pricing guide
How we price your cards
This is how we price cards at ROTO's TCG. Even if you're not selling to us, this is still good info to have. It'll help you understand what your cards are worth regardless of who you sell to. You've probably seen vendors advertise high buying percentages. That number sounds great until you realize they're pulling comps from the lowest sales they can find. A big percentage of a low number is still a low number. So here's exactly how we do it.
modern singles
Modern singles are the easiest category to price. For lower-value cards, we use Collectr. It's fast and accurate enough for cards that aren't worth a ton. Once a card gets into the few-hundred-dollar range, we switch to a mix of TCG Player and eBay Last Solds and average them out to land on a market price. If there are outlier sales in either direction, unusually high or unusually low, we ignore those. We also ignore very recent eBay sales that are noticeably different from the rest of the trend. Those could be a Best Offer that was accepted at a different price, or a sale that never actually goes through.
vintage and mid-era singles
Older cards are priced exclusively through eBay Last Solds. Apps like Collectr tend to be pretty inaccurate when it comes to vintage and mid-era stuff. They just don't update fast enough. Condition is a much bigger factor with older singles, and we do have a condition guide you can refer to. That said, condition is subjective. People often inflate the condition of their cards in online listings, or they just genuinely see the card differently than someone else would. So what we do is photo-match. We take the actual card you bring us and compare it side by side with eBay sold listings to find cards in the same condition that actually sold. That gives us the most accurate picture of what someone is willing to pay for a card that looks like yours.
sealed product
For relatively modern sealed product, we usually already have a purchase price in mind and there isn't much room for negotiation there. But there's a lot of sealed product out there. Older stuff, uncommon sets, things that don't come through the door every day. For anything we don't already have a price on, we comp it through eBay Last Solds the same way we do with singles.
buying percentages
We don't stick to a fixed buying percentage. We've bought binders at 60% and we've paid 92% on a single. The number depends on what cards you're bringing us, the condition they're in, and who's selling. We pride ourselves on working with people and their needs. Every deal is a conversation, not a formula. We'd rather work something out that makes sense for both sides than slap a flat rate on everything.
interested in selling?
interested in selling?
If you want to sell to us, fill out the form below and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.
Fair conversations, clear offers, zero pressure.
Collections of all sizes welcome across Toronto, Waterloo, and beyond.
We review every submission personally. No bots, no algorithms. Just Ron and Tom.