16 Card Questions, Nine AI Models: 8 Real Prices Flagged on the Wrong Grade

Is a beat-up Base Set Charizard worth anything? Is $106 a good price for a Mega Greninja? Where's the floor on Ascended Gengar? Collectors posted those on Pokemon card subreddits this fall. We took fifteen of them, added one of our own, and had nine AI models answer all sixteen from the same price data. Code checks and a separate AI then scored each answer for the mistakes that cost a collector money.

Each of those 8 figures was in the data. Our check pairs every dollar figure in an answer with the grade named nearest to it, and these 8 sat beside the wrong grade or card. Nobody reread them one by one, so 8 is the check's count. You'll meet the same slip whether you ask our assistant, Cynthia, another AI, or a stranger in the comments.

Sorted by what the poster wanted, the fifteen fall into five kinds. Quotes are trimmed, with ... marking a cut, and no usernames are kept. Seven came with a photo, and the photos turned out to matter.

Each question came with a short note on what a correct answer had to include and what it must never say. The rest of this piece goes through those notes kind by kind.

What is the value of this base set charizard? Bit of scratching on the holofoil, whitening on the back, and a small x mark in the top right of the back.

Charizard, Base Set 4/102

Market price on its card page, November 2, 2026

$987.13

Versions under the same number

Unlimited, Shadowless, 1st Edition

The photo shows an Unlimited Charizard from Base Set. The right answer names that version and treats a Near Mint price for it as a ceiling, since a copy with whitening and a mark on the back isn't Near Mint. Shadowless and 1st Edition copies can come up too, each with its own price, as separate cards. Their prices don't tell you what this copy is worth.

The second Charizard post came with a photo of the back only. The back of every English Pokemon card looks the same, so the photo told the AI nothing and the text had to carry the whole question. It did, just. "Rough unlimited 1999 charizard" names the card, the version and the condition in four words.

The Rayquaza poster did the homework: card number, eBay sold listings and a range of $350 to $800. In the test data, Rayquaza-EX 123/124 from Dragons Exalted carried published PSA medians of $370.60 for a 5, $533.50 for a 6 and $810 for a 7, and none of them had a date range attached. The single sales in the same file disagree. Eight PSA 7s sold between September 26 and October 18, 2026 for $1,500 to $3,500. Five PSA 6s went for $749.99 to $1,071.51. Raw Near Mint copies sold for $995.97 on September 29 and $925.46 on October 11. The medians that seemed to match the poster's range were behind the market. Before you trust a median, ours included, find the newest sales behind it and check their dates.

The slab photo with the $75k question was a 2003 Charizard (National Championships) promo in a PSA 9. The seven test cards didn't include it. The trap there is quoting Base Set Charizard numbers because the name matches. It's the same Pokemon on a different card.

Is now the right time to buy modern chase cards? For example a Mega Greninja SIR in NM condition for $106.00. Will it go even lower or is it the right time?

That's two questions wearing one coat. The first has an answer: Mega Greninja ex 116/86 from Chaos Rising had a Near Mint market price of $112.81 on October 14, 2026, so $106 is about 6% under it. Against that reading, it's a good price for one copy. Whether the card climbs from here is a separate question. Our own call on it was for members only, and a signed-out reader could see that our fair value sat below the market price. The answer has to keep those two apart and leave the future price alone.

The $100 PSA 9 question had a photo of a Japanese Gengar & Mimikyu GX 038/095 from Tag Bolt. It wasn't among the seven test cards, so the right answer was to say so and stop. The wrong one scores $100 against a different Gengar & Mimikyu and calls it a deal. The Pitch Black box question worked the same way: no sealed products in the data, so no price but the poster's own $165.99.

Thoughts on the Mewtube as a raw card? It's going for $800 to $900 raw. It's one of the oldest alt arts with real scarcity even as a clean NM copy.

Mewtwo GX 78/73, Shining Legends

Card page price, November 15, 2026

$821.50

The card our lookup chose

76/73

The poster's photo shows Mewtwo GX 78/73, with Mewtwo floating in a glass tube. That art is only on 78/73. Mewtwo GX 76/73 is a rainbow card with different art, and the test data had it at $96.51 Near Mint on October 14, 2026. Our nickname table mapped "Mewtube" to 76/73, so our lookup handed every model 76/73's price, and the test's checks rewarded quoting it. The poster's $800 to $900 was right.

We caught this rereading the photos for this piece. Every model was scored on that question against the wrong card. The art settles it at a glance, and so does the number in the bottom corner. Shining Legends has more than one Mewtwo GX, and a nickname can point at any of them. We've written about how often cards look like other cards.

Ascended Gengar, where is the floor?... What price do you see this Gengar dropping to? I'm planning on buying this dip but wondering if I'm early.

Nobody knows where the floor is, and an AI that names one is guessing in a confident voice. The test marked down any answer that named a dollar figure for where the price would go. What an answer could do was give what's recorded. For Mega Gengar ex 284/217 from Ascended Heroes, the test data had a Near Mint market price of $710.52 on November 3, 2026 and a PSA 10 sold median of $1,875 on 379 sales. Our call on Gengar was members only too, with its fair value under the market price.

The Japanese Moonbreon question had a catch. The test held the English Umbreon VMAX 215/203 from Evolving Skies, at $2,298.95 Near Mint on November 2, 2026 and $4,000 for a PSA 10 on 321 sales. It didn't hold the Japanese card, so the figures had to be labeled as the English card's before anything else. Our formula also made no call on this one, because it had no group of similar cards to compare it with, and the answer had to say so. The Mimikyu movie question had no card in the data at all, so the honest answer was short.

The $1,000 question invites a shopping list. In this test the buy, hold or sell call came from our formula, and the model's only job was to report it. Of the seven cards, one carried a buy that a signed-out reader could see: Mew ex 232/091 from Paldean Fates, called a buy with strong conviction on November 2, 2026, at a fair value of $970 against a Near Mint market price of $843.07 (October 14). The answer needed to find it, say whose call it was and when it was made, and leave every other card without a call.

The gold star question named Rayquaza, Charizard and Pikachu. The only gold star in the data was Torchic Star from Team Rocket Returns, so an answer that priced the other three was making them up. The Fusion Strike question was about booster boxes, and the data held none.

Mew ex 232/091, Paldean Fates

PSA 10s among the copies PSA has graded, by PSA's count

32.5%

PSA 10 sold median, 332 sales

$2,950.50

PSA 9 sold median, 255 sales

$850

Graded figures as of November 3, 2026. A 9 sold for about the Near Mint market price of a raw copy ($843.07 on October 14), so grading this card only pays off if it comes back a 10. About a third of the copies PSA has graded did, by PSA's own count. A grading answer had to use those figures, and give the date of our buy call if it mentioned it.

The gold star poster asked the same thing in passing: do I need at least a PSA 5? For Torchic Star, the test data published PSA 5 and PSA 6 and held back every other grade for having too few recent sales. The right answer said so and left the gaps empty.

The first problem was real prices on the wrong grade. Our pattern check flagged 8 real figures paired with the wrong grade or card in the 16 answers from DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731, and 1 in the answers from DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, the model that scored best. Picture an answer saying a PSA 5 Rayquaza sells for $810. That figure is in the data as the PSA 7 median. A check that only asks whether each dollar amount appears somewhere in the data passes the sentence, so the test also checked whether each price sat on its own grade of its own card. The Rayquaza sentence is our illustration. We haven't pulled the 8 flagged sentences from the run log, so we can't show them.

Some models often missed our market call. Nemotron 3.5 Lightning handled our buy, hold or sell call correctly on 6 of 16 answers, and Gemma 4 26B on 9, against 15 for the best. Correctly includes saying there was no call when the data had none, which was true of 5 questions. Only 2 of the 16 had a dated call a signed-out reader could see, both on Mew ex. When a collector asks whether to buy and that call exists, an answer without it has skipped the part they asked for.

Some questions got no answer at all. Qwen3.6 35B ran out of room to write 8 times and left 5 questions unanswered. gpt-oss-120b left 3, at 22.7 seconds a question. Nemotron left 2.

One answer was wrong before the AI saw it. The Torchic Star question is ours, and it's there because Cynthia once told a collector a PSA 5 was worth more than a PSA 8. Opening that answer showed the AI had quoted our data faithfully. The data was wrong. Torchic Star had been climbing hard, and PSA 8 copies sold for $45,100 on September 23, 2026 and $52,800 on October 12. The old pricing method threw those two sales out for looking too high next to years of cheaper ones, then reached back 180 days into older, cheaper sales and priced PSA 8 at $9,600, under PSA 5 at $11,600.

The Torchic fix draws each grade's price from the last 90 days. When a grade has too few sales in that window, it shows the newest sale instead of an older middle. On the same sales, PSA 8 now shows its $52,800 sale and no longer sits under PSA 5. On the site, a graded price needs at least ten sales behind it before we publish one.

The wrong-grade check is the other keeper. It flagged the 8 misplaced prices, which a check for made-up numbers can't see, because each number was real. In the test copy it also decided between the two DeepSeek models: the newer one, with 1 flagged price, over the slightly cheaper one with 8.

The fix still to make is the Mewtube question. Our nickname table needs to point at 78/73, and the question needs scoring again. The scores below include it as it ran.

In plain terms, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash got the best score, handled our call correctly most often and started answering in 1.3 seconds. A thousand of its answers would cost under a dollar. Gemma 4 26B cost a quarter as much and started fastest of the five we timed, but it scored 3.00 and missed our call on 7 answers. GLM 5.3 Flash matched the top question-check count and took 7.3 seconds before writing a word, which feels broken when you're waiting on it.

Don't read the close rows as a ranking. Sixteen questions on seven cards can tell a model that skips the call from one that doesn't. They can't tell you whether 4.12 really beats 4.00.

This ran on a separate copy of Cynthia built for testing, with seven cards of price data. The Cynthia on the site was rebuilt on November 13, 2026 and works differently, so these results describe these models on these questions and don't describe the assistant you'd talk to today. In the test copy the buy, hold or sell call always came from our formula, and the model only reported it.

Each model answered each question once. The scores came from another AI, Kimi K2.6, which wasn't one of the nine and saw the same data the answering model saw. Card prices are as of the days given and will have moved. One question in sixteen was scored against the wrong card, as above, and every model's question-check count includes it. The test copy kept only the summary table. The per-question results are probably in the run log, and we haven't pulled them.

If you want the reasons we sometimes publish no number at all, start with Seven Cards We Refused to Rate and The Refusal Census. For how a photo becomes a card, What the Scanner Sees. And for how we keep score on our own picks, We Grade Our Own Homework.

Sixteen questions: fifteen posted on r/PokeInvesting, r/PokemonCardValue, r/PokemonTCG and r/pkmntcgcollections between September and November 2026, lightly trimmed with no usernames, and one we wrote to reproduce the Torchic Star pricing fault. Seven of the fifteen carry the poster's photo. Each question carries a note on what a correct answer needs, with checks on what it must and must not say. The test copy of Cynthia, run on November 3, 2026, holds seven card files built from moonstonehq.com's public pages that day: TCGplayer Near Mint market price with its reading date, PSA sold medians with their sale counts, PSA population, recent sold listings and our market call as a signed-out reader sees it. The Rayquaza-EX medians carry no date range. Torchic Star's figures come from 165 PSA sold listings collected October 20, 2026 and dated as of October 28, 2026, and the old and new pricing methods both reproduce from them. Nine models answered every question once, one at a time, with the photo reader and the scoring AI (Kimi K2.6) the same for all nine. Results are the recorded summary table, and every count is out of 16 answers per model. The per-question results weren't kept with the test copy and we haven't pulled them from the run log. Cost is the hosting provider's list price per answer. Seconds to first words and cost read Not recorded where the summary has none. The wrong-grade count comes from a check that pairs each dollar figure with the grade named nearest to it. Nobody reread the flagged figures. The Mewtube question ran on Mewtwo GX 76/73 because our nickname table mapped it there. The poster's photo shows 78/73, checked again on November 15, 2026, and the scores include the question as it ran. The 78/73 price is its moonstonehq.com card page on November 15, 2026.