Using the Vault

The Vault watches the graded-card market for you and puts the best buys at the top of a list. It re-checks every tracked card every night, so you see supply and demand move before prices catch up. This guide explains, in plain terms, what each screen shows and how to use it to decide what to buy.

The Buy Board

This is the home screen: cards worth buying, ranked best-first. Each row is one card at one PSA grade. Click any row to open its full card page.

• Buy score — the big badge (0–100) with a one-word verdict. It blends three things: how scarce the card is, how much momentum it has, and how far the asking price sits below fair value. The colored bar under it shows how much each ingredient contributed.
• Population — how many exist at that grade. 90-day pop trend is a mini-chart of that number over time.
• Fair value — our estimate of what the card is worth, from recent sold prices. Asking is what it's listed for now. Below FV is the gap between them — a positive number means it's listed under fair value.
• Data — a confidence percentage (see below). Watch-outs are plain-language flags to check before buying.
• Decision — mark a card Watch, Bought, or Pass. Every decision is logged (Pass asks for a quick reason), so the board learns which calls actually paid off.

Controls

• Show switches between candidates, everything, owned, bought, or passed.
• Include flagged rows reveals rows the board hides by default (e.g. a price that's collapsing).
• Adjust weighting lets you slide how much scarcity vs. momentum vs. value counts toward the score, so you can tilt the board toward what matters to you today.
• Favor proven data pushes cards with thin history down the list, so headline scores built on very little data don't float to the top.

The score, explained

Each Buy score (0–100) is a blend of three ingredients. You never need the math — here's what a high score in each one is telling you.

If we can't measure one ingredient yet (say, no recent sales), it's simply left out and the other two carry the score — a card is never punished just for missing data.

What the verdict word means

Confidence (the "Data" column)

Confidence is how much to trust the score. It rises with more days of population history and more recent sales. Labels: High, Medium, Low, Very low. A high score with low confidence means "interesting, but verify before acting."

Watch-out flags

These chips flag things to check. The most important:

When you Pass, you pick a reason — Too expensive, Pop risk, Don't need, Bad comps, or Other — so passed cards keep a note of why.

The card page

Click any row to open a card's full story. From the top:

• Buy Signal — plain language: the score, its confidence, a one-line headline, and a short bullet list of the actual reasons ("Scarce: only 19 PSA 10 copies…", "Priced 22% below fair value…").
• Fair value & ask-gap tiles: fair value, the ask, the gap between them, and a freshness rating that tells you how recent the sales behind the value are:

• Grade distribution ("pop pyramid"): a bar for each PSA grade showing how many copies exist at each — your target grade is highlighted. Shows at a glance whether the grade you want is rare or common.
• Population across graders: PSA next to BGS, SGC and CGC counts and gem rates (from GemRate). Useful for seeing the card's true scarcity across the whole hobby, not just PSA.
• Supply trend — 7 / 30 / 90 days: how many copies (and how many PSA 10s) were added over each window, plus how the gem rate is drifting. Rising supply is a caution for scarcity; a falling gem rate hints that future 10s will be scarcer.
• Grade-mix forensics: a plain label on what kind of supply arrived — raw supply arriving (mostly low grades), fresh gems flowing in (mostly 10s), or crack-and-resubmit churn (10s up while 9s drain, no real new supply).
• Population & price charts over time, the underlying comps (recent sales, which you can add or exclude), and a decision history of every Watch/Bought/Pass on the card.
• ☆ Track (top of the page): star the card to follow it in your Favorites. Chart over time → jumps to Analytics for this card.

Set Explorer

Browse the market set by set, or watch the whole thing heat up. It has two modes in one table:

• All tracked sets (default) — every card we track, ranked by how fast its population is growing. The movers view: what's getting graded and sold most right now.
• Pick a set — its full PSA-style population report: every card with its PSA 10, PSA 9, total, and gem %, with the movement columns overlaid. The header sums up the set: total population, PSA 10s, gem rate, days tracked, how fast it's growing, and a 90-day projection.

Columns beyond the raw counts:

• Growth — how much the population grew over the window you pick (7 / 30 / 90 days). Unusual — how far that growth stands out from every other tracked card.
• +PSA 10s — how many new 10s appeared. Gem drift — the change in gem rate; falling means future 10s are getting scarcer.
• Supply story — the same grade-mix label described on the card page (raw influx / gem flow / resubmit churn).

Find filters by card, number, or variety; Supply story and Min population narrow the list; Export CSV downloads the current view as a spreadsheet. Each row's Watch button sends the card straight to the Buy Board.

Adding a set from PSA

Use + Add a set from PSA. On PSA's population report, open the set you want and copy its web address, then paste it in. We look it up, confirm the card count, and start re-checking it every night — you can even pull the first snapshot immediately. Every card in a set you add automatically joins the Explorer and the scarcity comparison.

Analytics

Chart supply and value over time so you can see trends and compare. Pick a measure — population, PSA 10 population, gem rate, or fair value — and a level:

• Cards — one or more individual cards (up to eight overlaid at once).
• Sets — whole sets, to compare how they're maturing.
• Hobby / category — a roll-up across a category (e.g. all Pokémon), optionally by era.

Set the time Range (30 days up to a year, or Max). Hover the chart for exact numbers on any day. Index to 100 at start rebases every line to 100 at its first point — the honest way to compare cards of very different sizes on one axis, since it shows percent change rather than raw counts.

Favorites & My Tracked

Star any card with the ☆ Track button on its page to build a personal follow list. Your starred cards appear under My Tracked at the bottom of the Analytics screen, each with a mini trend line. You can tag them, filter by tag, and select several to chart them together. This is the fastest way to keep an eye on a shortlist over time.

Demand rating

Everything above is measured from data. Demand is the one place your team's judgment lives. On a card page, anyone can rate how wanted a card is on a 1–5 scale. The votes combine into a 0–100 Demand score shown beside the objective, pop-based rarity score.

• Demand never changes the rarity number — the two sit side by side so you can see when the crowd disagrees with the raw scarcity.
• It shows how many people voted, how fresh the votes are, and a confidence read — and it flags when a single voter is driving the number.
• One standing vote per person, per card; your latest vote wins. Add a short note if you want to explain your call.

Where the data comes from

Everything in the Vault is refreshed daily by an automatic overnight crawl. The pieces:

In short: fair value comes from recent solds, the asking price is the live list price, and the value gap compares the two. Because the two blend, always glance at the freshness rating and confidence before acting on a gap.

Signing in

The Vault uses refractors.app single sign-in. Sign in once with your @midwestcards.com Google account and you're recognized across every refractors app. Your name appears in the top-right; your Watch/Bought/Pass decisions and demand votes are tied to it, so the team's history stays attributable. There's nothing to install — if you're not signed in, the Vault sends you to the login automatically.