Verified Floor vs Market Price: How Sealed TCG Prices Are Really Computed

TCGstacker's verified flooris the cheapest actually-buyable TCGplayer listing for a product, including shipping, refetched daily. Two filters keep it honest: junk "custom" (photo) listings are excluded before a floor is selected, and a sanity gate drops any remaining listing priced below 50% of TCGplayer's own market price for that product, so one mispriced or scam listing can't set the number.

The ✓ badge appears only on basket products with a verified series, running since 2026-07-18. Earlier history, and products outside the verified series, fall back to TCGstacker's unverified daily tracked price — labeled as such rather than presented as a floor.

TCGplayer defines its own Market Price as an average across multiple recent sold transactions, with outliers excluded so one unusual sale can't swing the figure (TCGplayer help center, article 213588017, fetched 2026-08-06). Verbatim: "We take the prices at which a collectible has been selling, average across multiple recent transactions… while ignoring outliers that would affect the traditional LO-MID-HI scale." Shipping is not part of the calculation.

That's a reasonable way to answer "what did this sell for" — a different question from "what can I click buy on right now, shipped," which is what the verified floor answers.

The two numbers measure different things, so they diverge most on low-liquidity or fast-moving sealed products. The clearest real example: a sealed Mew Mythical Collection box where TCGplayer's market price showed $220 while the only two actual listings on the site were $365 and $500. A buyer reported the gap on r/PokeInvesting (2025-05-09, fetched 2026-08-06): "There are only two for sale on TCGplayer, one for $365 and one for $500 but it says market price is only $220. eBay sold listings for the last month are anywhere from $150-400." Read the thread.

A trailing average of past sales can't reflect a floor that only two sellers have set today; the verified floor can, because it's read directly off the live listing book rather than averaged from history.

PriceCharting blends "most recent sale price, median price, average price, [and] age weighted average price" from eBay sold listings and its own marketplace, and says so plainly on its own methodology page (pricecharting.com/page/methodology, fetched 2026-08-06): "Shipping Costs Are Not Included. The prices shown do not include shipping costs or any other transaction related costs." PriceCharting's methodology page →

Collectr publishes its own valuation number but, as of 2026-08-06, TCGstacker found no public methodology page describing how that number is calculated.

None of this makes those numbers wrong — they answer "what did it sell for." TCGstacker's verified floor answers a narrower question: "what can you buy it for, shipped, right now." Both are useful; they're just not the same number.