One of the main reasons our users love Card Ladder is the application's ability to estimate the value of any card in your collection and track the value daily. This guide will walk you through the different ways we let you estimate the value of a card in your collection. We prefer to give customers more options and power when deciding the value of a card because we know how important it is to get this part right. We don't believe in magic tools that spit out numbers with no explanation.
All of these options are available on the website or either of the mobile apps and all of the selection choices are the same. We will use the website for examples in this article.
Choose the method of estimation
After you add a card to your collection that isn't verified in the Ladder you'll see this screen to help you determine the value.
Graded Card Automatic: This is the simplest method if you don't want to mess with configuration. If you have a graded card then you can choose this method and let us do all the work. We will match your card against all sales from our Sales History of that exact card and pull them into your profile. We will also use the most recent sale to generate an estimated value for you. This feature updates once a day so any new sales that come in will reflect on your profile automatically. This is the default option if you add cards to your collection using a cert #. (NOTE: Sales History sales are not verified by Card Ladder's research team. Only Ladder cards have verified sales that appear with green checkmarks.)
Index + Purchase Price: This method simply uses the value of the player index at the date of your purchase and tracks its value over time relative to your purchase price. IE, if you purchased your card on 1/1/2020 for $100 and the value of the player index at that time was 100 and today's index value is 200 then your card value estimate today will be $200.
Index + Manual Price: This method is similar to Index + Purchase Price except instead of using your purchase date/price you are able to choose any sale from our Sales History database yourself as the anchor point. See below for more details.
Custom Sales Query: This method is how we build profiles for cards verified in the Ladder. You will construct a boolean logic query to find the exact results of your card. This will allow you to select an index just like the previous methods but instead of choosing a sale manually when a new one comes in this will automatically pull in new sales using your query each day and update your value accordingly. This is for advanced users. See below for more details.
Multipliers: This method was developed when we first launched and is still supported but we prefer the previous two methods at Card Ladder. This basically lets you tie the value of your card to any combination of verified cards in the Ladder using multipliers. As the value of the connected Ladder cards changes, so will yours.
Manual: This one is self explanatory. You just punch in the value of the card and this will not update daily. You have to manually come back and update whenever you think it changes.
Index + Manual Price value estimation
If you chose Index + Manual Sale you'll see this screen. We need you to input 3 things here in order to get proper estimation. First you need to select the index from which you want to pin the value of your card. This is explained further here.
Next you will choose a card value/date from the past. Search for the card you're adding first. See if you can find an old comp using the Sales History search bar. If you can't find a sale of your exact card try searching for another player or a different year. The goal is to determine the general value of the card in the past. You can ultimately enter in whatever value and date you'd like here. The system will calculate the change of the index you selected relative to the value/date you selected in the past and determine the estimated value of the card today and going forward. This option gives you ultimate control.
Custom Sales Query value estimation
If you chose Custom Sales Query you'll see this screen. We need you to input 3 things here in order to get proper estimation. First you need to decide if you want to just want to use the latest sale as your value or if you want to use the latest sale calculated forward using an index. If you choose the sale and index method then you need to select the index from which you want to pin the value of your card. This is explained further here.
Next you will construct your boolean logic query. You can get more help with this here. This is how the Card Ladder team verifies cards in the Ladder. We build the queries and match them against sales in our Sales History database. Now you can do that for your collection cards. Start typing out your query and see a preview of the results below. You'll want to make sure you include lots of exclusions to weed out cards that you don't want. It's not an easy task but worth it. If you want to see the full results of your query click the link next to Search Results.
Once you have your query complete click Save. This will pull in all the sales to your collection card profile as well as estimate the value based on the same CL Value logic used with verified Ladder cards. Each night we will pull the latest sales using your query and update the value according to the method you chose. You will also be able to see a graph of the sales on your profile and a list of the sales with links just like the Ladder cards. This is by far the most powerful option we have for estimating collection card values at Card Ladder.
Daily updates
After you have completed this step your collection card will have an estimated value attached to the profile in your collection. All of these methods, except for manual, will update the estimated value of your collection card daily. You can see these updates on the graph from the collection card profile. This updates once per day in the middle of the night so you should see it when you wake up in the morning.