How to comp a Pokémon card
Comping is not looking up a number. It is building a defensible price from sales that actually match the card in your hand. Here is the exact process COMPED automates — and how to do it by hand if you want to check our work.
Comping, defined
A comp is a comparable completed sale. A card is worth what copies of the same printing, in the same condition, have recently sold for — not what someone is asking, and not the average of every version that shares the Pokémon's name.
Almost every bad valuation comes from one of four mistakes: wrong printing, wrong condition, active listings instead of sold ones, or one freak sale treated as the market.
The five-step process
- 01
Pin the exact identity
Name, set, collector number, rarity, language and finish. Charizard alone spans hundreds of printings; a reverse holo, a promo stamp or a Japanese release is a different market from the English base card.
- 02
Separate the edition
For vintage this is the whole ball game. 1st Edition Shadowless, Shadowless, 4th print and Unlimited Base Set are four different cards with four different prices, even though the artwork is identical.
- 03
Grade the condition honestly
Centering, edges, surface, whitening. A 1999 holo you would call 'good' is usually Lightly Played to Moderately Played in market terms, and pricing it as Near Mint inflates the value substantially.
- 04
Pull sold comps, not listings
Completed sales in your own currency and market. Six recent UK sales in GBP beat forty US asking prices when you are selling in the UK.
- 05
Scrub, then choose a range
Bin damaged copies, bundles, mislabelled graded sales and obvious outliers. What is left gives you a floor, a fair number and a stretch — pick the one that fits the decision you are making.
How COMPED builds a number
- UK sold data first. Completed eBay UK sales in GBP are the primary evidence. If a card is thinly traded, the search widens to global sold data rather than falling back to a guess.
- Exact printing only. Set, number, language, finish and edition must match — 1st Edition, Shadowless, 4th print and Unlimited are priced as separate cards, as are reverse holos and regional printings.
- Outliers scrubbed. Digby drops damaged copies, lots, proxies, mislabelled graded sales and single freak results before the weighted comp is calculated.
- Condition-anchored. Vintage raw cards are anchored to realistic played grades rather than pretending every copy is Near Mint; modern cards anchor to NM.
- Community-verified. Vendors and collectors confirm prices in the Price Trainer, and that consensus nudges the headline comp on cards where sales are sparse.
- Uncertainty is shown, not hidden. When there is not enough comparable evidence, COMPED says so and shows a range with the sale count behind it.
Why comps disagree across apps
Collectors regularly report that the same collection returns wildly different totals from different trackers — comparison studies have measured spreads of around 60% on an identical set of cards. None of the tools is necessarily broken. They are answering different questions:
- A marketplace market price is a US-centric snapshot of current listings and recent sales on that one platform.
- A sold-price history is an average over a period, which lags hard in a fast-moving market.
- A European average is priced in EUR against a different buyer pool.
- A live sold comp is what someone actually paid, in your market, this month.
COMPED is built for the last one, UK first, and tells you how many sales sit behind the figure so you can judge it yourself.
Where comping usually breaks
- Vintage and low-population cards that only sell a handful of times a year.
- Graded slabs, where a PSA 10 and a CGC 10 of the same card can be worlds apart in price.
- Japanese, Korean and Chinese printings, often ignored entirely or priced from the English card.
- Sold listings that were never actually paid for, cancelled, or bundled with other cards.
Keep reading
Common questions
- What does comping a Pokémon card mean?
- Comping means valuing a card from comparable completed sales — copies of the exact same printing, language and condition that have actually sold recently — rather than from asking prices or a single headline number.
- How many sold comps do you need?
- Three to five genuinely comparable sales is usually enough for a liquid modern card. Vintage and low-population cards often have far fewer, which is why a range and a sale count matter more than one precise figure.
- Why do two apps show different values for the same card?
- Because they measure different things: a US marketplace market price, a European average, a sold-price history or a live UK sold comp are all legitimate but different numbers. Published comparisons have found totals for the same collection varying by more than half depending on the method used.
- Is comping on COMPED free?
- Yes. Searching and comping cards is free, including sold-data comps and trend history. Paid plans add the collector vault tools and the vendor shop suite.
- Why can't some vintage cards be priced accurately?
- Because the sales simply are not there. A 1999 card in a specific edition and condition may have only one or two genuine UK sales in a quarter, so COMPED shows a range, the sale count and the wider evidence it leaned on instead of a confident single figure. Thin evidence is a fact about the market, not a bug in the comp.
- Why is a slab price so different from the raw single price?
- A graded slab is a different product: the grade, the grading company and the label all have their own buyers and their own sold history. COMPED prices raw singles from raw sales and each grade from sales of that exact grade, rather than multiplying a raw price by a fixed number.
- Why can't some scanned cards be priced?
- A scan can fail to resolve to one printing — a blurred or cropped image, a card in a sleeve with glare, or a printing that genuinely shares artwork across editions. When the identity is ambiguous COMPED asks you to pick the exact printing rather than guessing, because the wrong printing is worse than no price.