📊 How we grade ourselves. Cards aren't stocks. They're slow to sell, they move on call-ups and debuts and playoff runs that don't run on our schedule, and the people who do best in this hobby buy cards they'd be happy to hold. So we grade the way a collector actually experiences a card: would you be glad you bought it? A BUY is RIGHT if the card sells for at least 10% more than when we called it, WRONG if it sells for at least 10% less, and FLAT in between. A PASS (not at this price) is the reverse. We check at 6 months and again at 12 months, on sold prices only, and both grades stay on the page forever. The 8-week read is printed for every call so you can see what the card did early — but it is never graded. Two months is a trading clock, and nobody trades cards well on a trading clock; we tried. Nothing is ever edited after we publish a call — not the price, not the date, not the action. If we change our mind, we log a new call and grade that one too. Pokémon: we stopped calling Pokémon prices in August 2026 — we ran high on nearly every one, which means we had no edge, not bad luck. Those calls stay below, graded as they were.
🎯 The Scoreboard
Where We Stand
Computed live from the calls below. A call isn't graded until it's six months old — until then it's simply early, and that's the honest state for most of what's on this page right now.
The Scorecard — Sports
Sports Calls
Newest first. Sports is where we make calls — a prospect's card has real things ahead of it (a call-up, a debut, an award, a playoff run) and those are the events that decide whether it was a good card to own. Each row shows what we said, what the card did in its first eight weeks, and its 6- and 12-month grades as they come due.
| Card | Our Call | Our Price | 8-Week Read | Live Asks ⚡ | Status | Grade (6 / 12 mo) |
|---|
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The Scorecard — Pokémon · Retired Aug 2026
Pokémon Calls — Retired, Not Deleted
🚫 We stopped issuing Pokémon price calls in August 2026. The finals told us why: our misses ran one-directional — we projected HIGH on nearly every card. A one-directional error pattern isn’t bad luck, it’s structure: a Pokémon single has one value driver (supply against the print run), and it isn’t knowable at call time. Sports cards print catalysts on a schedule; Pokémon prints rarity and nothing else. The open calls below still grade to FINAL on their original dates, and every graded row stays on this page permanently — deleting the misses would defeat the point of keeping score.
| Card | Our Call | Projected / Entry | Market Read | Live Asks ⚡ | Status | Grade |
|---|
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calls.json · sold reads from PriceCharting/TCGplayer completed sales · live asks via the eBay Browse API (active listings, not solds) · updated weekly by the Monday scan.
Why
Why We Do This
Because the only thing in this hobby that can't be argued with is a sold price. Our calls are opinions about where collectors will be a year from now — some will land, some won't. Publishing the ones that don't is what makes the ones that do worth anything.
How we think about cards. A card is not a stock. You can't sell it in a second, the spread is wide, and a prospect's best moment usually arrives without warning — a call-up on a Tuesday and the card is gone by Thursday. So we don't try to time it. We look for cards we'd be glad to own a year from now, buy them at a price that makes sense today, and let the player do the rest. That's the line every good collector walks between investing and collecting, and it's the only way we've found that actually works.
The Weekly Check-In
Every week we re-read the open calls and post the biggest mover on X — with the grade when one is due, and without one when it isn't.
Free · Every Tuesday
Watch Me Grade The Next Ones
This scorecard updates every week. Get the new reads emailed each Tuesday — what moved, what's coming due for a grade, and the board moves behind it. Nobody else in the hobby publishes the calls that went wrong; that's the whole point.
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Affiliate Disclosure: ShopCardHub earns commissions when you buy through links on this page (eBay Partner Network 3–4%, plus other partners). "Live asks" are current eBay asking prices via the eBay Browse API — not sold values. Market reads sourced as noted per row. Not financial advice — this page exists precisely because nobody's projections are.