{
  "url": "https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-completion-bill",
  "slug": "the-completion-bill",
  "title": "What Completing a Set Actually Costs, and Why It Is Two Purchases",
  "summary": "We summed every priced card in every set on one day: $909,227.42 across 51,843 rows and 647 set buckets. Across the checklists deep enough to measure, the median completion bill is $1,224 and the median top-ten share of a bill is 68.8%. But the checklists whose every card holds value are not sets at all. They are the promo bins, where nothing ever fell out of a pack.",
  "section": "Investment research",
  "published": "2026-09-03",
  "readMinutes": 9,
  "publisher": "moonstone",
  "findings": [
    {
      "value": "$909,227",
      "measures": "one of every priced row in the dump",
      "basis": "51,843 rows, 647 set buckets, September 2, 2026"
    },
    {
      "value": "68.8%",
      "measures": "median share of a set's bill held by ten cards",
      "basis": "295 buckets with 60+ priced rows"
    },
    {
      "value": "$0.19",
      "measures": "median card in Paradox Rift, the median completion bill",
      "basis": "against $59.55 in the Nintendo promo bin"
    },
    {
      "value": "0.84%",
      "measures": "share of catalog value held by sub-$1 cards",
      "basis": "and they are 43.7% of all priced rows"
    }
  ],
  "tables": [
    {
      "title": "The completion bill, split, September 2, 2026",
      "columns": [
        "Set",
        "Priced rows",
        "Full bill",
        "Top card share",
        "Top-10 share",
        "Rest of checklist",
        "Cost per remaining card"
      ],
      "rows": [
        {
          "Set": "[Evolving Skies](/set/evolving%20skies)",
          "Priced rows": "253",
          "Full bill": "$8,273",
          "Top card share": "27.9%",
          "Top-10 share": "79.0%",
          "Rest of checklist": "$1,741.23",
          "Cost per remaining card": "$7.17"
        },
        {
          "Set": "[Lost Origin](/set/lost%20origin)",
          "Priced rows": "230",
          "Full bill": "$1,374",
          "Top card share": "59.9%",
          "Top-10 share": "86.4%",
          "Rest of checklist": "$187.00",
          "Cost per remaining card": "$0.85"
        },
        {
          "Set": "[Phantasmal Flames](/set/phantasmal%20flames)",
          "Priced rows": "139",
          "Full bill": "$1,216",
          "Top card share": "57.7%",
          "Top-10 share": "92.0%",
          "Rest of checklist": "$96.73",
          "Cost per remaining card": "$0.75"
        },
        {
          "Set": "[Fusion Strike](/set/fusion%20strike)",
          "Priced rows": "296",
          "Full bill": "$2,306",
          "Top card share": "45.0%",
          "Top-10 share": "89.6%",
          "Rest of checklist": "$240.39",
          "Cost per remaining card": "$0.84"
        },
        {
          "Set": "[Paradox Rift](/set/paradox%20rift)",
          "Priced rows": "276",
          "Full bill": "$1,224",
          "Top card share": "9.7%",
          "Top-10 share": "41.3%",
          "Rest of checklist": "$718.52",
          "Cost per remaining card": "$2.70"
        },
        {
          "Set": "[Temporal Forces](/set/temporal%20forces)",
          "Priced rows": "229",
          "Full bill": "$1,260",
          "Top card share": "7.6%",
          "Top-10 share": "46.1%",
          "Rest of checklist": "$679.24",
          "Cost per remaining card": "$3.10"
        },
        {
          "Set": "[Skyridge](/set/skyridge)",
          "Priced rows": "178",
          "Full bill": "$18,891",
          "Top card share": "6.4%",
          "Top-10 share": "38.4%",
          "Rest of checklist": "$11,638.81",
          "Cost per remaining card": "$69.28"
        },
        {
          "Set": "[XY Promos](/set/xy%20promos)",
          "Priced rows": "241",
          "Full bill": "$16,114",
          "Top card share": "5.6%",
          "Top-10 share": "32.0%",
          "Rest of checklist": "$10,953.43",
          "Cost per remaining card": "$47.42"
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "charts": [],
  "sections": [
    "The bins nobody markets",
    "Trophy sets and shopping-trip sets",
    "The catalog is a spike on a floor"
  ],
  "method": [
    "Source: moonstone's own daily price-history table, the free CSV dump we accrete rather than re-buy, read at day bucket 20698 (September 2, 2026). That day carried 51,843 rows with a price across 647 set buckets, summing to $909,227.42. The dump's per-row price is the FLAGSHIP printing's market price, not the canonical printing price the card pages show, so a card quoted here can read higher than the same card's page; the two instruments are named rather than mixed, and every figure in this piece comes from the dump. Set buckets are the dump's own lowercased set names, so English and Japanese sets appear as separate buckets, trainer galleries appear as separate buckets from their parent sets, and promo bins appear as sets; concentration and bill figures are computed over the rows actually priced in each bucket, not over a published checklist. 7,738 rows do not resolve to a card in our catalog and are counted in bucket totals as the dump supplies them; the catalog grows, so that count drifts down while the priced rows for a past day bucket do not move. Distributional cuts (top-10 share, rest-of-checklist bill, cost per remaining card) are restricted to the 295 buckets with at least 60 priced rows; medians quoted for that group are medians across buckets, not across cards. The table holds four day buckets, August 30 to September 2, 2026, but only three distinct snapshots: the September 1 bucket is byte-identical to August 31 on all 51,827 rows it shares, so the feed did not update that day. Three snapshots is far too short to describe a trend and no movement figures are reported from it. Nothing here is 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."
}