$13,600: Genius or Idiot?

A 2009 Platinum Arceus Gengar LV.X in a PSA 9 slab drew 56 bids and closed at $13,600 — 1.16x the median of the 8 matched sales we could verify.

Somebody paid $13,600 for a 2009 Platinum Arceus #97 Gengar LV.X graded PSA 9 on Oct. 26, after 56 bids. Against the eight matched sales of the same card at the same grade we could verify, the median is $11,750.

Why it matters

This price was not one buyer’s opinion. 56 bids is the heaviest price discovery this column scores — the difference between a number the market set and a number a seller asked for, and most of the day’s biggest figures are the latter.

By the numbers

• $13,600 paid — 1.16x the $11,750 matched-comp median, a premium of $1,850.
• 8 comps, every matched sale we found of this card in this grade. Middle half $10,100 to $12,600; full pool $6,799.99 to $14,200.
• 56 bids — 15 of 15 on price discovery, the only component that scored perfectly.

The intrigue

Nothing here is above the market. $13,600 sits inside the comp range, below the pool’s $14,200 ceiling, and the card is trending up: the last 30 days of that pool ran 5.5% over the 90-day median, on 6 recent sales. That is a defensible fill, and comp deviation is where this card earned the biggest block of its score, 30 of 40.

Reality check

Two things cut the other way, and the first is ours. Eight sales is a thin foundation, and our own floor is eight — one absent comp and we would not have priced this card at all, so treat $11,750 as weakly supported, not settled. The second is arithmetic: $13,600 is above that median, and a price above the comparable market is not a bargain however hot the bidding. Liquidity scored 3 of 15; with no serial number and no autograph, scarcity scored 0 of 15.

What's next

Score 60 of 100 — comp deviation 30/40, trend 12/15, price discovery 15/15, liquidity 3/15, scarcity 0/15. Verdict: FAIR BUY. Not a steal, not a mistake — a market-set price a shade over the market. Watch the next PSA 9 to cross the block: clearing $12,600 would pull the upper quartile toward this sale. Our score uses no pop report, no sell-through data and no card-level search volume: we do not have them and will not invent them.

Between the lines

This was not the biggest sale we tracked. That was a 2005 Gold Star Rayquaza, PSA 8, at $52,600 — and we could score neither it nor the 18 sales priced above our lead. 10 had too few matched sales for a median, 1 produced a pool mixing different cards, 2 were covered elsewhere today, and 5 were rejected for free on their titles before we spent anything: 4 from product still being opened, 1 a print run too short to have comparable sales. Our browse hit its row cap, so every count here is a floor, not a total.

How we track this

RazMania monitors completed eBay sales daily, filtering out multi-card lots, reprints, altered cards and cross-listed items to isolate genuine single-card sales. Accepted best offers are dropped entirely, because eBay publishes the seller’s asking price on those and never the settled figure — every price above is one somebody actually paid. The comparable-sale median is computed from 8 verified sales of the same card at the same grade, with this sale excluded from its own pool; we do not record the span that pool covered, so we make no claim about it. This day’s market-wide figures come from a row-capped browse and are floors, not totals. eBay reports sold date, not sold time.