{ "url": "https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-frozen-catalog", "slug": "the-frozen-catalog", "title": "The Frozen Catalog: 7,795 Cards Held Exactly One Price for Twenty-One Straight Days", "summary": "We recorded 994,132 daily prices across 52,542 cards over three weeks. Among the 35,507 cards priced on every single day, 22.0% never changed by a cent. The frozen share is not worst among the penny commons, as you would expect. It is worst at the top: half of every card above $500 held one number for the entire window.", "section": "Data forensics", "published": "2026-09-19", "readMinutes": 8, "publisher": "moonstone", "findings": [ { "value": "994,132", "measures": "daily price readings recorded", "basis": "August 30 to September 19, 2026, 52,542 distinct cards" }, { "value": "22.0%", "measures": "of fully-covered cards never moved", "basis": "7,795 of the 35,507 cards priced on all 21 days" }, { "value": "51.5%", "measures": "frozen share above $500", "basis": "106 of 206 cards, the worst band in the catalog" }, { "value": "17", "measures": "most distinct prices any card produced", "basis": "out of a possible 21; 271 cards tie at that ceiling" } ], "tables": [ { "title": "Frozen share by price level, 21-day window", "columns": [ "Average price", "Cards", "Never moved", "Frozen share", "Avg distinct prices" ], "rows": [ { "Average price": "Under $1", "Cards": "14,270", "Never moved": "2,281", "Frozen share": "16.0%", "Avg distinct prices": "3.67" }, { "Average price": "$1 to $5", "Cards": "6,081", "Never moved": "745", "Frozen share": "12.3%", "Avg distinct prices": "6.03" }, { "Average price": "$5 to $20", "Cards": "8,144", "Never moved": "2,284", "Frozen share": "28.0%", "Avg distinct prices": "4.92" }, { "Average price": "$20 to $100", "Cards": "5,234", "Never moved": "1,727", "Frozen share": "33.0%", "Avg distinct prices": "3.97" }, { "Average price": "$100 to $500", "Cards": "1,572", "Never moved": "652", "Frozen share": "41.5%", "Avg distinct prices": "2.96" }, { "Average price": "$500 and up", "Cards": "206", "Never moved": "106", "Frozen share": "51.5%", "Avg distinct prices": "2.32" } ] }, { "title": "The six most frozen sets, and six of the fourteen at zero", "columns": [ "Set", "Fully-covered cards", "Never moved", "Frozen share" ], "rows": [ { "Set": "bw-p promotional cards", "Fully-covered cards": "75", "Never moved": "62", "Frozen share": "82.7%" }, { "Set": "Mysterious Mountains", "Fully-covered cards": "63", "Never moved": "51", "Frozen share": "81.0%" }, { "Set": "pcg-p promotional cards", "Fully-covered cards": "89", "Never moved": "71", "Frozen share": "79.8%" }, { "Set": "xy-p: XY promos", "Fully-covered cards": "121", "Never moved": "95", "Frozen share": "78.5%" }, { "Set": "The Town on No Map", "Fully-covered cards": "71", "Never moved": "55", "Frozen share": "77.5%" }, { "Set": "sm-p: Sun & Moon promos", "Fully-covered cards": "193", "Never moved": "142", "Frozen share": "73.6%" }, { "Set": "[Base Set](/set/base%20set)", "Fully-covered cards": "101", "Never moved": "0", "Frozen share": "0.0%" }, { "Set": "Base Set (Shadowless)", "Fully-covered cards": "102", "Never moved": "0", "Frozen share": "0.0%" }, { "Set": "[Base Set 2](/set/base%20set%202)", "Fully-covered cards": "130", "Never moved": "0", "Frozen share": "0.0%" }, { "Set": "[Fossil](/set/fossil)", "Fully-covered cards": "62", "Never moved": "0", "Frozen share": "0.0%" }, { "Set": "[Gym Heroes](/set/gym%20heroes)", "Fully-covered cards": "132", "Never moved": "0", "Frozen share": "0.0%" }, { "Set": "[Jungle](/set/jungle)", "Fully-covered cards": "64", "Never moved": "0", "Frozen share": "0.0%" } ] }, { "title": "The dearest card at the 17-price ceiling from each of the five dearest sets", "columns": [ "Card", "Set", "Distinct prices", "Low", "High" ], "rows": [ { "Card": "[Mega Rayquaza ex](/card/jat-709264)", "Set": "M6: Storm Emeralda", "Distinct prices": "17", "Low": "$376.15", "High": "$600.55" }, { "Card": "[Cynthia's Garchomp ex](/card/sv10-232)", "Set": "[Destined Rivals](/set/destined%20rivals)", "Distinct prices": "17", "Low": "$226.27", "High": "$238.83" }, { "Card": "[Mega Darkrai ex](/card/me05-116)", "Set": "[Pitch Black](/set/pitch%20black)", "Distinct prices": "17", "Low": "$191.25", "High": "$212.58" }, { "Card": "[Mega Greninja ex](/card/me04-116)", "Set": "[Chaos Rising](/set/chaos%20rising)", "Distinct prices": "17", "Low": "$164.07", "High": "$184.57" }, { "Card": "[Moltres & Zapdos & Articuno GX](/card/smp-SM210)", "Set": "SM Black Star Promos", "Distinct prices": "17", "Low": "$153.05", "High": "$160.17" } ] } ], "charts": [ { "title": "Distinct prices produced over 21 days", "unit": " cards", "note": "Cards with a reading on all 21 days (n = 35,507). A card with one distinct price never moved.", "points": [ { "label": "1 price", "value": 7795, "basis": null }, { "label": "2 prices", "value": 6836, "basis": null }, { "label": "3 prices", "value": 5396, "basis": null }, { "label": "4 prices", "value": 4001, "basis": null }, { "label": "5 prices", "value": 2662, "basis": null }, { "label": "6 prices", "value": 1751, "basis": null }, { "label": "7 prices", "value": 1185, "basis": null }, { "label": "8 prices", "value": 881, "basis": null } ] } ], "sections": [ "Most of the catalog barely moves, and a fifth does not move at all", "The expensive end is the frozen end", "Where the freeze lives, and where it does not", "The expensive cards that did not move at all", "What a card that actually trades looks like", "How to read a price once you know this" ], "method": [ "Source: our price_history table, 994,132 rows covering 52,542 distinct cards on 21 consecutive days from August 30 to September 19, 2026, recorded from TCGplayer market values. Daily coverage is not uniform across the catalog (between 35,700 and 52,261 cards were priced on any given day), so every frozen-share figure in this article is computed only on the 35,507 cards that produced a reading on all 21 days; that restriction is what makes 'never moved' checkable rather than an artifact of missing days. 'Distinct prices' counts unique values, so a card that moved and moved back counts two. Price bands use the mean price across the window. Set-level figures require at least 60 fully-covered cards in the set and use the set names as recorded on the price series. Nothing here is financial advice. ONE CAVEAT THAT BELONGS IN THE HEADLINE, added on September 22, 2026: on September 7, inside this window, the rule behind the recorded price column changed. Until that morning it recorded the dearest printing of a product; from that morning it records the shared canonical-printing rule, and on multi-printing cards the two are nowhere near each other. 16,915 series show a price change across that one day boundary, out of the roughly 51,900 that were priced on both sides of it, and an unknown share of those changes are the rule moving rather than the market. That biases every figure here in the same direction: a card counted as having moved may only have been re-measured, so 22.0% is a FLOOR on the frozen share, not a point estimate, and so is every band and set figure built the same way. Restricting to the thirteen days from September 7 to September 19, which are all measured the same way, 41.7% of the 35,574 fully-covered cards never moved and 139 of the 206 above $500 never moved, 67.5%. That window is shorter and so freezes more cards by construction, and it is not a like-for-like restatement of the 21-day figures, but it does say that correcting the bias makes the finding stronger rather than weaker. RECHECKED 2026-09-22: every other number in this article reproduces exactly against production, including the row counts, the full distinct-price histogram, all six price bands, the top six frozen sets, the fourteen sets at zero, the per-set medians, 386 frozen cards above $200 and 32 above $1,000, and every card named in the two tables." ], "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." }