$6,900: Genius or Idiot?

A 1st Edition Neo Genesis Lugia drew 28 bids and closed 1.22x above the median of the only 11 comparable sales we could verify.

Someone paid $6,900 for a 2000 Pokemon Neo Genesis 1st Edition Lugia in PSA 8, in an auction that drew 28 bids. Against the 11 matched sales of the same card at the same grade we could verify, that is 1.22x the $5,655.00 median — a premium of $1,245.00.

Why it matters

A contested auction set this price, not one buyer accepting a seller’s number. A crowded auction tells you the market agreed on a price — not that the price was a bargain. More sports collectibles coverage.

By the numbers

• $5,655.00 — the median of 11 matched sales of the same card in the same grade. Our floor for quoting a median is 8, so 11 sales is a thin foundation, and we would rather say so than bury it.
• $3,882.37 to $9,200.00 — the span of that pool. The $6,900 paid sits inside it, nearer the top.
• 28 bids — price discovery scored 15 of 15, the only component to score full marks.

The intrigue

The fill does not look forced. This pool’s ceiling is $9,200.00, so $6,900 is a high number for the card in this grade rather than an unprecedented one. The market is flat, not falling: the 30-day trend against the 90-day window is 0.0%, across 5 recent sales.

Reality check

They still paid over the comparable market. 1.22x the median is $1,245.00 of premium, and comp deviation — the heaviest component, worth 40 points — returned 22. The median rests on 11 sales against a floor of 8, so one or two different results would move it, and liquidity scored 6 of 15 on that same count.

What's next

The score is 57 of 100 and the verdict is FAIR BUY. Components: comp deviation 22 of 40, trend 9 of 15, liquidity 6 of 15, price discovery 15 of 15, scarcity 5 of 15. One caveat of our own: the scarcity 5 reads the card’s 9/111 as a print run, and on a Pokemon card that string is a set position, so treat those 5 points as unearned. Three inputs are absent from the model — no population report, no sell-through, no card-level search volume. The number to follow is whether the next 1st Edition Lugia in PSA 8 clears above or below $5,655.00.

Between the lines

The biggest sale we tracked on October 10 was $63,512.00, for a 2006 Pokemon Mew Legend Maker #10 in PSA 10 — and we could not price it. Our category browse hit its row cap, so this pull is a sample rather than a census: the 970 confirmed single-card sales behind these figures are a floor, not a total. We walked past 76 costlier sales to reach the Lugia. 47 had too few comparable sales to quote a median, 6 gave pools spanning different cards, 2 built no specific enough comp query, and 6 were cards this column or its sister column has covered. 15 of the 76 cost nothing to reject: their titles ruled them out before any spend. Yesterday we priced a Gym Challenge Misty’s Gyarados.

How we track this

RazMania monitors completed eBay sales daily, dropping multi-card lots, reprints, altered cards and Best Offer Accepted listings — on those eBay publishes the seller’s asking price, not what was paid — to isolate confirmed single-card prices. The comparable-sale median here is computed from 11 verified sales of the same card at the same grade, matched on year, set code, grader, grade and 1st Edition status; our floor for quoting a median at all is 8. The comp pull requests a 90-day window and we do not record the span it actually returned, so no claim is made about the period it covers. The day’s category browse hit its row cap, so every market-wide count here is a floor rather than a total. eBay reports sold date, not sold time.