How our numbers work

Estimates, not guarantees

Sealed markets are thin. The same box can sell for meaningfully different prices in the same week depending on venue, listing quality, and timing. A Fair Market Value Estimate is a reference point for tracking and comparison — it is not a promise of what you will pay or receive.

Monthly index history

The backbone of SealedEX is a monthly price history reaching back to 1999, sourced from PriceCharting’s market data. Each product carries the index value at each month close — no interpolation, no synthetic smoothing, no active-listing inflation. This history powers the charts, 1-year deltas, and era baskets.

Weekly modern-product snapshots

For modern-era products, we derive a weekly view from our canonical daily marketplace reads (TCGplayer-derived data from a licensed marketplace data partner) — covering many modern products in the catalog. Each weekly date is a comparison anchor built from those daily observations, not a separate recurring weekly fetch; earlier weekly observations recorded before daily coverage began remain part of the historical record. This view sharpens current estimates where the market moves fastest.

Human-reviewed calibration

When sources disagree materially — a stale feed, a mismatched listing, an implausible spike — a human reviews the product and records an explicit decision about which source to trust. Every decision is dated, auditable, and never auto-generated. Dozens of active decisions currently calibrate the catalog.

For rare vintage Pokémon Booster Boxes with insufficient reliable recent market evidence, SealedEX may publish a clearly labeled owner-attested valuation. It is an owner-reviewed estimate, not a sold-comp-backed valuation. Provider daily prices remain separate and do not determine this estimate.

Known coverage gaps

Vintage products have no weekly marketplace source by nature — their estimates rest on the monthly index. A small number of modern SKUs (for example, certain Pokémon Center exclusives) also lack weekly data; those fall back to monthly values. We track these gaps internally rather than papering over them.

Relative Value and Sealed Edge

Relative Value compares a sealed product’s Fair Market Value Estimate against the PSA 10 value of the cards you can actually pull from it — the box’s price set against a tracked pullable card-value basket. Sealed Edge extends the same idea across the covered booster boxes, ranking each one by that ratio.

Sealed Edge keeps product types in separate layers so comparisons stay like-for-like: Booster Boxes are the benchmark sealed-box layer; Elite Trainer Boxes — Canonical tracks one clean Elite Trainer Box per set; and Elite Trainer Boxes — All SKUs lists every eligible variant — regular, Pokémon Center, and named or dual versions — as its own row for a variant-level market view. ETB SKUs from sets we don’t yet cover, or without a resolvable price, are left out rather than estimated. Promo-card value is not yet included in ETB ratios; folding in reviewed promo-card values is a planned future step, not part of today’s ratios.

These ratios are descriptive comparison tools, not recommendations. A lower ratio can indicate a box costs less per dollar of tracked pullable card value — but it says nothing about whether any card will be pulled, what grade it reaches, or where the market goes next. Relative Value and Sealed Edge are built from the same scheduled, source-backed estimates described above, so they inherit the same cadence and caveats.

Alert cadence

Alerts are evaluated weekly and at monthly index updates — not in real time. When an evaluation runs, your thresholds are checked against the freshest Fair Market Value Estimates from the schedule above.

Data freshness & schedule

The refresh rhythm is fixed and intentional: the monthly index updates at the start of each calendar month, the weekly modern view is derived from our canonical daily reads, and calibration reviews happen as source disagreements surface. Nothing on SealedEX ticks continuously, and we’d rather show you exactly how fresh a number is than pretend otherwise. Product pages display each product’s own last-updated date next to its estimate.

Monthly index

Jun 2026

Latest monthly period in the price index. Refreshes at the start of each calendar month.

Weekly modern snapshots

Jul 16

A weekly view of 490 modern products, derived from the latest daily observations — not a separate weekly fetch.

Daily PriceCharting

Jul 26

Latest confirmed daily observation across 585 products; 14 currently carried forward from an earlier observation. Carried entries keep their last confirmed date — a carry never counts as a new observation.

Daily JustTCG

Jul 25

Latest confirmed daily observation across 490 products; 1 currently carried forward from an earlier observation. Carried entries keep their last confirmed date — a carry never counts as a new observation.

Human review

Jun 11

Most recent fair-value calibration review. 43 active human-reviewed decisions.

Alerts

Weekly + monthly

Alerts are evaluated weekly and at monthly index updates — not in real time.

Not financial advice

SealedEX is a tracking and research tool, not investment advice. An estimate is not an exit price: selling sealed product takes time, fees, and a willing buyer. For the full breakdown of data sources, licensing, and which integrations are active versus in progress, see the data-source disclosure page.