Pokémon deals, before the damn scalpers get there

Pokémon cards don't behave like toys. A new set drops, the Elite Trainer Boxes vanish, and a third-party seller lists the last few at double the price and calls it the market. Then a restock lands and the price falls back to earth — which, if you only look at the strikethrough, reads as a damn miracle discount. The real deals here are usually small: a booster box a few percent under where it has genuinely been selling is worth knowing about, because this stuff sells out.

How we damn well score Pokémon

Pokémon gets a lower minimum drop than most pages, because genuine discounts on hyped sets are small and a modest cut on a box people are hunting is a real event. What we don't lower is the honesty bar: when a run of scalped days drags a product's 90-day average well above its median, we score against the median instead, and anything more than 75% below its reference is thrown out. Pokémon promotions tend to run for weeks rather than a day, so we search this shelf over a 31-day window, and a product only counts when its listed brand is Pokémon.

How the Damn Good Score works →