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Holo Returns

Methodology

How prices are cleaned

Every price on Holo Returns is a sold price, not an asking price, and every one carries the date it was captured. The rules below are the same ones used to research each episode of the channel.

Where the numbers come from

  • Sold listings: TCGplayer sales, eBay sold listings and PriceCharting's published sales.
  • Retail and MSRP: the retailer's or Pokemon Center's own product page, captured with a date.
  • News: official Pokemon announcements and established Pokemon news sites.
  • Never a source for a price: other creators' videos, forum posts or social media. Those show sentiment, not what something sold for.

What gets filtered out

Raw sales logs are messy. Before any figure is published, each listing title is checked and removed if it is:

  • A preorder or presale listing.
  • Titled with a different set's name.
  • A Pokemon Center Elite Trainer Box in a regular Elite Trainer Box log, or the reverse.
  • A graded card in a sealed or raw-card log.

How comparisons stay fair

  • No preorder prices as a reference. A preorder price and a post-release price are different markets, so a change is never measured from a presale print. A release-month average that mixes both counts as presale.
  • Same marketplace on both dates. eBay sales tend to print lower than TCGplayer, so a comparison uses one marketplace across its dates, or the same published price on two dates. Mixing them would overstate a drop.
  • One sale is not a price. Day-level prices use days with three or more sales.
  • Volume compares two neighboring weeks, never a week against a distant baseline or a partial week.

Retail availability

A claim that a store has or hasn't stocked a product comes only from that store's own page, captured with a date. Pokemon Center exclusives are sold only on pokemoncenter.com; marketplace listings of them are resale, not retail.

Verdicts and dates

Each product carries one call (buy, wait, hold or skip) with the date it was made. The date changes only when the data or the call changes, and every change is logged on the page. Prices move fast, so treat any figure as a snapshot from its date.

Not financial advice.