Market
Prices tell you what. We tell you why.
ManaLotus reads the Magic market through four signals kept deliberately apart, so you know whether a printing is climbing or spiking right now, whether the card behind it is riding the metagame, and what the cheapest printing we track costs today.
The Market is free and public. No account needed to read it.
Climbing right now
What's climbing?
Trend: the biggest sustained price gainers across every set
The proof
What a copy costs you, and what a copy sells for
TCGplayer's marketplace prices the copy you are about to buy. Card Kingdom's buylist quotes what a vendor pays for a near mint copy of the one already in your binder. Both are re-read every day, and the four signals below stay four numbers.
- 2
- Price sources
- Daily
- Price refresh
- 140K+
- Live buylist quotes
- 4
- Signals kept apart
TCGplayer marketplace and the Card Kingdom vendor, side by side
Every trend, breakout, meta read, and floor re-read each day
Card Kingdom's current NM buy prices, the sell-your-copy side
Trend, breakout, meta, and floor, never flattened into one number
Four signals
One price, read four ways
A sustained slide, a right-now spike, a metagame shift, and the cheapest copy are four different stories that a single price number flattens into one. Two live on the printing, two on the Oracle Card, and we keep all four apart.
Trend and Breakout
Tell a printing's sustained climb from its right-now spike
The Printed Card Trend is the sustained direction of a single printing's price at one finish, fitted across the whole window so the verdict only turns once a move persists. The Breakout is the opposite tell: the last day or two jumping away from that trend relative to the card's own volatility, the early warning the trend deliberately suppresses until it persists.
- Printed Card Trend: a robust slope over the window, Mann-Kendall significance behind it, and a High, Med, or Low confidence read telling you how far to trust the direction
- Breakout: kept separate from the trend, a fresh spike scaled to the printing's own normal volatility, the signal that something is happening now
Live market reads
Printed Card Trend
Live · ClimbingThis printing's trailing 30 days. The +425% is what holding it would have realized: a multi-day average now measured against the same average 30d earlier.
Breakout
Live · Spiking nowThe recent jump away from this printing's 30-day trend, scaled to its own volatility (breakout score +26.4).
Trend and Breakout render off each printing's real trailing price history, one printing per read. Illustrative shapes stand in only if a read is briefly unavailable.
Meta Signal and Acquisition Floor
Zoom out to the Oracle Card: metagame demand and cost to acquire
Where Trend and Breakout read a single printing, the Meta Signal and the Acquisition Floor read the whole Oracle Card across its printings, answering two different questions. The Meta Signal reads demand: when most of a card's printings move the same way in a format, that agreement reads as a metagame shift, rising as a card enters the format and falling as it leaves. The Acquisition Floor reads cost: the lowest price we track for a playable copy, read across every printing of the card and condition-blind, so it can point you at a cheaper printing than the one you are looking at, backed by whichever printing happens to be cheapest that day.
- Meta Signal: the directional consensus across an Oracle Card's printings, per format, a card entering or leaving the metagame read from its own prices before the meta stats catch up
- Acquisition Floor: what it costs to get in today, condition-blind, read across every printing, whatever printing happens to be cheapest
One Oracle Card, every printing
Meta Signal
Live · Commander10 of 10 printings up over 14 days. Agreement across an Oracle Card's printings is the metagame-demand read, before the meta stats catch up.
Acquisition Floor
Lowest of the stackThe cheapest printing we track: the lowest price of a playable copy across its printings, condition-blind. The printing backing it can change day to day.
Meta Signal is a live read. The floor rows name which price levels the estimator reads.
Buy Windows
Every Buy Window explains itself in two parts
The Deals desk reads the buyer's side: popular cards sitting at the low end of their own tracked range. Each row states where the price sits, then names a reason only when the evidence carries one.
One state per row, at most one cause, and a name for what we cannot explain
The state is the price read, and every row has exactly one: at the low end of its tracked range, one of four decline grades running Falling fast, Still declining, Decline easing, Leveling off, or Limited history when the printing is too young for its range to mean anything. The cause is directional, optional, and capped at one: a suspected reprint, Fresh supply from a named set, Still settling from release, a premium drifting toward the regular printing, Fading from the meta, or Collectible. A Secret Lair sliding down from its own release price is a different story from a staple that just got reprinted in a Commander precon, and the desk labels them differently. When the price is low and we looked for a supply or meta event behind it and found none, the row prints that finding as its own line.
Buy Window row · state, then cause
State, exactly one on every row
Cause, at most one, once it clears its gate
When no cause clears its gate
No specific supply or meta event detected
Held back
The savings framing, on every row still confidently falling.
A schematic of the two-part row. Every chip is the desk's shipped wording; the live desk fills in the card, the price, and the set behind fresh supply.
A card rides the desk only once its price series carries enough observed days to average honestly and its quote is neither stale nor scattered. Thin evidence is dropped before it can be labelled, so the desk runs shorter on a quiet day and is never fuller than the data behind it.
Price Alerts
Watch the price question you actually have
A watch is yours to specify: what it points at, which price it reads where the grain leaves that open, and how often it may fire.
Point a watch at a printing, a card's Acquisition Floor, a sealed box, or a whole List
A watch can sit on one printing in the finish you chose, or on an Oracle Card, where it reads the Acquisition Floor across every printing and the fired alert names the copy that actually hit it. It can sit on a sealed box's own price, or behind the expected value feature, on that box's crack edge. Point one at a whole List and it arms one watch per entry, skipping the entries you already watch. On a printing or a sealed box you also pick the price it reads, Market, Lowest Listing, or Buylist, so a buyer can watch acquisition cost and a seller can watch what a vendor will pay. A floor watch offers no basis at all, because the floor already answers that question. Every watch picks how it fires: One time, Every crossing, or Daily while true.
- A movement watch, on a printing or on the floor, reads a percentage move over a window you choose, so a slow slide and a sharp week stay separate conditions
- A watch that goes dark says so: after enough evaluations with no usable price it pauses itself and tells you, so a stalled watch never reads as a quiet market
One watch · what, which price, how often
A schematic of the choices one watch carries. The basis, firing, and window options read from the same constants the create form offers. The crack edge sits behind the expected value feature; every other option here is free.
Alerts are evaluated once a day against the same daily refresh, never an intraday or real-time ticker. Evaluation is triggered by the daily price load finishing, so a watch always reads the snapshot that just landed.
10 watches, free.
Expected value
Sealed product expected value, netted down to what you would keep after marketplace fees with the sub-$1 bulk left out, has its own page.
Read the market like you have a desk on it
Movers, metagame, and expected value in one place, keyed to the same cards as your collection.