Data & Methodology

Market data: seven TCGs · Editorial coverage: Lorcana, One Piece, Riftbound — beta-game coverage expanding.

How InkSight's prices, indexes, Deck Lab, and Pack Lab actually work across all seven games we cover — Disney Lorcana, One Piece, Riftbound, Star Wars Unlimited, Gundam, Digimon and Fusion World. What the numbers mean, where they come from, and what they don't claim to be.

Platform-wide pricing pipeline

InkSight runs the same price pipeline for all seven games it covers. A daily build script pulls that game's TCGplayer category from the public tcgcsv.com mirror, reading every set group's products and prices in parallel. For each card it keeps the listing's lowest current ask and TCGplayer's Market Price (falling back to mid-price only when market price is absent) — never fabricating an ask from a market figure or vice versa. A card only enters the catalog if it has at least one of the two. Sealed product (booster boxes and cases) is tracked separately, keyed by set and product type.

Every snapshot ships a machine-checkable source block recording that prices, catalog data, and images all came from TCGplayer via TCGCSV — the honesty is enforced in the data itself, not just described here.

Per-game data sources

Disney Lorcana

TCGplayer category 71, via TCGCSV. Ink colors, set names, and rarities come from TCGplayer's own extended product data. Gameplay stats and rules text (cost, strength, willpower, lore, classifications, keywords, card text) come from Lorcast — used for Lorcana rules text and stats only, never for prices.

One Piece Card Game

TCGplayer category 68, via TCGCSV. Gameplay fields (cost, counter, power, life, card type) are read directly from TCGplayer's extended product data — there is no second gameplay-data source for One Piece. Sealed vs. single classification and print-treatment (alt art, manga, SP, parallel, etc.) are parsed from the product name by a documented precedence order, never guessed.

Riftbound

TCGplayer category 89, via TCGCSV. Same pipeline as every other game we cover: prices, catalog, and images all originate from TCGplayer.

Star Wars: Unlimited

TCGplayer category 79, via TCGCSV. Same pipeline as every other game we cover: prices, catalog fields, and images all originate from TCGplayer, with no second gameplay-data source.

Gundam Card Game

TCGplayer category 86, via TCGCSV. Same pipeline as every other game we cover: prices, catalog fields, and images all originate from TCGplayer, with no second gameplay-data source.

Digimon Card Game

TCGplayer category 63, via TCGCSV. Same pipeline as every other game we cover: prices, catalog fields, and images all originate from TCGplayer, with no second gameplay-data source.

Dragon Ball Super: Fusion World

TCGplayer category 80, via TCGCSV. Same pipeline as every other game we cover: prices, catalog fields, and images all originate from TCGplayer, with no second gameplay-data source.

Across all seven games, prices, catalog fields, and card images are TCGplayer-sourced through TCGCSV — the same pipeline, the same trust boundary. Lorcast is the one exception, and it supplies Lorcana rules text and stats only.

Refresh schedule

Each game's dataset rebuilds daily and every card's confidence tier, 24-hour change, and rolling history stats are recomputed from the stored price history in the same nightly pass. Most price-bearing pages show a "prices updated daily" stamp; live pages also expose a data-freshness indicator.

Market Price vs. Lowest Ask

TCGplayer Market Price

TCGplayer's own rolling/blended midpoint reflecting recent transaction activity. This is the primary, trusted value — it's what ranks Most Valuable lists, set/index totals, and rarity-tier stats, and it's the headline number shown wherever a single card price appears.

Lowest Ask

The lowest current TCGplayer listing (normal/non-foil printing) at snapshot time — a listing price, not a confirmed sale. It's shown as a secondary comparison value everywhere a card price appears, and it's what Deck Lab and Pack Lab use to price individual cards going into a deck or a pull, since those tools are pricing "what would it cost to buy this card today," not "what's this card's blended value."

Thin-market / listing-outlier flag

Raised when Lowest Ask sits well above Market Price (a single optimistic listing, not a market move) — treat the ask as a data point to verify, not fair value.

Confidence model & the minimum-evidence gate

Every priced card is classified into one of five confidence tiers by a single shared classifier used everywhere on the site — rankings, set pages, card pages, Deck Lab, and Pack Lab all read the same conf field rather than each inventing their own threshold:

Presale

The card's set has a wide-release date in the future. Its price is a preorder ask, not a market price yet.

Outlier

Thin history combined with a price that's wildly out of line with peers of the same set/rarity (5×+ the peer median, or ≥$2,500 with under 7 days of history), or a price that's blown past its own 7-day trailing median by 3× or more. A second pass also flags parked listings: an ask with 14+ recorded snapshots and zero price movement that sits in the top 50 highest-priced cards for that game, or any ask that's 5×+ its own market price.

Thin

Fewer than 5 days of price history, or the ask diverges from market by more than 60%. A flat, never-moving ask outside the top 50 also lands here rather than being hidden.

Moderate

5–13 days of history, or 30–60% ask/market divergence, or a price more than 2× its own 7-day trailing median.

Verified

14+ days of history, ask/market divergence at or under 30%, and price at or under 2× its own 7-day trailing median.

This minimum-evidence gate is what keeps rankings honest: presale and outlier tiers are excluded from Most Valuable lists, Movers, set/index totals, and Deck Lab's card pool everywhere on the site. Thin and moderate cards are still shown — just badged — because hiding a real price is its own kind of dishonesty; a fabricated confidence score would be worse.

Valuation & screener rules, per game

These numbers are read from one registry (src/lib/market-rules.json) by both the code that filters the data and this page, so a rule and its description cannot drift apart. Primary valuation everywhere is Market Value (TCGplayer Market Price); the secondary comparison is Buy Now Reference (Lowest Ask).

Ranking tiers — the implemented rule

One function classifies every card for every game (public/market-eligibility.js, shared by the build and the browser). Each card lands in exactly one tier; standard and collector-grail never overlap.

• Standard tier — the only tier that is ranked, indexed or badged "In index". Requires a Market Value (TCGplayer Market Price) above zero, at least the game's minimum number of daily observations, and none of the conditions below.
• Collector grail — a real listing whose number is not a market price: a serialized / one-of-X printing, an event-prize (championship, top-cut, winner) printing, an ask sitting at or beyond the game’s spread ratio from Market Price at or above the grail price floor, or a thin-confidence card at or above that floor. Shown in a separate, labelled module; never ranked or indexed.
• Excluded — presale tier, listing outliers, cards with no Market Price, cards below the observation minimum, and accessories / non-card products (sleeves, dice, tokens, playmats, binders, deck boxes and the accessory sets they live in).

Accessory / non-card detection uses these patterns, verbatim from the shared engine: name ((?:energy|don!!?|memory|life)\s*marker|\bmarker\s*(?:set|pack)\b|\btoken\b|\bcounter\b|\bdice\b|\bdie\s*set\b|\bcoin\b|\bplaymat\b|\bplay\s*mat\b|\bsleeve|\bdeck\s*box\b|\bdeck\s*case\b|\bcard\s*case\b|\bstorage\b|\bbinder\b|\bportfolio\b|\bpin\b|\bacrylic\b|\bstandee\b|\bscore\s*card\b|\brule\s*book\b|\brulebook\b), set (energy\s*marker|accessor|supplies|playmat|sleeve|marker). Serialized detection uses (serial\s*(?:number|numbered|#)|\bserialized\b|\btrophy\b|\b1\s*of\s*1\b|one\s*of\s*one|\bone\s*of\s*\d+\b|\b\d+\s*of\s*\d+\s*\)|\bnumbered\s*to\b|world(?:s)?\s*champion(?:ship)?\s*(?:trophy|prize)|prize\s*wall); event-prize suffixes use (champion|finalist|participation|competitor|grand\s*prix|\bcup\b|top\s*\d+|winner|playoff|regional|nationals?|championship|invitational|store\s*champ|ultimate\s*cup|treasure\s*cup).

Standard rankings therefore exclude presale prices, listing outliers, serialized / event-prize printings, collector grails, accessories and non-card products, asks an extraordinary distance from Market Price, cards with no Market Price yet.

Wide market spread — the lowest ask is well above Market Price; often a thin market, not a change in value.

Market indexes & ranking inclusion

Set and rarity indexes on the Market pages rank by TCGplayer Market Price (falling back to Lowest Ask only when market price is missing). Rankings and index totals exclude presale and outlier tier cards so a placeholder preorder price or a single parked listing can't distort a headline number.

• Constituents. The top ~200 singles by current market price for the game in view — the most economically meaningful slice, not the entire catalog.
• Movers. Cards under $2 are filtered out, zero-change rows are dropped, and any single card's day-over-day move is capped at ±50% before it can factor into a headline change — this damps thin-market noise without hiding the underlying price.
• Presale handling. A set becomes presale-excluded automatically once its price history begins, and automatically re-enters ranked, confidence-gated totals once its release date passes — see "Presale handling" below for the mechanics.

Indexes and rankings are descriptive snapshots of current data, not investment advice or a prediction.

Deck Lab

Deck Lab builds a legal 60-card shell for any two-ink (or two-color) pairing from that game's daily priced card pool — presale and outlier cards are excluded from the pool entirely. Building is archetype-driven, not price-driven:

• Every card in the legal pool is scored against an archetype template (Aggro, Midrange, Control, Songs, Tempo, Beginner) that defines curve targets, minimum inkable count, minimum removal/draw, and a set of weighted deckbuilding "roles" (lore engine, removal, card draw, finisher, evasive, etc.).
• The builder seeds the top-scoring engine cards for that archetype, then greedily fills curve gaps by re-ranking the remaining pool on score first — price only breaks ties between cards that score equally, and even then it prefers the cheaper of two equally-good options rather than the more expensive one.
• A separate pass swaps in cheaper inkable alternatives if the deck falls short of its archetype's minimum-inkable target, and a soft budget check can trim the list toward the selected budget tier.

The four budget tiers change which cards are eligible, not how the deck is assembled:

• Budget — cheapest legal commons/uncommons/budget rares only.
• Modest — mid-priced role-players.
• High — upper rares, super-rares, and legendaries/secret rares are eligible.
• No Limit — the entire in-color/in-ink card pool is eligible. The build is still the same archetype-coherent, role-scored process as every other tier: price is a tiebreaker between equally-weighted picks, not the sort key — No Limit does not simply select the most expensive cards available.

Every card and price comes from that day's TCGplayer feed. Outputs are heuristic starter shells — a sensible launching point to tune, not a tournament-validated list. Deck legality changes as formats rotate; verify current rules before buying for competitive play.

Pack Lab

Pack Lab is a simulator — it opens virtual booster packs using modeled pull-rate weights per game, and computes pack/box expected value against that day's TCGplayer prices. No real cards are produced or shipped.

• Disney Lorcana. Ravensburger does not publish official pull rates. Weights are modeled from community-tracked box-break data.
• One Piece Card Game. Bandai does not publish per-slot pull rates for the One Piece TCG at all. Every slot in Pack Lab's One Piece odds is tagged source: 'estimated' with a basis string rendered verbatim in the odds modal, crediting community-aggregated box breaks (r/OnePieceTCG megathreads and TCGPlayer sealed-break streams) as the modeling basis. Pack composition (12 cards per pack: 10 filler + 2 rare-or-better) is taken from Bandai's own published product spec — only the rarity-slot odds within that structure are community estimates.

Presale handling

A set's presale/released status is derived from its release date, not set by hand. A card is classified presale automatically whenever today's date is before its set's wide-release date, and it automatically becomes eligible for normal, confidence-gated pricing the moment that release date passes — no manual step flips the switch.

• For Lorcana, release dates come from a maintained release-date map. For One Piece and Riftbound, the same daily build also pulls each set group's published date directly from TCGCSV and uses it as that set's release date, so newly announced sets get correct presale treatment without a manual entry.
• While presale: the set's cards are tagged conf: 'presale', excluded from index/set totals, Most Valuable and Movers rankings, and Deck Lab's card pool; 24-hour change and rolling history stats are also suppressed so a release-day price jump can't fake a collapse or a spike against placeholder history.
• After release: once a snapshot date is on or after the set's release date, its cards flow into the same pricing, confidence, and ranking path as every other released set — again automatically, driven by the date comparison.

Collection & watchlist synchronization

Your collection and watchlist are stored in your browser's localStorage by default and work with no account — localStorage is the source of truth on your device. If you create an optional account and sign in, that local data is pushed to a cloud copy and merged back down on future sign-ins across devices, so the cloud copy is a best-effort mirror, not a replacement for the local copy. Clearing your browser's site data removes the local copy; signing back in restores it from the cloud if you'd previously synced. See our Privacy Policy for what's stored.

What we don't do

• We don't average across multiple marketplaces. Prices reflect TCGplayer only, for all seven games.
• We don't include shipping, sales tax, or condition adjustments in headline figures.
• We don't surface intraday moves — every snapshot is daily.
• We don't claim Pack Lab odds or Deck Lab health scores are official or tournament-validated — both are clearly labelled heuristics/estimates.

Disclaimer

InkSight is provided for informational purposes only. Card prices are volatile, can move materially within a single day, and may lag the daily market between snapshots. Nothing on InkSight is financial, investment, or trading advice — treat every number as a starting point for your own judgement, not a guarantee. InkSight does not buy, sell, grade, or appraise cards on your behalf.

Methodology last reviewed: 2026-08-02.