Guides
How to Read a Card Price in Pounds
Where our GBP card prices come from, how the conversion works, and what a market price does and doesn't tell you. The methodology behind every number on this site, in full.
Loaded Dice4 min read
Every price on this site is a converted market price, not a UK sale price. That distinction matters enough that we’d rather explain it in full than bury it in a footnote — so here is exactly how the number in front of you is produced, and what you can safely conclude from it.
Where the number comes from
Card prices come from JustTCG’s market data, which aggregates real sales and listings across the major marketplaces. It’s US-centric, and it’s denominated in dollars.
We don’t set prices, adjust them, or apply a house margin to them. What we do is convert them and show our workings.
The conversion
Dollar prices are converted to sterling at the European Central Bank’s daily reference rate, fetched through Frankfurter. No key, no attribution requirement, and a rate that’s a matter of public record rather than one vendor’s opinion.
One honest caveat, which is why our price pages say “the latest published rate” rather than “today’s rate”: the ECB publishes once per working day, around 16:00 CET. There’s no weekend or bank holiday publication. Look up a card on a Sunday and the rate applied was Friday’s.
For card prices that’s completely fine — currencies don’t move enough over a weekend to matter at these amounts — but it’s not the same as “today’s rate”, so we don’t claim it is.
What a market price is, and isn’t
A market price is roughly what a card has been changing hands for. It is not:
- A valuation. Nobody is obliged to pay it, and no insurer will accept it.
- A shop price. Retail includes VAT, handling, and a business that needs to still exist next year.
- A buylist price. What a shop pays you for a card is a fraction of market — that’s the margin the shop lives on. See buylist in the glossary.
- A guarantee of a sale. Thin markets move violently. A card with three sales in six months has a market price that’s really just an average of three opinions.
Why the converted price won’t match a UK listing
Convert an American price and you’ll usually land below what the card actually sells for here. That’s structural, not sellers taking liberties:
- VAT. UK prices include 20% VAT. American prices don’t include sales tax, which is added at the till and varies by state. You were never comparing like with like.
- A thinner market. Post-2021, buying from continental sellers means import VAT and handling fees above £135, so UK buyers largely stopped shopping the European pool. Fewer sellers competing for the same card means firmer prices here.
- Allocation. The UK gets a smaller share of most sealed product, and allocations are set well before anyone knows which sets turn out to be popular.
There’s a longer version of this in the blog: Why UK Card Prices Never Match the American Ones.
Condition and printing change everything
The headline figure on a card page is the cheapest priced option we hold. Underneath it is the full breakdown, because a card isn’t one price:
- Condition — Near Mint through to Damaged. The spread between NM and MP on a chase card can be tens of pounds. Definitions are in the glossary.
- Printing — normal, foil, reverse holo and the rest are separate markets that happen to share a name and a number.
- Language — priced separately, and not interchangeable.
If you’re checking a price to buy or sell a specific card, read the row, not the headline.
What we deliberately don’t do
- We don’t publish a price API. Prices render into pages and nowhere else. Our search endpoint returns card names and URLs, never prices — JustTCG’s licence forbids re-serving their data, and we’d rather keep the licence than be clever.
- We don’t sell cards here. LoadedTCG is a data and content site. When you want to actually buy something, that’s Loaded Dice, the shop this site comes from.
- We don’t show a price when we haven’t got one. A card with no market data says so, rather than displaying a guess or a stale figure from six months ago.
Coming: UK-native pricing
Converted US data is a starting point, not the destination. UK sale data is what we actually want behind these numbers, and it’s the next material upgrade to the price checker.
Until it lands, treat every price here as a well-sourced guide to what a card is worth — and treat the gap between it and a UK listing as information about the market, not as an error.
Start at the price checker, or see what’s coming out next.