person’s read of the card, not a room’s.

By the numbers

• 0.97x — what the buyer paid against the $9,474.50 matched-comp median, across 16 confirmed sales of the same card in the same grade.
• $8,650 to $10,888 — the full span those 16 sales covered. This fill landed in the lower half of it.
• 0 bids — a buy-it-now, so nobody bid this price up or held it down.

The intrigue

The case for the buyer is the pool. Sixteen matched sales is a real sample for a Japanese promo, and they cluster tightly: the middle half ran $9,200 to $9,999.99. So the $9,200 is not merely below the median — it sits exactly on the pool’s 25th percentile. Three-quarters of the recent matched market paid more for the same card and grade.

Reality check

The discount is $274.50. On a pool running $8,650 to $10,888, that is inside the ordinary spread between two copies of the same slab — a fair price, not a steal. The 30-day trend reads -1.8% on only 6 recent sales, thin enough to argue for nothing. And with no bidding there was no price discovery.

What's next

The buy scores 61 out of 100 — FAIR BUY, no cap applied. The breakdown: 36 of 40 for comp deviation, 9 of 15 for trend, 9 of 15 for liquidity, 3 of 15 for price discovery, 4 of 15 for scarcity. Note where the 9 points short of a GENIUS call sit — not in the price paid, but in the quiet listing and the shallow recent tape. Watch whether the next copies clear above or below $9,474.50. Three inputs are absent and we will not guess them: no population report, no sell-through, no card-level search volume.

Between the lines

This was not the day’s big number. The biggest sale we tracked was $160,000 for a 2006 EX Trainer’s Challenge Mew #040 in PSA 10, and 61 confirmed sales priced above this one could not be scored. Five were rejected before we spent anything, their own titles disqualifying them: a print run too short to have comparable sales, or a product too new. Another 55 failed on the comps — too few matched sales to quote a median honestly, or a pool so spread out it plainly held different cards. The last we set aside ourselves, having already covered that card. This column leads on the biggest sale it can price, not the biggest it can see. One caveat: the day’s browse returned its full row cap, so every count here is a floor, not a total. Compare the same day’s top Michael Jordan sale, or browse our trading card coverage.

How we track this

RazMania reads completed eBay sales daily across the sports and trading-card-game single-card categories, dropping multi-card lots, reprints, altered cards and Best Offer sales — on those eBay publishes the seller’s asking price, never what was actually paid. We then walk the day’s biggest confirmed sales from the top down until one can be matched against comparable sales of the same card in the same grade, and the verdict is scored only from that matched pool, here 16 sales, plus the listing’s own bid count and print-run information. The comparable pull requests a 90-day window; this run does not record the span it received, so no window is claimed. No population report, sell-through or card-level search volume enters the score. This day’s category browse returned its full row cap, so it is a sample of the market rather than a complete count of it. eBay reports sold date, not sold time.