Data & Methodology
How InkSight's prices, decks, and pack simulator actually work — what the numbers mean, where they come from, and what they don't claim to be. Honesty matters more than polish.
Price data
Source
Card prices come from TCGplayer, sourced through the public tcgcsv.com daily snapshots of the Disney Lorcana category. Sealed and accessory prices come from the same source where available.
Refresh schedule
InkSight rebuilds its full price dataset on a daily schedule (approximately 04:00 UTC) and serves that snapshot for the rest of the day. Most price-bearing pages show a "prices updated daily" stamp; live pages also expose a data-freshness indicator in the footer or status pill.
Field definitions
- Current Lowest Ask
- The lowest current TCGplayer listing (near-mint, normal/non-foil printing), refreshed daily — what someone is actively offering the card for right now. Lowest Ask is a listing price, not a sale price: a single optimistic listing on a thin-market card can sit well above what the card actually trades for. Shown across InkSight as a secondary comparison value, always alongside TCGplayer Market Price.
- TCGplayer Market Price
- TCGplayer's published Market Price — a rolling/blended midpoint reflecting recent transaction activity. This is the primary trusted value used to rank Most Valuable cards and shown as the headline number wherever a card price appears on InkSight.
- Thin-market / listing-outlier badge
- Shown when a card's Lowest Ask is more than 50% above its TCGplayer Market Price. It flags that the lowest current listing is an outlier vs. recent sales activity, so the listing price should not be treated as fair market value. Verify recent sold comps before acting.
- Highest listed
- The top listing in the snapshot. Useful for spotting outliers and very thin markets; not a reliable indicator of fair value on its own.
- 24h % change
- The percent move of the headline price field versus the prior daily snapshot. If a card has no prior snapshot (newly added), no change is shown.
- Sealed / box prices
- Lowest available listing for booster boxes, packs, and other sealed product on TCGplayer at snapshot time.
Movers methodology & thin-market caveat
The Movers list ranks cards by their day-over-day, 7-day, or 30-day move on the headline price field, with each card's contribution capped at ±50% to damp obvious noise. Cards under $2 are filtered out for signal quality.
Large moves are flagged for thin-market conditions. Some low-liquidity cards may still appear in the Movers list when current listing data changes materially between daily snapshots — that's a real change in what someone is asking, but on a card that doesn't trade often it may not reflect a genuine market re-rating. We mark these with the Thin market badge described above. Treat flagged movers as signals to investigate, not as confirmed price moves.
What we don't do
- We don't average across multiple marketplaces. Prices reflect TCGplayer only.
- We don't include shipping, sales tax, or condition adjustments in headline figures.
- We don't surface intraday moves — the snapshot is daily.
Ink Market Index
The Ink Market Index is a single composite number — currently shown on the Market page — that tracks the top ~200 Disney Lorcana singles by value (a curated high-value slice of the market, not the broad/whole singles universe) day to day.
- Constituents. The top ~200 Disney Lorcana singles by current market price (the most economically meaningful slice of the card universe).
- Weighting. Value-weighted by market price, but no single card exceeds 2% of the index. Weights above the cap are trimmed and the rest renormalized, so one chase card cannot dominate the headline.
- Outlier control. Each card's contribution to the 24h / 7d / 30d move is capped at ±50% (winsorized). This damps both genuine spikes and noisy thin-market 30d prints that would otherwise distort the composite.
- Level. Baselined at 1000 on the start date and chained forward by the guardrailed 24h move, so the level shown on the widget is consistent with the displayed window moves.
- Banking. One point per day is written to history; the chart line accrues going forward — we don't back-fill or fabricate prior history.
- Source. Per-card prices and recent change windows come from our daily enrichment dataset; the index never blends in shipping, fees, or non-singles.
The Ink Market Index is a market indicator, not investment advice. Thin-market prints, low-volume sales, and one-day spikes can still nudge the index even with these guardrails in place.
Deck Lab
Deck Lab is a budget-tier deck builder, not a tournament results database. Two flavors of list can appear:
- Tournament-sourced lists — for certain recognized two-ink archetypes, Deck Lab ships a curated 60-card list inspired by published competitive lists. These appear with a "Tournament-sourced" pill.
- Suggested brews — for ink pairs and budget tiers that don't have a curated list, Deck Lab auto-builds a ~60-card shell from the daily in-ink TCGplayer card pool, capped at 4 copies per card, chosen by price tier:
- Budget — cheapest commons / uncommons / budget rares
- Modest — mid-priced rares
- High — upper rares, super-rares, and legendaries
- No Limit — the most valuable in-ink cards on offer
Every card and price comes from the daily TCGplayer feed. Deck legality changes when formats rotate; verify the current legal set list with Ravensburger or your local store before buying for competitive play.
Pack Lab
Pack Lab is a simulator. It opens virtual booster packs using modeled pull rates intended to approximate real Disney Lorcana booster distribution — rarity slot composition, the cold-foil / holo-foil slot, and the relative odds of upper-rarity hits. We tune the model from public information and observed pull data; the result is an honest approximation, not a verified disclosure of Ravensburger's actual rates.
No real cards are produced or shipped. Pack Lab is for entertainment, value-comparison ("would I be better off buying the singles?"), and learning what a sealed box can look like. It is not a gambling product, a loot-box service, or a substitute for buying real product.
Watchlist & collection storage
Anything you save in InkSight's UI (e.g. watchlist state on the Market page) is stored in your browser's localStorage on your device. We don't sync it to our servers, and clearing your site data removes it.
Disclaimer
InkSight is provided for informational purposes only. Card prices are volatile, can move materially within a single day, and may lag the daily market between snapshots. Nothing on InkSight is financial, investment, or trading advice — treat every number as a starting point for your own judgement, not a guarantee. InkSight does not buy, sell, grade, or appraise cards on your behalf.