The Pokémon Spike Report launches next week.
It tracks what actually moved in the Pokémon TCG secondary market over the previous week. Not what is hot, not what someone thinks you should be looking at. What moved, by how much, on what volume, and the most likely reason why.
Before the first board goes out, here is exactly how it works. If you want to argue with the method, you can do it now rather than after the fact.
The Weekly Rhythm
Data cutoff is end of day Sunday. The edition is built Monday and sent Tuesday morning. That gap is deliberate. A Sunday cutoff catches the full weekend, which is when a large share of collector trading actually happens, and a Monday build leaves room to check the numbers against the news before anything is written down.
What Arrives Every Week
The Pokémon Chase Modern EN 50 Index. A snapshot of the broad market, so the individual movers have something to sit inside. A card up 30 percent in a market that rose 8 percent is a different story than the same card in a market that fell 5 percent.
The Top 10 Movers. One list. Gainers and decliners ranked together, not split into two flattering columns.
Why It Moved. Context for each of the ten. A reprint announcement, a rotation, a tournament result, a supply event, a shift in how people are talking about a card.
Early Signal. Three cards whose underlying data currently shows a recognizable pattern, described as a pattern. Included with Tome Intel and above.
What Qualifies as a Mover
A card has to clear all six of these. Fail any one and it is out, no matter how large the swing looks.
Era. Modern sets only.
Rarity. Chase tier only. ex, V, VMAX, VSTAR, Full Art, Illustration Rare, Special Illustration Rare, Hyper Rare, Secret Rare, Alt Art. A common going from 40 cents to a dollar is a 150 percent move and it is noise.
Price floor. $10 minimum. Same reason.
Data reliability floor. At least 5 recorded sales in the trailing 7 days. Two sales is an anecdote, not a price.
No sealed product. A booster box moving is not a card moving. Sealed has its own dynamics and it does not belong on the same board.
No brand new sets. Nothing is eligible until it has been out 90 days. Launch hype would otherwise take over half the list every time a set drops, and launch hype is not sustained market movement. New releases get covered in Set Overview instead.
How the Ranking Works
Ranked by magnitude of seven day price change blended with sales volume. Not by percentage alone.
This matters more than it sounds. A card that jumps 60 percent on three sales and a card that climbs 20 percent on ninety sales are not telling you the same thing, and a pure percentage sort would put the wrong one on top every single week. Blending volume in means the list reflects where the market actually committed money.
Direction combined with volume is also the closest available read on pressure. A rising price on heavy volume looks like genuine demand. A falling price on heavy volume looks like supply being released into a softening market. There is no order flow data in this hobby, so this is the honest proxy and it is worth naming rather than dressing up.
Where the Numbers Come From
JustTCG, exclusively.
It blends aggregated online marketplace data with real time physical sales reported by more than 45 verified local game stores, which is a fuller picture of the market than any single online source on its own. TCGPlayer was ruled out because it is already an input to JustTCG and adds access friction for nothing. eBay was ruled out because mixed conditions, bulk lots and auction dynamics make it structurally messy for this purpose.
Single source is also a discipline, not just a convenience. The Chase Index runs on the same data, so the two can never show you contradictory prices for the same card. If a number here disagrees with a number there, that is a bug, and you should tell us.
What This Will Never Do
This is a pricing publication. It reports what the market did.
It will not tell you to buy anything, sell anything, or hold anything. Not in the free sections and not in Early Signal. When a card shows a pattern, the pattern gets described along with what that pattern has historically been associated with, including the times it went nowhere. What you conclude from that is yours to conclude.
That is a deliberate line, and it is worth being blunt about why it exists. The moment a market publication starts telling people what to do with their money, it stops being a record and becomes something else, something with a different set of obligations and a different set of risks. We would rather hand you the data and trust you with it.
So there will be no calls, no price targets, and no breathless language about what is about to happen. If that makes some editions boring, some weeks the market is boring, and you deserve to know that too.
Who Sees What
Anyone, including readers without an account, gets the index snapshot, the Top 10, and the full Why It Moved context.
Tome Access, the free tier, adds the archive of past editions. Week to week that is a small thing. A year in, it is a searchable record of what this market did and why.
Tome Intel, Tome Edge and Tome Vault add Early Signal.
Questions about the method, disagreements with the filters, or a number that looks wrong? Comment below. Corrections get published.
Informational only. The Spike Report is a market pricing publication. It describes observed secondary market activity for collectible trading cards. It is not investment advice, financial advice, or a recommendation of any kind, and nothing in it is a directive to take any action with any card or collectible. Trading cards are collectibles, not securities. Prices can move sharply in either direction and past movement does not indicate future movement. Any decision you make is your own.
Pricing. Figures are sourced from JustTCG and reflect the stated seven day window. Live market prices move independently of this article.