$5,800: Genius or Idiot?

A 2016 Japanese Luigi Pikachu promo drew 35 bids and closed at $5,800 — $750 under the median of the 14 matched PSA 10 sales we could verify.

A 2016 Pokemon Japanese XY Promo #295 Luigi Pikachu Holo graded PSA 10 sold for $5,800.00 on 35 bids on October 28 — $750.00 below the median of the 14 confirmed sales of that same card at that same grade.

Why it matters

The biggest sale we tracked that day went for $31,100.00. It is not the one worth reading: a card clearing below its own comparable median in open bidding shows what the market thinks a known quantity is worth; a five-figure one-off shows only what one person paid.

By the numbers

• $5,800.00 — paid, against a $6,550.00 median across 14 confirmed sales of the same card and grade.
• 0.89x — price to median, or $750.00 under. The pool runs $6,296.00 at the 25th percentile to $7,400.00 at the 75th.
• 35 bids — a competitive auction, and the full 15 of 15 points for price discovery.

The intrigue

The comp pool is the strongest part of this: interquartile spread of 1.18, a full range of $5,600.00 to $7,700.00, every row pinned to card number 295 in PSA 10 on the Japanese printing, and the lead sale excluded from its own pool, so the baseline is not partly made of the number it is judging. We priced another card from this same promo set earlier this month.

Reality check

The exit is thin. 14 matched sales is the whole market a buyer sells back into, and it scores 6 of 15 on liquidity. The trend against that same pool reads -3.5% on 8 recent sales: a discount into a market drifting slightly down. Scarcity scores 4 of 15 — no serial, no autograph, points from the grade alone. And the price sits just above the pool’s own minimum of $5,600.00.

What's next

GENIUS, 70 of 100, clearing the band’s floor exactly with no cap applied — comp deviation 36 of 40, price discovery 15 of 15, trend 9 of 15, liquidity 6 of 15, scarcity 4 of 15. The band needs 70 points and a price at or below the comparable median: read this as the bottom of the top bucket, not the middle. The score uses no population report, no sell-through and no card-level search volume. Watch whether the next #295 copies clear nearer $6,550.00 or nearer $5,600.00.

Between the lines

99 candidates above it could not be scored, which is why a $5,800.00 card leads a day whose biggest tracked sale was $31,100.00 — a 2002 Pokemon Shining Tyranitar Holo Neo Destiny 1st Ed. #113/105 CGC PRISTINE 10. Of the 99: 64 returned too few matched sales to quote a median honestly, 10 returned pools spanning different cards, 4 could not be pinned to a specific card, and 8 were cards this column has already covered. 13 were rejected for free, before any comp data was bought: their titles name current-season product or print runs too short to resell. The browse behind these market-wide figures is row-capped and reached only 2 sold days, so 1,091 confirmed sales and a $1,875.00 median are floors, not totals. More daily card sales coverage.

How we track this

RazMania reads completed eBay sales daily and drops multi-card lots, reprints, altered cards, and Best Offer rows, where eBay publishes the seller’s ask rather than the settled price. This verdict rests on 14 confirmed sales of the same card in the same grade, matched on year, card number, grader, grade and the Japanese printing, with the lead sale excluded from its own comp pool. The comp pull requests a 90-day window and this brief does not record the span it actually received, so no window length is claimed here. The market-wide counts come from a row-capped category browse that covered 2 sold days, so they are floors rather than totals. The buy score uses no population report, no sell-through data and no card-level search volume. eBay reports sold date, not sold time.