Our standard

We show you what we know. Nothing else.

Every price on Hoshino comes from somewhere real — a completed sale, a live listing, or a published price guide — and we label which one it is, every time. When we don’t hold enough real data to back a number honestly, we don’t fill the gap with a guess. We show nothing.

What each price actually means

Four different things can put a number on a card. We never let one masquerade as another.

SoldA confirmed, completed sale. Someone paid this price for this exact card, at this grade, on this date.
Sold · inferredReconstructed from a listing’s own lifecycle — for example, an auction that ended in a way consistent with a completed sale — where we don’t hold a direct sold confirmation. Always labelled as inferred. Never shown as a confirmed sale.
AskA live asking price. Nobody has bought it yet at this number — it is what a seller wants, right now.
GuideA marketplace’s own published price-guide point (for example, a market or trend price a listing site publishes) — a reference figure the venue publishes, not a sale we personally observed.
Recorded · not sold onSome venues publish what a card sold for but never when. Mercari Japan is the biggest of them. For those sales we hold the day we recorded it, which is an upper bound on when it actually sold — never a later date, sometimes an earlier one by days. We label every one of them rather than let a collection date pass for a sale date, and we will not tell you a price moved over seven days when part of what separates the two windows is when we happened to look. The price is real either way; only the timing is uncertain.

One grade, compared to itself

A PSA 10 and a raw copy of the same card can differ by 40× or more. So every comparison on this site — a price, a trend, a cross-market gap — sits inside one grade tier at a time: PSA 10 against PSA 10, raw against raw. We never average across grades, and we never show you one blended “card price” that hides which tier it came from.

Every claim links to its source

Prices here aren’t just numbers — they deep-link to the sale, the listing, or the guide they came from, so you can check our work yourself instead of taking our word for it.

No data, no number

A dash on this site means exactly that: we don’t hold enough real, clean data to price it honestly yet. Not that the card is worthless, and not our best guess dressed up as fact. A grade whose own sales are too thin, mix different print runs, or invert the ladder below it is shown without a price, on purpose.

We’d rather tell you we don’t know than tell you something that isn’t true.

See it in practice on any card’s price-by-grade table.

Methodology →Browse cards →Pricing →Changelog →