Pick any Pokemon card over $100 and look at the cents. If the price ends in .00 or .99, a person typed it. If it ends in .37 or .74, a machine worked it out from what sold. We checked what happens next to each kind, on 920 cards over 26 days, and the two behave nothing alike.
One card in five above $100 carries a round price. The commonest ending by far is .00, on 129 cards, then .99 on 63. Those are not the shape of an average. They are the shape of a decision.
Share of cards whose price never changed, by price band
Why this happens
A market price is supposed to be a summary of what people paid. When almost nobody is paying, there is nothing to summarise, and the number falls back to whatever the one seller on the shelf is asking. Sellers do not ask $487.31. They ask $500.
So the round cents are a fingerprint. They mark the cards where the price is one person's opinion rather than a market's. That is why the frozen share runs between 46% and 60% in every band we can measure, and why it barely changes as the price goes up. The shape of the card does not matter. The thinness does.
The second half of the result is the one that costs money. When a computed price moves, it ticks: median 1.24%, and only 22.5% of first moves are bigger than 5%. When a round price moves, it jumps: median 13.3%, and 80.2% of first moves clear 5%. Nothing was accumulating in between. The seller relisted, or sold and the next listing was somewhere else entirely.
The dearest prices that did not move a cent in 26 readings
| Card | Set | Price, every day |
|---|---|---|
| Mew Star 101 | Dragon Frontiers | $3,500.00 |
| Lugia ex 105 | Unseen Forces | $2,500.00 |
| Rocket's Mewtwo 8 | Best of Game | $2,400.00 |
| Raikou Star 114 | Unseen Forces | $1,600.00 |
| Mudkip 5 | Nintendo Black Star Promos | $1,500.00 |
| Shining Charizard 107 | Neo Destiny | $1,495.00 |
| Gengar ex 108 | FireRed & LeafGreen | $1,399.99 |
| Charizard 136 | Plasma Storm | $1,150.00 |
| Suicune Star 115 | Unseen Forces | $1,100.00 |
| Entei Star 113 | Unseen Forces | $1,067.00 |
Four of those ten are Gold Stars from Unseen Forces. That set shows up here because almost nothing in it trades, not because something is wrong with it.
And when they break
Raikou from Call of Legends sat at $225.00 and then went to $699.00 on its first move, up 210.7%. Eevee from the Black & White promos moved 128.6% off $349.99. It runs the other way too: Deoxys ex fell 79.4% off $800.00 and Blastoise from Expedition fell 76.4% off $400.00. These are not market crashes. One listing left and another took its place.
What this measure is not
A round price can be a real sale at a round number, and 53% is not 100%. Almost half of the round-priced cards did move inside the month. The claim is a ratio, not a rule.
Frozen here means 26 consecutive readings with the same number, which is one month. It is not a statement about the year. And it is a fact about the quote, not about demand: a card can trade briskly off-platform while its listed price sits still.
The two copied days matter more than they sound. The provider republished the previous day's file on 7 and 25 September, and if you count those as readings, every unchanged run looks one day longer. We drop them by testing each day against the one before it rather than by remembering which days were bad.
Window 2026-09-07 to 2026-10-04 inclusive, which begins at PRICE_RULE_EPOCH_DAY (day 20703), so every reading is comparable. price_history joined to cards on tcg_id, lang 'en', one row per TCGplayer product id (21,449 distinct ids in the catalog; 21,245 priced on every comparable day). 1,357,159 readings in the window. Two days, 2026-09-08 and 2026-09-25, repeat the previous day on more than 97% of cards and are dropped as republished files, leaving 26 readings. A card is in the $100 group when its price on 2026-09-07 was $100 or more: 920 cards. Round means the price on that day ended in .00 or .99: 192 cards. Frozen means all 26 readings are the identical number. The first move is the first reading that differs from the one before it. Medians are the upper middle value on an even sample. Every figure here is printed by scripts/the-round-number-tell-figures.mts.