RiftCompare Markets Desk

The Markets Desk byline covers writing that is generated directly from the RiftCompare price database rather than composed by hand — index movements, price snapshots and the numbers behind our market coverage.

It is a separate byline on purpose. Anything published under it is derived from recorded data with a fixed methodology, and we would rather label that plainly than pass it off as hand-written analysis.

Prices are collected daily from public store listings and marketplace APIs, matched to a specific printing by set code and collector number rather than by name, so a promo, an alternate art and a Signature print are never conflated into one figure.

The methodology is deliberately dull and deliberately fixed: cheapest live in-stock listing per card per market, ranked by delivered cost where a store's postage is known, never converted between currencies to declare a cross-market winner. When the data cannot support a claim, the claim is left out rather than estimated. Our editorial policy sets out the whole procedure, including how often each surface refreshes and how to report a figure that is wrong.

Nothing under this byline is investment advice, and card prices can and do fall.