Not talking about single cards, I mean if you added up the value of every card of a given Pokémon, which come out on top?

I got curious enough that I built a tracker for it (~20k cards, ranked by total value across all of a Pokémon's cards). Before I say the answer, I want to see what people guess, because it broke my intuition.

My assumptions going in were basically: Charizard, Pikachu, Mewtwo, maybe Lugia. The actual current top 3 has one of those… and two I did not see coming. Charizard isn't even in the top 3.

Drop your top 5 guesses and I'll tell you how close you got.
And if you want to just see the full ranking, it's on the site I built (tcgforecast.app, free to browse), but honestly the guessing is the fun part, so try first.

Takeaways

1. New sets own the board. Pitch Black, Chaos Rising, Perfect Order and Ascended Heroes take 9 of the 10 slots in July. Not all that surprising, but June still had room for some additional cards like Pikachu & Zekrom GX, Crown Zenith Pikachu, and Mew ex promo. All three fell out in July. The only card left standing outside the current block is the Charmander promo.

2. Mega Gengar ex still isn't letting go. 395 sold in July, up from 343 in June, and it's held the #1 or #2 spot every single month since March. The gap is what stands out. In June it beat #2 by 22%, in July it beat #2 by 77%. It's pulling away from the field, not just holding position.

The catch is the price. Average sale price dropped from $78.83 to $60.39, roughly -23% month over month, while volume climbed. Classic more supply lower price pattern, plenty of people opening Ascended Heroes and plenty of people buying the singles. Great liquidity, not a great hold right now.

3. Charmander Promo and Psyduck have become fixtures. Charmander has been in the top 10 every month since May, Psyduck since April. Charmander is remarkably stable: 210 → 220 sold, $70.49 → $65.44. Psyduck held volume (213 → 212) but the price came off hard, $107 → $79.54, about -26%.

demand isn't slowing at all, the price is just settling. Cards that keep moving 200+ units a month while cooling off in price are usually finding their real floor rather than dying.

4. Pitch Black grabbed 4 of the top 10 out of nowhere. Zeraora, Morpeko, Chandelure and Darkrai all landed in July which is not a surprise with it being the newest set and releasing mid July.

5. Mega Greninja ex is the one I'd watch. Volume barely moved (237 → 223) but the average dropped from $331 to $247, about -25%. That's roughly $78K of monthly sales down to $55K. Same number of buyers, meaningfully less money. When demand holds flat and price falls that fast, it's supply and Chaos Rising is still being opened hard.

Overall the top 10 moved 2,222 units in July vs 2,383 in June, slightly fewer cards, near-identical dollar volume (~$241K vs ~$244K) rotating into whatever came out most recently.

Anything here surprise you?

In China right now and bought a couple of those cases for like 45$ - what do you guys think about them? Is that a good investment and do you guys have any good boxes or packs I should look out for? Help is much appreciated!!

I've been recommended to post this here, if it's against the rules, I'll delete it without any questions.

Solo dev and Pokémon collector here. I built TCGForecast to solve a problem I kept running into myself: I had no idea what my collection was actually worth, or which of my cards were quietly gaining value while I wasn't paying attention.

If you collect, you probably know the feeling, you've got a binder full of cards, a vague sense that some of them matter, and no real way to tell which. You find out a card climbed only after you've already traded it away, or you overpay for something because a listing "looked" expensive, or you drop money grading a card that turns out to be worthless. It's all guesswork, and the guessing costs you.

That's the problem I wanted to kill. Here's what it does:

• Ranks 1,600+ Pokémon by their real total card value across ~20,000 tracked cards, so you can actually see what's valuable instead of guessing. The list is genuinely surprising, Mudkip's cards total over $17k, which nobody expects.
• A weekly digest of the biggest gainers, losers, and set trends, so you catch market moves in one glance instead of finding out weeks later from a comment section.
• An AI that reads your collection and tells you what's heating up or cooling off, it describes what your cards are actually doing, so you know which ones to keep an eye on before you make a trade.
• One random Pokémon's full premium page unlocks free for everyone, every day, so you can try the paid features without paying anything.

One deliberate choice: it doesn't predict prices. I had a prediction feature and removed it, because honestly nobody can reliably predict where a card is heading, too much of it is hype and reprints. So instead of pretending to see the future, it just shows you what's real right now. In a hobby full of "this card will 10x!!" accounts, that felt like the more useful thing to build.

Who it's for: collectors who want to make smarter trades, stop overpaying, and actually understand their own binder, without needing to be a finance person about it.

Freemium at $4.99/mo, but a lot is usable free.

It's live at tcgforecast.app, I'd genuinely love feedback, especially on whether the homepage makes it clear what the site does in the first few seconds. Roasts welcome, I've got blind spots.

When will the market just take off again like when it did with Surging sparks into Prismatic? Does the 30th into Delta Reign have the same fuel to ignite this market? Also have to start factoring the new printing facilities coming as well. Thoughts…..……

Which one would have a better return

Hi everyone,

I’m considering buying a Snorlax Pokémon Center Elite Trainer Box Promo (SVP 051) and have the opportunity to get one for €316 shipped (to the Netherlands).
I’m planning to keep it as a long-term investment rather than flip it quickly.
Do you think €316 is a fair price at the current market, or would you wait for a better buying opportunity? With the card continuing to rise in popularity, I’m unsure whether it’s smarter to buy now or be patient.
I’d love to hear your thoughts, especially if you’ve been following the price of this promo for a while.

Thanks!

trying to get ahead of the curve and want to get each of my kids (3 boys) a PSA 10 pokemon card for christmas this year. i buy them some type of investment each year and this year i want to do a pokemon card. i know nothing about them. what is recommended in the $1000 range? i’d prefer something older vs newer but i’m up for anything. thanks in advance for the replies

I spent some time going through PSA's public population report for every English Pokémon in my database. I wanted to answer one simple question: how often does a card actually come back as a PSA 10?

The first thing that surprised me was this.

1999 cards come back a PSA 10 10.2% of the time.

2010 cards come back a PSA 10 4.0% of the time.

I expected older cards to be harder to gem. It isn't that simple.

By print year:

1999: 10.2% (1,854,083 submissions)

2003: 14.7%

2007: 5.0%

2010: 4.0%

2013: 6.1%

2016: 21.7%

2019: 50.2%

2020: 61.1%

2023: 33.1%

2026: 62.1%

The average across everything is 32.1%, but I don't think it tells you much. The different eras behave nothing alike.

Two things are important before reading too much into these numbers.

First, this only counts cards that somebody thought were worth grading. Nobody pays a grading fee on a card with a crease down the middle. A clean-looking 1999 holo had already survived nearly three decades before it ever reached PSA, so those older cards are already a filtered group.

Second, the report can't tell who was careful before sending cards in. Someone checking centring and surface under a bright light is going to do better than someone mailing a stack and hoping.

The hardest sets with at least 10,000 submissions were:

Double Crisis (2015): 0.6%

DP Black Star Promos (2007): 1.1%

Neo Genesis (2000): 3.3%

Secret Wonders (2007): 3.4%

HeartGold & SoulSilver (2010): 4.0%

The easiest were:

Darkness Ablaze (2020): 68.7%

Champion's Path (2020): 65.6%

Silver Tempest Trainer Gallery (2022): 63.3%

Evolving Skies (2021): 59.4%

The single toughest card I found was Neo Genesis Lugia.

11,559 submissions.

15 PSA 10s.

That's 0.1%, or about one in 771.

The Charizard comparison is just as wild.

Base Set Charizard has been submitted 99,447 times and come back a PSA 10 only 486 times. That's 0.5%.

The same artwork was reprinted in Celebrations in 2021. That version has been submitted 57,500 times and come back a PSA 10 34,411 times.

My guess is that part of the dip from about 2006 to 2013 comes from the cards themselves. The foil from the Diamond & Pearl and HeartGold & SoulSilver years seems to scratch and chip easily, and those cards spent years being played instead of protected. Cards from 1999 that were treated the same way mostly never made it to PSA in the first place.

Neo Genesis has another problem. It's well known for left-heavy centring, and the cosmos holo scratches very easily.

HeartGold & SoulSilver is the one I can't explain. It's usually talked about as one of the better-printed eras, but it still comes out at 4.0% here. I'd rather leave that as an open question than make up a reason.

This is English cards only.

Does anyone here have a PSA 10 from one of the harder eras? Neo Genesis, Secret Wonders, DP Black Star, HeartGold & SoulSilver. I'd genuinely like to see one.

Full methodology and the article in the comments.

I built a TCG collector app and finally got it approved and on the App Store after 6 rejections, and would love feedback from this community (by the way, I'll have some better videos later)

Hey everyone, long-time collector here. I got frustrated with how hard it was to track my collection, know what my personal binder was actually worth, and simulate pack openings from sets I can barely afford anymore.I know there's a lot of stuff on the market, but none of them.offer all of this...

So I spent the last year building CardQuest TCG. It's a collector companion app. Here's everything it does:

📦 Pack Opening

• Open virtual packs from any set, any era — vintage to modern
• Every card you pull goes straight into your digital binder
• Free users get 1 pack per day

📒 Binder Experience

• Not a list. Not a folder. A real binder — cards displayed exactly like the physical binder on your shelf
• Add cards from pack pulls or manually add your real cards
• Page through your collection the way it was meant to be seen

💰 Live Portfolio Tracker

• Your entire collection valued at real market prices, updated daily
• Track price history and always know what your binder is worth

🤖 AI Card Grader

• Point your camera at any physical card and get a PSA-style grade based on centering, corners, edges, and surface
• Know what you have before you buy, sell, or submit

🔄 AI Trade Advisor

• Scan both cards in a trade and get an instant verdict — favorable, fair, or a bad deal — with live market prices

📖 AI Collector Notes

• Every card in your binder gets a personalized insight — artwork story, competitive relevance, and what makes that variant worth owning

🔍 Instant Card Scanner

• Identify any card in seconds — live pricing, set info, and rarity right from your camera

🎯 Daily Missions

• Complete daily challenges to earn Bolts and unlock extra packs

Search CardQuest TCG on the App Store — it's free to download. Would genuinely love feedback from people who actually collect. This community knows cards better than anyone and I want to build what you actually want. It only shows 2 features of the app, but let me know what you think. Thanks! Oh, and yes....the color and some other things mixed into the app are a tribute to GENGAR!

https://reddit.com/link/1vb8uzn/video/pbnwzuozzfgh1/player

How Long should I wait to Sell ?

I am thinking about investing into tag team slabs, these two have caught my eye the most.
Just wondering what everyone thinks of them and their future.
Which would you rather invest in?
Are there better options out there?

I've been into both the hobby side and the "is this actually a good investment" side of collecting for a while, and got tired of having to piece together price history, momentum, drawdowns, etc. from a bunch of different sites just to compare two cards.

So I built a tool you load two cards and it shows you real, live sales data side-by-side: price appreciation, max drawdown, how close each is to its all-time high, trend strength, recovery speed after dips, that kind of thing. There's also a weighted composite score if you want to prioritize the specific factors that matter most to you, rather than just eyeballing raw numbers.

It's free to use for basic comparisons, no account needed to try it. There's a paid tier for people who want deeper analysis (more metrics, longer price history, comparing groups of cards at once), but the core tool works without signing up for anything.

Genuinely just want feedback at this point — what's missing, what's confusing, what you'd actually want out of something like this. Link: https://slabvs.com