We had a good one this weekend. Big pickups for the vault, real sales off the table, and someone walked away with their first graded slab. Here’s the full recap, plus a look at what we’ve been building behind the scenes.
The Show
We set up at the Collectors First “Trick or Trade” Card Show this past weekend, October 3rd at the Cleveland County Event Center in Norman, OK. 115 tables of sports, TCG, and Pokémon, packed from 9am to 10pm. Buy, sell, trade, same as always. Cards stay on eBay and Whatnot the rest of the month, but shows like this are where the Reliquary actually grows.
- Vault pickups: a Crystal Lugia (picked up for $175), a Salamence, and the Mew (158/128) from 30th Celebration, plus a Shining Magikarp
- Sold three straight out of the Hidden Fates Shiny Vault: Greninja, Altaria, and Gardevoir
- Tatsugiri found a new home too
- Best moment of the day: a customer bought their first graded card ever, an Emboar GX, Gem Mint 10
The slab sale is the one that stuck with me. People aren’t just buying inventory off our table, some of them are starting something. That’s worth remembering every time we set up.
Behind the Scenes: Building Reliquary’s Market Intelligence
While we were working the table this weekend, something else has been running quietly in the background.
We’ve spent the last couple weeks building a real price-tracking system for Reliquary, pulling live market data on specific cards from 30th Celebration every day. The idea is simple: pull rate tells you how hard a card is to find on release day. It doesn’t tell you what that card is worth a month later. Demand for the character does that. A card that’s easy to pull but genuinely loved holds its value. A card that’s brutally rare but forgettable doesn’t. We’re building the data to prove it, card by card.
Here’s an early example. 30th Celebration has 30 different Pikachu Rare cards, each with roughly the same 1-in-30 pull rate. Same odds to pull any one of them. Right now the most expensive one is sitting at $2.30 and the cheapest is $0.62. Same scarcity, nearly 4x the price gap. That gap is pure demand for the art, not rarity. More as the data builds.
This is the engine behind two things coming soon: a weekly Tier Watch show breaking down risers and fallers by price tier, and a monthly Market Read going deeper on the data. Every call we make gets logged and scored against what actually happens. Hits and misses, both, out loud.
Catch the next show live on Whatnot, and keep an eye on the blog. This is just the start of tracking the data behind what we buy and sell.