Every graded price on this site carries a number in parentheses: how many recorded sales produced it. That number is not decoration. It is the difference between a market price and an anecdote. We ran a census across our own published PSA 10 series to show what the distribution actually looks like, and where we draw the lines.
The floors, stated plainly
Under 3 verified sales we publish nothing: zero of our 94 series sit below that floor because the floor is enforced at write time. Under 15 sales a card cannot enter the Weekly Grade Plays list. Under 50 it cannot headline a featured analysis. And 26 of our 94 series currently sit under 10 sales, which is why those prices render with an explicit thin-comps caveat instead of confident type.
The reason is mechanical, not aesthetic. Small samples are hostage to single events: one liquidation dump, one bidding war between two collectors, one mislabeled listing that slipped a filter. We watched a bulk liquidation print dozens of identical $15 sales in two days and briefly bend a real card's median. With three sales that event owns your price. With 150 it casts one vote.
Census of the latest snapshot per card in our graded price store, PSA 10 grade, August 26, 2026. Publication floor n>=3, Grade Plays floor n>=15, feature floor n>=50, all enforced in code before a number is written.