{
  "url": "https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/bulks-hidden-floor",
  "slug": "bulks-hidden-floor",
  "title": "Bulk's Hidden Floor: A Quarter Century Later, the Worst WotC Cards Are Worth 33x the Worst Modern Ones",
  "summary": "The bottom tenth of Sword & Shield era cards trades at seven cents. The bottom tenth of WotC-era cards trades at $2.34. Same game, same rarity tiers, one difference: twenty-five years of attrition. This is what a floor forming actually looks like, decile by decile.",
  "section": "Analysis",
  "published": "2026-08-28",
  "readMinutes": 5,
  "publisher": "moonstone",
  "findings": [],
  "tables": [
    {
      "title": "The floor, era by era (live base-printing market prices)",
      "columns": [
        "Era",
        "Median card",
        "Share under $1",
        "10th-percentile price"
      ],
      "rows": [
        {
          "Era": "WotC (1999-2003)",
          "Median card": "$39.34",
          "Share under $1": "4.3%",
          "10th-percentile price": "$2.34"
        },
        {
          "Era": "Sun & Moon (2017-2019)",
          "Median card": "$0.41",
          "Share under $1": "62.5%",
          "10th-percentile price": "$0.16"
        },
        {
          "Era": "Sword & Shield (2020-2022)",
          "Median card": "$0.33",
          "Share under $1": "60.5%",
          "10th-percentile price": "$0.07"
        },
        {
          "Era": "SV / Mega era (2023-)",
          "Median card": "$0.60",
          "Share under $1": "61.9%",
          "10th-percentile price": "$0.19"
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "charts": [],
  "sections": [
    "The floor forms at the bottom, not the top"
  ],
  "method": [
    "Live base-printing market prices from moonstone's daily TCGplayer sync, August 28, 2026, across every priced English catalog card (era classified by set; the priced sample skews toward cards with active listings, so true bulk floors are, if anything, LOWER than shown for modern eras and the vintage contrast understated). Median, under-$1 share, and 10th-percentile computed per era. The WotC sample is 92 priced cards. Correction, 2026-09-22, from an independent recomputation against production: that sentence used to add that the unpriced vintage bulk 'is thin', and it is not. Our English price coverage quadrupled in the days after this piece ran, and 1,652 WotC cards now carry a live base-printing price. On that fuller book the WotC median is $8.59 rather than $39.34, the under-a-dollar share 12.0% rather than 4.3%, and the tenth percentile $0.86 rather than $2.34, which turns the headline 33x gap over Sword and Shield's seven cents into about 12x. The direction holds and it is still the largest gap on the board; the multiple in the title belongs to the 92-card sample of August 28, 2026. The Sword and Shield row is unchanged on the fuller book: the under-a-dollar share is still 60.5% and the tenth percentile still $0.07. Concentration and registry-depth references link to their own methodologies. Not financial advice."
  ],
  "terms": "Figures are moonstone's own recorded measurements, dated as published. Quote them with the population stated beside them. The article at `url` is the human form of this file."
}