Why Prices Can Sometimes Be Inaccurate
The estimated prices in the app are based on Cardmarket's trend price — which averages across all language variants of a card. Here's what that means and why it can lead to discrepancies.
One of the most-used features in the app is the price display: scan a card, check its value, done. Most of the time this works well — but sometimes the price shown doesn't match what you actually see on Cardmarket. There's a specific reason for this, and I want to explain it clearly.
Where does the price come from?
The app fetches the so-called trend price from Cardmarket. This value represents the price at which a card has typically been traded recently — it's not the current minimum ask, but a smoothed average across many transactions.
The catch: Cardmarket provides this trend price across all language variants of a card combined. A card like Pikachu ex from the Scarlet & Violet set exists in German, English, Italian, and other languages — and all of those variants feed into the same trend price.
Why this causes discrepancies
Language variants can differ significantly in price. Italian cards are often considerably cheaper than their English or German counterparts. Rarer language editions can be more expensive. When all of this gets averaged together, the result is a number that doesn't accurately reflect any single variant.
A concrete example: if the Italian version of a card trades at €2 and the English version at €8, the app might show a trend price of around €4–5 — even though you're holding a specific English card that's realistically worth quite a bit more.
When is the price still reliable?
For many cards, the language distribution on Cardmarket is fairly balanced — or the price differences between languages are small. In these cases, the displayed trend is a reasonable guide. Common cards from current sets tend to be well-represented, and the values usually hold up.
The rarer the card and the more uneven the language distribution in the market, the larger the potential discrepancy.
Promo cards and variants sharing the same name
Another source of inaccuracy is cards that exist in multiple variants with the same name and collector number. This is especially common with promo cards — for example, when the same card was released as a standard promo, a stamped version, or as part of a specific bundle. For cards like these, it's especially worth using the price-check buttons in the app. They link directly to search results on Cardmarket, eBay, or TCGplayer, where you can find the exact variant and look up the real market price.
What's going to change
We know this isn't ideal, and we're already working on a better solution — specifically, fetching language-specific prices directly. That would make the display significantly more accurate, since your German card's value would no longer be pulled down by cheaper Italian variants.