$7,733: Genius or Idiot?

A PSA 10 Umbreon from 2000's Japanese Neo 2 set drew 20 bids and closed 1.24x above its own matched-comp median.

A 2000 Pokémon Japanese Neo 2 #197 Umbreon Holo, graded PSA 10, sold on eBay for $7,733.00 on October 14 after 20 competing bids. Eight matched sales of the same card at the same grade put the median at $6,250.00.

Why it matters

20 bids is a room setting a price, not one person deciding one — the strongest form of price discovery this column scores. A premium argued over in public reads differently from one paid quietly at a fixed price.

By the numbers

• $6,250.00 — the matched-comp median, from 8 verified sales of the same card, card number, grader and grade. 8 is exactly our own floor for quoting a median, so read it as thin.
• +$1,483.00 — what the buyer paid above that median, or 1.24x it.
• 20 bids — the maximum 15 of 15 on price discovery, the only component that came back perfect.

The intrigue

The buyer did not pay the most anyone has paid. The matched pool runs $5,300.00 to $7,810.00, so $7,733.00 lands inside it, under the dearest sale rather than past it. The pool is firming too: its last 30 days ran 8.4% above the full-window median, worth 12 of 15 on trend. Paying up into a rising, contested market is defensible, and the score credits it.

Reality check

Above the median is still above the median. 1.24x takes only 22 of the 40 points riding on comp deviation, the heaviest component in the model. Liquidity scores 3 of 15: 8 comparable sales is a thin exit, and 8 is our floor, not a comfortable margin above it. The 8.4% trend rests on 4 recent sales. The score carries no population report, no sell-through and no card-level search volume.

What's next

56 of 100. Comp deviation 22, trend 12, liquidity 3, price discovery 15, scarcity 4. The verdict is FAIR BUY, uncapped: the score never reached the 70 GENIUS requires, and it could not have on this fill anyway, because GENIUS is reserved for a price at or below the matched median. Watch whether the next copies clear the pool’s upper quartile of $6,950.00.

Between the lines

The biggest sale we tracked on October 14 was $140,100.00, a Pokémon Chansey from the 2021 Japanese Creatures Deck 25th Anniv set in a CGC 10. We led on neither it nor the 95 sales above $7,733.00 the walk set aside first. 15 were rejected for free, before any comp pull was paid for, because their titles rule out a comparable market — short print runs and product still being opened. 58 were pulled and failed: 51 could not reach 8 matched sales, 6 returned pools spanning different cards, 1 could not be pinned to a specific enough query. The other 22 are cards this column has already covered. Our browse hit its row cap, so the day’s figures — 950 qualifying sales, $3,445,003.33, a $2,000.00 median — are floors, not totals, and $140,100.00 is the biggest sale we saw, not the biggest there was. More in Auctions Ending Today and across Sports Collectibles.

How we track this

RazMania monitors completed eBay sales daily, dropping multi-card lots, reprints, altered cards and Best Offer sales — on a Best Offer eBay publishes the asking price, never the figure actually paid. Prices are final sold prices. The verdict is scored against 8 matched sales of the same card, same card number, same grader and same grade, pulled in a separate query from the day’s browse; the pool’s observed span is not recorded, so we claim no window for it. The buy score uses no population report, no sell-through and no card-level search volume. The day’s market-wide figures come from a row-capped browse and are floors, not totals. eBay reports sold date, not sold time.