{
  "url": "https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/cards-people-misidentify",
  "slug": "cards-people-misidentify",
  "title": "The 10,872 Cards That Look Like Other Cards",
  "summary": "Our catalog holds 58,907 printings. 10,872 of them share a name with another card in the same set, and the median price gap inside those groups is 11.5x. This is the map of every way a Pokémon card can be mistaken for a different Pokémon card, measured, with what being wrong costs.",
  "section": "Data forensics",
  "published": "2026-09-03",
  "readMinutes": 8,
  "publisher": "moonstone",
  "findings": [
    {
      "value": "10,872",
      "measures": "cards sharing a name with a set-mate",
      "basis": "4,764 groups across the 58,907-card catalog"
    },
    {
      "value": "11.5x",
      "measures": "median price gap inside a priced name group",
      "basis": "3,497 groups with 2+ priced members"
    },
    {
      "value": "1,155",
      "measures": "English name-and-number pairs living in 2+ sets",
      "basis": "2,506 cards; median gap 2.2x, 90th percentile 15.5x"
    },
    {
      "value": "37.5%",
      "measures": "of logged scan events whose candidate list held a name twin",
      "basis": "220 of the 587 events carrying 2+ candidates"
    }
  ],
  "tables": [],
  "charts": [],
  "sections": [
    "Class one: the number is the whole difference",
    "Class two: the same name and the same number, in a different set",
    "Class three: the letter suffix, and the cards that were never printed",
    "What people actually point at a camera"
  ],
  "method": [
    "Catalog counts are a full read of moonstone's card table on September 2, 2026: 58,907 rows, 24,564 with lang=en and 34,343 with lang=ja, 732 distinct set names, 18,851 distinct card names, 51,088 rows carrying a perceptual fingerprint, 2,480 digital-only rows excluded from the scan index by id pattern, 48,443 rows surviving into the index, and 11,809 synthetic exemplar rows. Name-collision groups are computed on exact (language, set name, card name) keys, and price gaps use each group's dearest and cheapest priced member; 4,764 groups covering 10,872 cards exist, of which 3,497 carry two or more priced members. Cross-set collisions are computed on exact (card name, printed number) keys within English rows only. Prices are CANONICAL printing prices from our daily TCGplayer sync, the same field the card pages show; an earlier version of this piece read the flagship-printing field instead and published gaps its own card pages contradicted, most visibly a $195.79 Neo Genesis Heracross implying a 3,916x collision where the canonical prices give $44.04 and 489x. Those cache rows carry refresh stamps spanning July 29 to September 2, 2026. The scan log is our own scan_rejections and scan_feedback tables, 996 rows between July 24 and September 1, 2026, since grown to 1,000; it records corrected, removed, weak and low-confidence scans, not successful ones, so it is a sample of difficulty and not a measure of traffic, and every claim drawn from it is stated with that sample size attached. Both the collision counts and the scan log describe the same catalog, so they are not independent confirmations of each other. STALENESS NOTE, added 2026-09-22: the card table is a current-state table with no history, so none of these counts can be recomputed at the September 2 date they carry. On today's catalog the same queries return 63,600 rows, 24,635 English and 38,965 Japanese across 778 set names, 5,553 same-set name groups covering 12,821 printings, and 1,161 cross-set name-and-number collisions covering 2,519 cards. The shape holds and the cross-set figures barely moved; the Japanese side of the catalog grew by about 13% in three weeks, which is where most of the drift is."
  ],
  "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."
}