Methodology

Where our data comes from

• Independent stores — the public product catalogue of each of the 172 stores we track, the same feed its own storefront publishes, requested with the store’s market selected so the price is the one a local buyer is charged. Our importer honours each store’s robots.txt.
• eBay — eBay’s official Browse API, searched on each market’s own eBay site.
• TCGplayer — TCGplayer’s public product search, the one its own website uses: the listings behind the US comparison row, and TCGplayer’s market price for the reference figures.
• CardTrader — CardTrader’s documented API, for the EU marketplace listings in the EU comparison.
• Cardmarket — Cardmarket’s public price-guide and product-catalogue files, used with Cardmarket’s written permission, and only as a reference figure for the UK and the EU.
• The cards themselves — names, types, domains, rarities and rules text from Riot Games’ official card gallery at playriftbound.com and, for the earlier sets, the RiftScribe community card database. Card art is Riot Games’ own, used under Riot’s “Legal Jibber Jabber” fan-content policy and served from our own copy.
• Pull rates — Riot’s published pack structure, “Collectability in Riftbound: Origins”, for Box EV and the pack simulator.
• Demand — our own anonymous counts of which cards visitors search for and open (see Demand Finder below).

Every price in a comparison is the asking price of a copy that was for sale when we read it; the reference figures are the marketplaces’ own aggregates. We don’t record what individual copies sold for, and nothing on the site forecasts a price.

Matching a listing to a card

A listing is tied to one printing by its set and collector number, not by the card’s name alone, so a promo, an alternate art and a Signature print of the same card stay three products with three prices. Listings for a non-English printing are dropped rather than priced as the English card. When a store offers one card in several conditions we record its best-condition copy, then the cheapest at that condition, together with the wording the store used. A store’s prices are refused if they arrive in a different currency from its market’s, so a storefront that quietly serves the wrong currency cannot publish a wrong price.

Condition grading

There is no official cross-marketplace grading standard for trading cards. eBay, TCGplayer, CardTrader and Cardmarket each use their own vocabulary, and independent stores describe condition however their storefront lets them. We standardise every listing onto one five-grade scale — NM, LP, MP, HP, DMG — but we never discard the source’s own wording: every price row on a card page shows our normalised grade next to (or hoverable to reveal) exactly what the store or marketplace actually said, so you can see the translation rather than trust it blindly.

When a listing’s condition text doesn’t match any known pattern, we show it unclassified rather than guess — a wrong condition claim is worse than an unlabelled one. Our condition guide explains what each grade means for the copy you receive.

TCGplayer and Cardmarket reference prices

In the US, TCGplayer is an ordinary row in the comparison: the cheapest in-stock English Near Mint copy of that printing, at that seller’s price and shipping. Everywhere else, the TCGplayer figure is its US market price converted into your currency, and the Cardmarket figure is the low from its public price guide (converted to pounds for the UK). Neither is a local listing you can buy at that price — nobody sells as “TCGplayer Australia”, and the figure leaves out international postage and import charges — so both are shown below the comparison as clearly labelled reference prices and are never counted as a store, never set a card’s cheapest price and never outrank a real local listing. In the UK and the EU the Cardmarket figure leads that reference block.

Currency conversion

A store comparison is priced in its market’s own currency, at the price the store itself charges. We convert between currencies only in these places:

• Canada’s “eBay US” rows — eBay listings from the US, converted to Canadian dollars, with postage left unquoted because a Canadian buyer pays international postage the listing doesn’t state.
• TCGplayer’s market price — converted into your currency for the reference block, the Deal Finder, the homepage’s savings figures and Box EV.
• Price history — recorded in US dollars and converted into your currency for every chart, the price movers and the RiftCompare Index (see below).
• Cross-market price gaps — another market’s price converted into yours so the two can be compared.
• UK prices shown in euros — a visitor in the eurozone browsing UK stores can have them shown in EUR, with the pound price beside each one.
• Cardmarket’s UK reference — its euro low, converted to pounds at a fixed rate of 0.86 (1 EUR = £0.86) set in our Cardmarket import.

All of them except Cardmarket’s UK reference use one hand-maintained rate table, refreshed periodically rather than pulled from a live FX feed:

These rates are indicative only. Real checkout is always billed in the store’s own currency — any figure converted through this table is a reference, never a quote, and it leaves out whatever your card issuer charges to pay in another currency.

Postage and delivered totals

Most stores do not publish postage on a product page; they quote it at checkout. So a card’s comparison shows a delivered total only where the listing carries its own postage — an eBay listing whose seller states it, and TCGplayer’s US listing. Every other row says postage is added at checkout rather than treating it as free.

Where a whole order is priced — Best Basket, a portfolio’s replacement cost and each store’s own page — we use postage measured at the store’s own checkout. A probe fills anonymous carts (one card, ten cards, and few-card carts worth about 20, 50, 100 and 150 in the local currency) and asks each checkout what it would charge to deliver them; it never places an order. 159 of our 172 stores are measured. The addresses it asks about:

• United States — New York, San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago
• Australia — Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart, Darwin, Canberra
• United Kingdom — London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Belfast
• Singapore — Singapore
• Canada — Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Calgary
• Europe (EU) — Madrid, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam

An order of any other size is priced from those measured carts, always leaning dearer:

• a cheap letter rate is offered only to orders no bigger, in value and card count, than the ones it was quoted for;
• free postage applies only from a threshold we actually saw a checkout apply, never from a store’s advertised round number;
• if we don’t know your region, the dearest region’s rate is used and the quote says “up to”; an order bigger than anything measured is quoted “from”;
• a store we could not measure is charged at least its market’s dearest measured one-card rate and labelled “est.”, so an estimate is never the reason a store looks cheapest;
• a store that doesn’t post to you (pickup only, say) is left out of order planning, and the plan says why.

The probe runs again every month, and its results are reviewed before the rates on the site change. Rates drift between runs, so the store’s own checkout is always the final word.

How a comparison is ordered

A card’s store comparison lists the in-stock copies in your market cheapest first by item price, with the delivered total shown where the store publishes its postage. A store’s known postage — when we know it — breaks ties between otherwise-equal prices, but it never demotes a store below a competitor just because that competitor’s postage happens to be known upfront and theirs isn’t. An eBay row sits at its own price position like any other row, its button in eBay’s own colour with a “Paid link” tag; nothing is moved up or down for money. Reference prices are never in the list at all. See our editorial & pricing policy for how we make money and why it never affects this order.

Price history and method changes

Once a week we record each card’s cheapest price across the Australian, US, UK and Singapore markets, converted to US dollars. That single series is every card’s price-history chart in every market, converted into your currency, and it is what the price movers and the Index compare week to week. It is a worldwide low, not your own market’s history.

When the way a price is sourced changes, the step it causes is not a market move. On 23 September 2026 the US TCGplayer row switched from TCGplayer’s market price to its cheapest English listing, which is usually lower. Weekly comparisons — movers, 7-day changes, the card-page narrative — never compare a point from before that switch with one after it, and the Index flattens the step. Rising Cards is an exception, by choice: it still reads across the switch, because dropping the older points would leave too few weeks to screen on, so a US-sourced card can show one step there. Until any card has a week on the new basis, price movers shows the last week before the switch instead, labelled with its date, so every price it compares is on the old basis.

How each tool works