Topic: TCG Mid. Questions.

Hey guys, I'm pretty new to using tcg as a price guide (I used to just use SCG since I felt they had a better idea of the market). Looking at tcg mid there are some cards that seem artificially inflated due to ridiculous "high" listings (i.e. $95 Bob, $170 Jace, etc.) When there are too few listings or a large amount of these "extreme" outliers these listings can have a big effect on what the average price is (via math). I feel it inflates the card price in a way that's not truly reflective of it's price.

I guess my question is how do people on this site deal with that? When I even hint at a card having a distorted value in a trade the other guy gets really defensive and sometimes just cancels the trade. Is discussing value outside of TCG mid just a taboo or what? I'm new here so I'm just curious.

Re: TCG Mid. Questions.

Can you give a more detailed example? I'm not sure what TCGPlayer's formula is for determining their medium prices, but it hasn't appeared especially distorted to me. For orders over $50, I think you tend to get free shipping, which means that any individual card worth that much will probably be more economical if you just buy it at the 'low' price (~$64 for Bob) instead of negotiating a trade with it valued at the medium price. (~$75 for the same card) A similar phenomenon also appears with super low-cost cards. (< $0.10)

Re: TCG Mid. Questions.

The issue you described has been an issue here.  The API the site had been using (and may still be using--I'll let Sebi comment as to what API we are using currently) was using the TCGPlayer mean (average) pricing.  Some months back, TCGPlayer switched its pricing model to a median price (prices at the midpoint of all recorded prices).  Most traders prefer the median price, because it is less prone to being influenced by a few outliers with extreme prices (in either direction).

I know the hope was that the site would eventually adopt the ability to use the median price. I've been away most of the summer, so I personally don't know if we've had any back-end changes--perhaps one of the other mods could chime in on that point.

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