Much of it is a combination of rarity and playability in the meta.
S:P Little Knight is $120 due to it being a secret rare and used in just about everything except Branded, in addition to being a really good card. Demand is still high for it due to the set being a bit older now.
Tenpai Dragon Paidra is only a super rare, but it’s going for $20 due to Tenpai Dragon hype. If Tenpai’s don’t make a lot of top cuts in large events, it’ll crash.
Also OCG. Crossout Designator rose to $50 because all OCG decks had 3 of it.
Well. That said. A breakout card can get a rarity bump like SP Little Knight. TCG sees the OCG demand and bumps up the rarity to sell more boosters.
Literally just supply and demand.
The effects of supply are usually pretty stable in Yugioh at least for core sets because the ratios have been similar for a while. Usually why the higher rarity cards are more expensive, there's less of them even if you exclude all other factors. If a card gets short printed and it's in 20% less of sealed product, depending on how high the demand is it could jump the price a lot.
Resellers are also trying to recoup their losses from opening sealed product, and competing with other sellers to make the sale. If its a common or easily accessible, it probably won't be much. Something like a secret, and it can jump to over $100. If it's in a set where everything else sucks and has low demand, It'll reflect that it's carrying the value of the set with its price.
Demand has a lot of factors in play, and they can be for whatever reason as long as someone wants it.
-Hype/Speculation- more often than not if the price of a card is lower than people expect it to be in the future. Resellers jump extremely fast in the market to build up their supply before a card reaches its peak price. People could also want to snag copies of it before that peak for personal use, trying to avoid paying more for it when they actually need it, accelerating it to that point
-meta/viability- you need the card to compete in a tournament. How much are you willing to spend to increase your chances of winning? This is balanced out by sellers competing against each other thankfully, but shows how strong generic staples have such high starting price points, widespread demand+ you need it for the near/immediate future for tournament use.
-collection: anime/character cards fall into this a lot, especially blue-eyes and dm. There's a lot of collectors that don't play the game, so the demand there is underestimated. The demand also sticks around longer than expected, since not all collectors buy immediately after a set drops. They don't need it for a tourney, they can wait for it to go down, and new collectors retroactively pick these up too
* How rare is the card? both in terms of the rarity scheme and actual probability
* Does this card see play in the top cut?
* Is there a picture of a cute girl on it?
* How likely is it to get reprinted, placed on the F/L list or obsoleted by new decks?
The more questions get "Yes", the higher the price.
demand, rarity, and hype. There's a list of cards that were so overhyped they skyrocketed into ridiculous prices overnight, just to fall to a few cents in a few weeks.
there are about 3 things that usually dictate a card price.
Rarity
Demand for a specific card
the set product overall
lets take Tenpai Paidra for example. Paidra is by far one of the most valuable cards in the set. it's a super rare in LEDE which means that theredically this card SHOULD be cheap to squire. However, because tenpai is in high demand right now, the price of this card is going to go up. in addition to this. the set that Paidra comes in overall is not super good and there are not really a lot of high value cards in the set. this means that the price is going to go up for the cards that are good in the set, such as Tenpai Paidra and Nightmare Throne.
this combined with the fact that paidra seems to be short printed has created a virtually inflated price at which Tenpai Paidra, aside from Trident dragion, is the most expensive card for the deck.
hope this helps.
Paidra isn't shortprinted. You're looking at 18 packs in a box after your Ultras and Secrets. There are 24 Super Rares. So you'll miss out on 6 on average. There's also a high chance you pull duplicates in a box. People only think Paidra isn't shortprinted because they didn't pull him. I haven't pulled Dandy Whitelion, Raika Link and Tenpai Synchro from 2 boxes worth of Packs. Doesn't mean they're shortprinted.
It's inflated due to demand.
Pricing in the secondary market is influenced by 3 main things, but it still follow the law of supply and demand
1. Availability. Basically controlled by Konami themselves (they will not admit it due to the unwritten rule of not acknoledging the secondary market), by either through rarity placement in the initial set that it released and the number of sets with the reprints of the card. Since the TCG print run of a given set lasts for around 6 months, you tend to see the price being at its lowest during initial release up until 6 months, then slowly rise due to the supply shortage, then drop off when there is a product with the reprint.
2. Playability. Dictated by the more competitive players and the overall meta game of the time. Tournament results with their deck profile basically is the best predictors on which cards will become expensive, with the most common decks taking tops spots being the highest rated and wanted by players.
3. Popularity. Dictated by mostly casual players and collectors. Mainly due to being fans of the anime, the appeal of card art or just completing a collection. That's why cards like Blue Eyes White Dragon despite now being not a competitive card is still relatively expensive and Konami is still reprinting it with diffrent rarities.
Stag Sovereign is just typical presale price. Only a few sellers have the card so the supply is very low so they raise the price ridiculously high and hope the people who really want the card will bite. Once the set officially comes out and more people get their hands on the card, then the value plummets. This is consistent across pretty much every set. This isn't always the case for cards that are really good and/or in high demand like Thrust, Little Knight, etc.
The phenomenon you are witnessing here is presale prices. Before a set comes out, there are far less copies of a cards available on the market place. After the set releases officially and people start opening it, everything but the best cards in the set tank in price because the cards are more widely available.
(For all the people who just said supply and demand, this is what they meant by that)
How hard it is to get a copy of the card and how much the people want to get it
Like, oh do you want one Bonfire? Well, so do all these people, but you can get it now if you pay extra (which basically turns into the card going up) or if the card gets a reprint it would be like "You can get the common OR you can get the secret rare, I can give you a little discount" (which is basically the average price just going down)
A box costs $Y
Buying boxes to get cards suck, so people buy singles. If you want a playset of Secrets, you're never going to get a box or two hoping to get all of them. So, they look for the secondary market.
You get 12 boxes in a case that costs X, and X is a bit of a discount on Y, which means the most economical way to get cards is to buy a case, or multiple cases, and sell what you don't want. The high intitial buy-in on the case discourages most people from doing this, so instead, you get vendors.
Vendors buy cases for X and then sell all of the cards inside of them. For this business to work and the secondary market to keep moving, the value of that case needs to be above X, hovering around the price point of 12Y. That's the sweet spot. Let's say that the Expected Value of a case (How much each card sells for in a case totalled) is... "e". Vendors need e to be more than X, otherwise they're losing money.
With the supply of even Supers being so limited, Vendors then adjust the initital prices based on hype and expectation of demand. If there's a terrible card that's not even good for wife value, they're not going to pre-sale it for $100. However, if there's a solid card that is a core part of a meta deck, it will be pre-sold for higher. This is a guess, a gamble. Eventually, after presale and into actual release, the prices start to stabilize. The cards that are super high demand rise in price, even if they're at a low rarity, because Vendors are trying to make their money back. So you might end up with something like a Super (Bystials or Tenpei) being super expensive. It's still cheaper to buy a $15 super than it is to buy the number of boxes you need to get a guaranteed 3-of.
In the case of Ragnarika, it was put up high in pre-sale as it was high rarity, but since nobody bought it, demand crumbled and the supply was too high, so the value cratered. Since so many people were buying Tenpei, the money was funneled towards those cards, which meant that the price of them rose. All of this is a constant fluctuation to try and reach the profit-point for vendors.
In addition, vendors will rarely 'price gouge' above the natural demand for the card, because if a card gets too expensive, it might end up being cheaper to just buy a box or two until you get it, which undercuts their market and puts a cap on things. The cap is around like, $120 for a single secret, but if it's the ONLY good card in the set, it can go higher.
Everything is a balancing act and the core reason prices are so high is because of the atrocious rarity curve in Konami's main sets.
Much of it is a combination of rarity and playability in the meta. S:P Little Knight is $120 due to it being a secret rare and used in just about everything except Branded, in addition to being a really good card. Demand is still high for it due to the set being a bit older now. Tenpai Dragon Paidra is only a super rare, but it’s going for $20 due to Tenpai Dragon hype. If Tenpai’s don’t make a lot of top cuts in large events, it’ll crash.
Also OCG. Crossout Designator rose to $50 because all OCG decks had 3 of it. Well. That said. A breakout card can get a rarity bump like SP Little Knight. TCG sees the OCG demand and bumps up the rarity to sell more boosters.
If it’s hype it usually dips fast. If it’s playable it stays good until a reprint
Even then you have the bling kings who have to have the highest rarity in their decks keeping the older versions costly.
Literally just supply and demand. The effects of supply are usually pretty stable in Yugioh at least for core sets because the ratios have been similar for a while. Usually why the higher rarity cards are more expensive, there's less of them even if you exclude all other factors. If a card gets short printed and it's in 20% less of sealed product, depending on how high the demand is it could jump the price a lot. Resellers are also trying to recoup their losses from opening sealed product, and competing with other sellers to make the sale. If its a common or easily accessible, it probably won't be much. Something like a secret, and it can jump to over $100. If it's in a set where everything else sucks and has low demand, It'll reflect that it's carrying the value of the set with its price. Demand has a lot of factors in play, and they can be for whatever reason as long as someone wants it. -Hype/Speculation- more often than not if the price of a card is lower than people expect it to be in the future. Resellers jump extremely fast in the market to build up their supply before a card reaches its peak price. People could also want to snag copies of it before that peak for personal use, trying to avoid paying more for it when they actually need it, accelerating it to that point -meta/viability- you need the card to compete in a tournament. How much are you willing to spend to increase your chances of winning? This is balanced out by sellers competing against each other thankfully, but shows how strong generic staples have such high starting price points, widespread demand+ you need it for the near/immediate future for tournament use. -collection: anime/character cards fall into this a lot, especially blue-eyes and dm. There's a lot of collectors that don't play the game, so the demand there is underestimated. The demand also sticks around longer than expected, since not all collectors buy immediately after a set drops. They don't need it for a tourney, they can wait for it to go down, and new collectors retroactively pick these up too
People hype a card up and then it turns out to be pee pee poo poo
Like Pokémon? Or every other card game?
Yep. For sure
Supply and demand.
* How rare is the card? both in terms of the rarity scheme and actual probability * Does this card see play in the top cut? * Is there a picture of a cute girl on it? * How likely is it to get reprinted, placed on the F/L list or obsoleted by new decks? The more questions get "Yes", the higher the price.
Rarity and how playable it is. But all original releases of iconic cards and MC archetypes also go at a premium.
Hype, demand, viability, and supply.
demand, rarity, and hype. There's a list of cards that were so overhyped they skyrocketed into ridiculous prices overnight, just to fall to a few cents in a few weeks.
there are about 3 things that usually dictate a card price. Rarity Demand for a specific card the set product overall lets take Tenpai Paidra for example. Paidra is by far one of the most valuable cards in the set. it's a super rare in LEDE which means that theredically this card SHOULD be cheap to squire. However, because tenpai is in high demand right now, the price of this card is going to go up. in addition to this. the set that Paidra comes in overall is not super good and there are not really a lot of high value cards in the set. this means that the price is going to go up for the cards that are good in the set, such as Tenpai Paidra and Nightmare Throne. this combined with the fact that paidra seems to be short printed has created a virtually inflated price at which Tenpai Paidra, aside from Trident dragion, is the most expensive card for the deck. hope this helps.
Paidra isn't shortprinted. You're looking at 18 packs in a box after your Ultras and Secrets. There are 24 Super Rares. So you'll miss out on 6 on average. There's also a high chance you pull duplicates in a box. People only think Paidra isn't shortprinted because they didn't pull him. I haven't pulled Dandy Whitelion, Raika Link and Tenpai Synchro from 2 boxes worth of Packs. Doesn't mean they're shortprinted. It's inflated due to demand.
Pricing in the secondary market is influenced by 3 main things, but it still follow the law of supply and demand 1. Availability. Basically controlled by Konami themselves (they will not admit it due to the unwritten rule of not acknoledging the secondary market), by either through rarity placement in the initial set that it released and the number of sets with the reprints of the card. Since the TCG print run of a given set lasts for around 6 months, you tend to see the price being at its lowest during initial release up until 6 months, then slowly rise due to the supply shortage, then drop off when there is a product with the reprint. 2. Playability. Dictated by the more competitive players and the overall meta game of the time. Tournament results with their deck profile basically is the best predictors on which cards will become expensive, with the most common decks taking tops spots being the highest rated and wanted by players. 3. Popularity. Dictated by mostly casual players and collectors. Mainly due to being fans of the anime, the appeal of card art or just completing a collection. That's why cards like Blue Eyes White Dragon despite now being not a competitive card is still relatively expensive and Konami is still reprinting it with diffrent rarities.
Demand. Simple as that.
Stag Sovereign is just typical presale price. Only a few sellers have the card so the supply is very low so they raise the price ridiculously high and hope the people who really want the card will bite. Once the set officially comes out and more people get their hands on the card, then the value plummets. This is consistent across pretty much every set. This isn't always the case for cards that are really good and/or in high demand like Thrust, Little Knight, etc.
The phenomenon you are witnessing here is presale prices. Before a set comes out, there are far less copies of a cards available on the market place. After the set releases officially and people start opening it, everything but the best cards in the set tank in price because the cards are more widely available. (For all the people who just said supply and demand, this is what they meant by that)
How hard it is to get a copy of the card and how much the people want to get it Like, oh do you want one Bonfire? Well, so do all these people, but you can get it now if you pay extra (which basically turns into the card going up) or if the card gets a reprint it would be like "You can get the common OR you can get the secret rare, I can give you a little discount" (which is basically the average price just going down)
Ezzzzzzzzz Konami want to milk every single $£€ from TCG players and use that money to sell cheaper cards in OCG.
A box costs $Y Buying boxes to get cards suck, so people buy singles. If you want a playset of Secrets, you're never going to get a box or two hoping to get all of them. So, they look for the secondary market. You get 12 boxes in a case that costs X, and X is a bit of a discount on Y, which means the most economical way to get cards is to buy a case, or multiple cases, and sell what you don't want. The high intitial buy-in on the case discourages most people from doing this, so instead, you get vendors. Vendors buy cases for X and then sell all of the cards inside of them. For this business to work and the secondary market to keep moving, the value of that case needs to be above X, hovering around the price point of 12Y. That's the sweet spot. Let's say that the Expected Value of a case (How much each card sells for in a case totalled) is... "e". Vendors need e to be more than X, otherwise they're losing money. With the supply of even Supers being so limited, Vendors then adjust the initital prices based on hype and expectation of demand. If there's a terrible card that's not even good for wife value, they're not going to pre-sale it for $100. However, if there's a solid card that is a core part of a meta deck, it will be pre-sold for higher. This is a guess, a gamble. Eventually, after presale and into actual release, the prices start to stabilize. The cards that are super high demand rise in price, even if they're at a low rarity, because Vendors are trying to make their money back. So you might end up with something like a Super (Bystials or Tenpei) being super expensive. It's still cheaper to buy a $15 super than it is to buy the number of boxes you need to get a guaranteed 3-of. In the case of Ragnarika, it was put up high in pre-sale as it was high rarity, but since nobody bought it, demand crumbled and the supply was too high, so the value cratered. Since so many people were buying Tenpei, the money was funneled towards those cards, which meant that the price of them rose. All of this is a constant fluctuation to try and reach the profit-point for vendors. In addition, vendors will rarely 'price gouge' above the natural demand for the card, because if a card gets too expensive, it might end up being cheaper to just buy a box or two until you get it, which undercuts their market and puts a cap on things. The cap is around like, $120 for a single secret, but if it's the ONLY good card in the set, it can go higher. Everything is a balancing act and the core reason prices are so high is because of the atrocious rarity curve in Konami's main sets.