Grading Opportunity: the expected value of submitting

The matrix

The heatmap crosses sixteen raw-price buckets ($10 through $1,000+, each running from its own label up to the next) with six Grade 10 multiple bands (2–4× through 30×+). A card is placed by its own raw price and its own gem multiple; a card below $10 raw, or below 2×, is outside the grid and is COUNTED as such rather than pushed into the nearest square. Each square publishes its card count, its median Adjusted EV, the share of its cards that are EV-positive, and its admitted Grade 9 + Grade 10 sales over the trailing 12 months — a deliberately wider window than the 6-month pricing window, because "does this kind of card actually trade" is a question about a full season, not about today's price. The matrix is computed over EVERY qualifying card, not just the board's top-ranked slice, so a square's card count is a count of the whole catalogue and will not reconcile with the board's rows.

Volume is the default shading for a reason: a square can be EV-positive on paper and be a market that changes hands twice a year, and a slab you cannot sell has not made money. The two other fills (median EV, share EV-positive) are the same squares, re-coloured on the client — all five grids ('All' plus each era group) are precomputed, so the era filter costs no request-time read. A square with no qualifying card is hatched, never shaded as a zero. "Where the money is" names the highest EV-positive square that holds at least 10 cards AND 100 annual graded sales, and names nothing at all when none does.

Coverage

34779 candidate cards considered, 3515 qualified (262 on their own population, 238 on the named prior). 1772 had graded evidence but no qualifying raw price; 22134 had a raw price but fell short of the Grade 9/10 floor; 258 cleared every floor but priced a gem multiple over 100x and were refused rather than published or averaged into a median; 387 cleared every floor but a required tier's sales were too dispersed to trust (one sale more than five times that tier's own median) and were omitted rather than priced. Evidence spans 2026-04 through 2026-10.

What could make this wrong

A graded population skews toward cards worth grading in the first place — this page cannot see a card nobody ever submitted, and the prior is a stated assumption, not a measurement. The chart's shaded region approximates EV-positive territory using the Grade 10 term of the formula alone, AT THE STATED PRIOR (a two-axis plot cannot represent a card's own Grade 9 price, or a per-card population distribution), so a dot can sit outside the shaded band and still be EV-positive on the grid's own figure, or vice versa — the grid's `Adjusted EV`/`EV (average card)` columns are the numbers that actually count, `Adjusted EV` first. A thin tier's mean moves more on one large sale than the true market did; the sales count beside every price is how a reader judges that. A raw price and a Grade 10 price are matched by the exact card variant, never by name alone — but an aggregator-reported graded sale that was mistitled for a different finish or printing can still land on the wrong variant upstream of this page, which is exactly what a gem multiple over 100x almost always means; those rows are refused rather than shown (Coverage, above), not corrected, because this page has no way to know which side of the mismatch is the real card.

Research classification generated from observable market data with stated confidence and assumptions. Not personalized financial advice.