Counter Gain — 259/217

The absorption ladder walks the visible delivered-price ask book cheapest-first: what each slice of the book costs, the ask it leaves marginal, and how far that sits from the last price the card actually traded at. Manipulation risk is the worse of two reads — how many days of this card’s own turnover it would take to absorb the cost of control, and whether the whole buyable book fits inside a single ordinary order.

Daily units are the venue's own sold-quantity history, expanded off each bucket's real span, plus confirmed prints from the other side of the market. Prints come from the live sales tape at delivered prices. The floor is the cheapest delivered ask (item + required shipping) across venues — the same one FAIR VALUE prices against.

Over 30d: 99 confirmed print(s) (3 with no contemporaneous ask reference, excluded from net flow); net flow -$29.20 across 24 buy-side vs 125 sell-side unit(s); large prints (>= $2.57) were 28% of notional and skewed sell-side -> DISTRIBUTING.

Sealed product from Ascended Heroes — the set this card was printed in. We track which set a product belongs to, not which cards are inside it. Appreciation is each product’s last stored price against its own recorded MSRP, in percent. The card’s call is the MEDIAN of those percentages across the products that have an MSRP — a median rather than a mean, so one outlier SKU cannot carry a whole set — and a product with no MSRP on file is left out of that aggregate rather than counted as zero; it still lists below with its price. MSRP is somebody’s assertion rather than a published dataset, so it is shown only where a source is recorded against it, and that source is on the row’s hover. The bands are a legend for the percentage the card prints beside them: within ±5% is at MSRP, which is this repo’s own fair-value tolerance; up to +25% is a slight premium; up to +100% a significant one; at or above +100% the price has at least doubled and the figure is stated as a multiple, because a four-digit percentage is not a number anybody reads. Each price line takes a day’s observed low/high sale range and plots its midpoint; on a day with no recorded sale it carries the provider’s own daily guide value instead — a quoted price, not a transaction — and those days are drawn dashed, never described as trades. Every line is indexed to its own first stored day = 100, so the chart compares appreciation between products rather than price levels: a booster pack and a booster box cannot honestly share a dollar axis.

Each row is one tracked retailer's most recent reading of one of the set's sealed products, at that retailer's own SKU. A restock is an observed OUT_OF_STOCK → IN_STOCK transition in that SKU's reading history, never a change we inferred from a price or a gap. Shelf prices are pre-tax and exclude shipping, so they are not delivered prices and are never fed into a floor.

Each reading takes the venue's own listing count for this card in this condition — the whole book — at that instant. The direction is classified by the platform's absorption reading over that series: a book drawn down with demand behind it reads as accumulation, one that refills after a drawdown reads as distribution. Copies and sellers come from the cheapest asks we sample, not from the book, and are labelled as such. Sold units are confirmed prints from the live tape over the same span, and are shown only when the tape reaches back past the first reading.

The direction is classified over the platform-standard 30-day trailing window. That window is a scope, not a history: it contains exactly the readings counted on this card and no others — and only readings that counted the venue’s own book, never a sampled one trended against a counted one.

Graded population is print run × how often anyone bothers grading it, and the second factor moves with VALUE — so population is divided by price^0.606, the elasticity fitted across 3,826 cards that carry a population, a price and a pull rate at once. That normalised count is turned into a SET pack scale using the card’s pull rate (every card in a set is an independent read on how many packs exist, pooled by median), then brought back down to this card by its own pull rate. The band is a tertile of the result across every card that clears the gates.

Nobody has ever published a Pokémon print run, and this does not recover one — it is an ORDER, not a count. It reads surviving graded supply across PSA, CGC and ACE, so ungraded and sealed stock are invisible to it. What it is checked against: the model puts Black & White at the bottom of the catalog and modern Scarlet & Violet at the top, which is where the smallest and largest print runs actually are.