I have been waiting for a while for a moonbreon PSA 10 to drop below 600 to finally add it to my collection. I stopped checking for a couple of weeks and now almost all sales are between 700-800 or even more.
What happened here? Is somebody trying to buy up the cards or driving up the price? There should be no reason for moonbreon to spike like this in just a couple of weeks.
Edit: Screenshots for reference from 650 August 29th
To two weeks later, 810 -915. September 12th
All it takes is a couple of sales for the lowest buy it nows, and suddenly the lowest listed price is $800 instead of $600, which may drive up the price of auctions. Then before you know it, people start seeing the price shoot up so they hurry up and buy the lowest listed, and now that turns to $900. Patience will be pay off here, in my unprofessional opinion
It’s because of the stupid TCGPlayer market manipulation of the raw card.
It went up from $300 to $420 in a few days, that I assume rolled over to eBay and of course sellers aren’t going to see raw going up to $420 (and in some ludicrous example of price manipulation, selling raw for $500+ there) and keep their PSA 10s at $600.
I reported it, they said they would look into it and then ignored me. It’s incompetence and maybe even purposeful since the higher the price the more they make.
Isn’t it just a super popular card that is hard to pull?
I don’t believe that this is a case of market manipulation. It is an incredibly popular card with low pull rates + the premium of a graded 10, as @smpratte pointed out. I also agree with @eeveeteam that BINs drive up auction prices. We should also point out the role of YouTube channels that highlight it regularly (e.g., Top 10 Pokemon).
u wot m8
This card has quickly become THE chase card of the SWSH era, with people spending 1000s on packs hoping to pull just this card. It has a crazy low pull rate, the artwork is universally loved, and Umbreon is one of the most popular pokemon there is. With Evolving Skies sealed product going up, I don’t see how this card going up has anything to do with ‘‘market manipulation’’. Pretty sure it’s just an amazing card with very high demand and not enough supply.
Why is a price rise suddenly ‘market manipulation’?
Same shit was being said when Machamp V went up in price, tons of people were screaming ‘market manipulation’ and ‘it will come back down’ and guess what its still at that price. Perhaps the price just rises because more people decide to buy a really popular card?
What I am really surprised about is the short time and amount it went up in. It was around the 600 mark for at least half a year and in 1-2 weeks it spikes 20 % -30% all of a sudden while being still in print and and a lot of people still waiting for their middleman return? That’s quite unusual. Especially since the initial hype from 2022-2021 is basically over.
Why not buy raw and grade. Im sure 90% of these modern cards will get psa 10
ES could be done, it could get another reprint. Everyone was talking about a reprint at the end of August. Well, it’s almost the middle of September. It’s likely we already got the reprint, and the market reflects that.
I’ve been slowly buying every Moonbreon under $400 and relisting them with my burner accounts. It’s a full time job but I’ve already made $90 this month
Yes it is, but it is the sales behaviour that raises too many red flags on TCGPlayer. TCGPlayer sales history for a few months is public, so anyone can check the data themselves. Consistently since the price was in the $200s, there have been sales taking place way above market price. During the latest spike, there were sales for the card at $60-$100+ when there were many options at lower prices being offered at the same time. These sales did not include any pictures - just in case people were wondering if potential PSA 10s were the reason for the markup.
What else would cause that behaviour? Since TCGPlayer also doesn’t allow you to check bidders etc. there is no way to verify the buying accounts so it’s easy if there is a will.
You could argue that there might be people who don’t care about it, but look at this forum. Would anyone buy cards without any pictures? And this isn’t a $30 card for casuals (heck, 99% of cards in the SWSH era are below $30)
As for why TCGPlayer pricing affects the market, that’s easy. They are the only place offering an easily searchable ‘market price’. eBay doesn’t or its results/averages are an amalgamation of all kinds of conditions and variations inc. graded, bundled, fake etc. and Troll and Toad is more of an online seller than it is a marketplace. Facebook and Insta and wherever else don’t have any data. YouTubers and everyone else refer to the website when setting prices.
However the problem is that a relatively low amount of sales happens on TCGPlayer, which means that it’s easier to manipulate. Does that mean manipulation is guaranteed to happen? No, but it’s a glaring flaw that is easy to exploit.
edit: and to those who are so quick to make snide remarks, all I ask is to just look into the data first.
The PSA 10 price cannot stay close to the raw card value. If the latter goes up, the former will be forced to react to it.
I was bored so I made a chart.
Here is the TCG Player NM Sold listings between 5/15/22 and 9/11/2022 with one sale left out due to it being a PSA 10 for $799.
Total Quantity Sold is 222
Average Sold Price is around $345
Standard Deviation is around $58
4 Outlier Sales Over 3 Deviations from the Mean
$549.99 on 8/24/2022
$574.99 on 8/25/2022
$524.90 on 8/30/2022
$524.99 on 9/8/2022
I really don’t think anyone can conclude there was market manipulation. It already looked like the price was increasing before the first outlier sale as you can see the floor increase before any outliers occur. And If just a handful of sales can increase the price of a card by this much, then I feel like we would see it much more often.
Thanks for that! I did do that as well, but without any sd.
Maybe the math will prove me misled/wrong but my take was that the majority of the cards have no pictures so when you have sales even early on at $375 or $400 when there are abundant listings for $300, then it seems like price manipulation because nothing really justifies the price.
In other words, the numbers are not just randomly occurring but taken into context, why would there be sales consistently over when there are/were at least 10 options below that. (This bit is harder to quantify, but just taking other sold listings and my eyeballing/checking during the increase.)
If there are other reasons, people would be willing to do so, then I stand corrected. But otherwise it seems odd. I remember checking other rare cards that didn’t show that kind of price surcharge/variation.
Just looking at sold prices doesn’t tell you an important variable in why it sold for that much - seller feedback.
If I’m buying an expensive card, ESPECIALLY with no pictures, I will gladly pay $50 to buy from someone established instead of someone with low to no feedback.
I see this on Cardmarket all the time, I’m new to that platform so I struggle to sell even the most liquid modern cards despite pricing below the floor. Feedback matters so much when buying on these places with no card images.
What the data doesn’t show is how many of these sales are direct from seller and how many of them are through TCGplayer Direct. Direct items are typically listed higher and they do sell. Whether people are impatient and like the quick shipping directly from tcgplayer or if they did a big order and just want a single package from them instead of many smaller ones from different sellers.
If the goal is market manipulation, why would someone buy one higher priced listing if there are many lower-priced ones available? Surely the goal would be to buy out the lower priced listings and then relist for higher prices. Or at least create the appearance of a buyout in order to raise prices. This idea of one, high-priced card selling doesn’t really achieve anything if the goal is actual market manipulation. There are also many more likely explanations to this than a cabal of price-setters in the back of TCGPlayer. Never attribute to conspiracy that which can be adequately explained by someone buying a card they like.
