The floor
Four rooms, real addresses, cameras on. United Card Exchange runs live card commerce the way it actually works — people in a room, product on the table, always in stock.
The desk
TCG Study re-prices 4,688 sealed products across fifteen games every night, against the live TCGplayer feed. If a price can’t be verified, it says so.
One side of this business puts product in front of people on camera. The other side runs an unattended engine that audits the sealed market every night and publishes what it finds. Same company, same cards, two different jobs — and the research is free to read whether you buy from us or not.
This is a real sequence, not a diagram for its own sake — each step only happens because the one before it did.
TCGplayer’s daily price file lands around 20:00 UTC. Nothing on our side moves before it does.
An unattended job re-prices all 4,688 products, rebuilds the movers tape, and signs the record with the date.
What the desk published overnight is what the room quotes on camera the next day. Same number, no separate pricing sheet.
Real closes beat listings. Sales outrank asks, and contradictory prints are discarded rather than headlined.
Pulled live from the desk. The chip is the last 24 hours; the line beside it is the product’s whole recorded ledger, so the two can disagree — something up over a year can still be down today. Direction is carried by the arrow and the sign, never by colour alone, and a hollow final point means that close is an estimate rather than a verified sale.
The research desk is open to everyone and always will be. Read it before you buy from us — that’s the point of publishing it.