How do you guys search for good cards to buy? Do you just search for a set and scroll ebay (or any other side), or search for individual cards and look at the condition and the price of a card? Are there specific cards you look for?
I find I just randomly find good deals sometimes, but I don’t seem to have a tactic. Whats your techniques?
Without exaggeration, I scroll through ~8,000-10,000+ listings weekly on eBay, PWCC, Heritage, and Goldin and that’s just for auctions, not including BINs. It takes some time, but eventually your eyes will get so fine-tuned that you’ll be able to scroll very quickly and spot cards that you have interest in.
For eBay, I typically search the following if I am looking for general auctions of graded cards. I have more accurate searches for specific cards.
On eBay, I will restrict the listings geographically (North America for me) and may also add the “at least 1 bid” parameter on the Advanced Search settings to capture actual auctions.
On PWCC, I set dollar and year restrictions. I search around Saturday or Sunday, removing any card that hasn’t had a single bid by restricting to ≥$6. I also add an upper bound of 2013 for the print year. For modern cards, I remove the year restriction and sort by highest price. I will scroll downward until I have a solid understanding of the modern cards for sale.
I do not set any search restrictions for Heritage and Goldin, I simply go through their entire auction blocks related to Pokemon and related collectibles of interest.
I like the classic approach of going on ebay, searching “pokemon” and then sort the listings by ending soonest. Can find lots of deals and cool cards that way. You get some non tcg things too which makes the endless scrolling more fun.
I have a private discord where i post cool cards I see in and around the internet. I have a channel for english, japanese, yugioh, mtg, misc, etc.
Every now and then i refer back to it when i want to buy something
Offering a ritual sacrifice before jumping onto Ebay has worked a few times for me.
Otherwise, you can think about who’d you likely find good deals from–i.e. people maybe not that well versed with Pokemon cards or the market. And think about how they might set up a listing. An example might be searching for common/obvious mispellings of a Pokemon name, maybe like Feraligator instead of Feraligatr.
You’ll probably run into the opposite of what you want most times, like people not knowing what they have and massively overpricing it, but sometimes you’ll run into an underpriced item or a niche item that someone uninitiated might not know about. And example of the latter would be someone in the Recent Purchases thread a while ago nabbing a No Damage Ninetales that was just listed as a shadowless Ninetales.
It’s a lot to slog through sometimes, but if you like perusing Ebay, it’s a fun way to waste some time!
When it’s on eBay, I just use something like “pokemon no rarity” and sort by “new listed” after that it depends of the item, I’m French so for French items I go with ebay.fr but when it’s Japanese cards like no rarity I prefer to use ebay.com.
When I need something on Japanese Market (Mercari), I use my personal Discord bot that I wrote, I set up a keyword “ポケモンカード マークなし” for example and each 20 minutes the bot send me a message like that :
Facebook, Instagram once in a while will have some gems 
which its sellers are selling at below market price. Need to surf continuously, 24 hrs. Once listed, they’ll be gone in 1 or 2 hrs.
ive been using tcgfishs unreleased /secret site that shows undervalued auctions ending
https://deals.tcgfish.com/undervalue-bot?q=&pag=1
picked up a few good cards that way. other then that i scour weekly auction blocks on sites like pwcc hertiage and goldin to get steals.
This is the future of Pokemon eBay buying.
Wow I need this. Although I am happy with mercaris daily emails 
Discord bots on Japanese marketplaces is pro strat!
Most days it takes 15 minutes or less to scroll through quickly. Auctions on the weekend might take an hour max. 
ebay: “rare pokemon”
Y!J:【beauty goods】
saved search terms om buyee and buyee will email you new arrivals
Scrolling through Ebay for hours KEKW
Buy collection, break apart, sell and repeat.
Similar to @mika, I built some scraping tools so I don’t have to spend hours looking through listings. Sorry in advanced if this is TMI but very passionate about it.
I start with keyword groups I am looking for, here is my xy_p configuration.
The keywords map to Japanese keywords. I have around 200+ different combinations of keywords for JP markets specifically + general keywords like Pokemon. I then search every combination of the OR and AND keyword groups. I am constantly polling various markets:
I then process all of these through an additional keyword detecting step which ignores spaces and ordering for Japanese characters. (For the nerds, I do recursive descent parsing with my detector DSL)
These are then all aggregated in an inventory management tool I built. Here is my list for “all” (I have separate lists for each keyword detector).
I’ve been working on additional processing beyond this for segmenting the cards in the images and doing classification on flattened scans. I’m building this as way to hopefully afford some niche variants (here is my pipeline for this specifically)
Very overkill but having a lot of fun building it (+ writing Rust 
).
I use picclick.com. it lets you save your recent search titles. Takes me less than 30 seconds to check if there is new listings for around 25 specific cards.
a human sacrifice?
Asking for a friend…
This is the way
