About TCGROI

Why I built it

I wanted to know whether a booster box was worth opening, and I could not find out. Pull rates were scattered across forum threads and blog posts of wildly varying rigour. Prices were easy to find and impossible to combine with the odds. Every calculator I tried either used a model that overcounted badly, or quoted rates without saying where they came from.

So I built the tool I wanted. It combines published pull rates with daily market prices, applies the same model to every product, and shows the result whether or not the result is exciting.

Almost nothing on this site is flattering to sealed product. The expected return on a booster pack is very often somewhere near half of what the pack costs. I would rather publish that than not.

How it is made

Card catalogues and daily prices come from TCGPlayer's published data. Pull rates are transcribed by hand, one set at a time, from official TCGPlayer analyses where they exist and from disclosed-sample community research where they do not.

That transcription is the bulk of the work behind the site, and the sourcing decisions are the part I take most seriously. Every rated set records which source it used, how large that source's sample was, and a link to it.

The full methodology is published, including its limitations.

What this site will not do

• Guess a pull rate. A set with no source that discloses a real sample size shows TBD, and there are dozens of them.
• Borrow one set's rates for another, even when the two share a card list.
• Present a community estimate as if it were an official count. The two are labelled differently everywhere they appear.
• Quietly show an implausibly good number. Figures that look too good are flagged with the reason they may be unstable.
• Tell you what to buy. It is a research tool, not investment advice, and opening sealed product is gambling however good the maths is.

How it pays for itself

Links to TCGPlayer and eBay are affiliate links, and a purchase made through one may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. There is also an optional paid tier for portfolio and history features.

Neither affects a single number on the site. Expected value is computed from prices and published odds before anything is linked anywhere, and a product's figures are identical whether or not it carries a buy link.

Corrections and contact

If a figure looks wrong, or you know of a properly sourced pull-rate study for a set showing TBD, I want to hear about it. Sourcing corrections are the most useful thing anyone can send me.

Reach me at tcgroiofficial@gmail.com.