$9,606: Genius or Idiot?

A PSA 10 Psyduck from Pokemon's Munch Museum collaboration drew 41 bids and still closed $1,544 under our comparable median.

Someone paid $9,606 on October 15 for a 2018 Pokemon Munch: A Retrospective Psyduck #286 in PSA 10, winning an auction that drew 41 bids. Our matched-comp median for the same card at the same grade is $11,150.

Why it matters

The buyer paid 0.86x the comparable median — $1,544 under it — in an open auction rather than a quiet fixed-price listing. 41 separate bids set that number, and set it below where the same slab has been clearing. Most sales in our card sales coverage go the other way.

By the numbers

• $9,606 — the winning bid, against a matched-comp median of $11,150 from 8 verified sales of the same card at the same grade.
• 0.86x — what the buyer paid relative to that median, worth $1,544 in the buyer’s favour.
• 67/100 — the buy score: 36 of 40 on comp deviation, 15 of 15 on price discovery, 3 of 15 on liquidity.

The intrigue

The price is the strong half of this buy. 41 bids is the highest price-discovery reading our model awards, a full 15 of 15, so no lone optimist set it. The pool is tight: 8 matched sales from $7,100 to $13,550, an interquartile ratio of 1.19, and a 30-day trend flat at -0.4%.

Reality check

8 sales is a thin foundation, and our own floor is 8 — this pool cleared the minimum by nothing at all. The same 8 sales that set the median are also the exit market, which is why liquidity scored 3 of 15. A card that changes hands 8 times in a comp window is one you may hold a while before selling. The trend reading is thinner still, resting on 3 recent sales.

What's next

Score 67/100. Verdict: FAIR BUY — comp deviation 36/40, trend 9/15, liquidity 3/15, price discovery 15/15, scarcity 4/15, no cap applied. The 3 points short of a GENIUS call are not in the price; they are in how hard this card may be to sell. Watch for a ninth and tenth comparable sale near $11,150 — a deeper pool is what moves liquidity and settles whether $9,606 was a discount or the new level. We score with no pop report, no sell-through data and no card-level search volume. Yesterday’s edition ran the same gauntlet.

Between the lines

The biggest sale we tracked on October 15 was $85,000, a 2004 Pokemon EX Team Rocket Returns Gold Star Torchic #108 in PSA 9 — and we did not score it. 61 candidates priced above this one could not be scored: 42 returned too few matched sales to quote a median honestly, 4 produced pools spanning different cards, 3 could not be pinned to one card, 1 this column has already covered, and 11 were rejected for free before we bought a comp — 9 as current-season product, 2 as short print runs. Our browse hit its row cap, so $85,000 is the biggest sale we tracked rather than the market’s top sale, and every count here is a floor.

How we track this

RazMania monitors completed eBay sales daily, filtering out multi-card lots, reprints, altered cards, cross-listed items, and accepted best offers — on those eBay publishes the seller’s ask, never the settled figure — to isolate genuine single-card sales at confirmed prices. The comparable-sale median here is computed from 8 verified sales of the same card at the same grade, with the lead sale itself excluded. Our comp pull requests a 90-day window; the brief does not record the span it actually received, so we make no claim about one. This market-wide browse is row-capped, which makes it a sample rather than a census: every count above is a floor, not a total. eBay reports sold date, not sold time.