TCG Low, Market Price, Direct Low, and Buylist Price, explained side by side

Set up a repricing rule on TCGplayer and the first field asks you to pick a reference price. Most sellers pick without really knowing what the options mean, because nowhere lays them out side by side. TCGplayer's own explanation lives in a single support article, TCGplayer Market Price, and it's mostly about one of the four numbers you'll actually be choosing between.

Here's what each one is, how it's calculated, and why picking the wrong one is the single most common mistake in this category.

Market Price is a trailing average, not a live number

Market Price is TCGplayer's smoothed estimate of what a card has actually been selling for, built from recent completed sales. It moves slowly on purpose. That makes it stable to anchor a rule to, but it also means it lags a fast market by design — if a card spikes today, Market Price won't reflect that for a while, and it's $0 on a meaningful share of non-Magic rows, which breaks a formula that assumes it's always populated.

Use Market Price when you want a rule that doesn't overreact to a handful of low listings. Don't use it when you're trying to react to something happening right now.

TCG Low is the cheapest listing, not the right price

TCG Low is a live snapshot: the price of the single cheapest active listing for that card, in whatever condition the cheapest seller called it. It says nothing about volume, nothing about condition accuracy, and nothing about whether that seller is a real competitor or someone dumping stock to exit the game.

TCG Low with Shipping is the same idea with shipping folded in, and it can rank sellers in a different order than TCG Low alone. A card with free shipping at $5 and a $4.50 card with $1 shipping look identical on TCG Low and very different on TCG Low with Shipping. If your rule references one, know which one, because a competitor's listing can win on one and lose on the other.

Direct Low is a smaller, separate market

Direct Low is the cheapest listing among sellers enrolled in TCGplayer Direct, which is a narrower pool than the full marketplace. It also comes with its own fee structure, separate from standard marketplace fees, so a rule that references Direct Low without accounting for that fee difference is comparing prices from two different cost bases. We cover the fee side separately in repricing TCGplayer Direct inventory.

Buylist Market and Buylist High tell you what stores pay, not what buyers pay

Buylist Market and Buylist High describe the store-to-store side of the marketplace: what stores are currently offering to pay for a card, not what a buyer would pay for it. They're useful for sourcing decisions and for sanity-checking whether a card is worth listing individually versus selling into buylist, but they're a different question entirely from "what should I charge."

Which one should your rule actually reference

Anchoring to TCG Low is the most common beginner mistake, and it's expensive because it turns your pricing into a follower in a race that only ever moves one direction. If everyone selling a card references TCG Low, the price ratchets down every time anyone panics, and nothing pulls it back up. We go through why this happens mechanically on the repricing pillar guide.

Market Price is usually the safer default for a baseline, with a modifier applied on top, and TCG Low reserved for cards where you specifically want to stay competitive on price rather than track value.

A richer reference model already exists, just not here

TCGplayer's five reference points are flatter than what's available elsewhere. CardTrader's Autopricer, a competitor tool built for a different marketplace, lets sellers reference the lowest listing, the market average, a specific ranked position among competitors, or the current listed price, each with a percentage or fixed modifier, and each aware of condition and language. That's a meaningfully richer model than choosing one of five fixed price points and applying one modifier to it.

It's a useful comparison point even outside that marketplace: the question "which price point, at what offset, for which condition" is the actual shape of a good repricing rule, and TCGplayer's native tools only get partway there. This is one of the reasons we built Hoard's repricing agent to let condition and price point vary independently instead of forcing one rule for a whole SKU.