Pirates CSG eBay Sealed Pack and Hot Card Pricing Report

I've been roughly tracking eBay prices on most ships for a long time, in a very rough manner. I decided to finally sit down and collect real data and do some analysis of it, and I plan to do this over time so we can see trends. I am tracking a lot more data than is shown in this report, but here I'll focus primarily on some of the "big" ships and unopened booster box/booster pack pricing.

Keep in mind that this is what something sold for on eBay - it's not my opinion of what's something's worth, and sometimes people can get very emotional when bidding on things. This is just the weighted average* of what things sold for. Disclaimer: do not expect to get a ship or a pack for a price shown in this report. It's just an average of sold prices, and should not be seen as a "price guide" - it's not, it's just the math done on what has sold in the past. Prices continue to rise and people will continue to ask for more for rare ships as supplies dwindle. This doesn't include pricing from Hill's or elsewhere, it's just eBay.

Some top notes:

I continue to see people overpay on ebay for single booster packs. The most egregious was an auction for 15 SCS packs where the buyer paid almost as much ($550+) for 15 packs as s/he would have buying the available booster box of 36 packs ($600). But even for the cheaper packs, look for lots of 15 or more packs for the best price. Hills continues to have better pricing on some packs (OE, Rev) than eBay does, as long as you buy in bulk (e.g., booster boxes) and can deal with Hill's shipping. Hills is now out of F&S and RotF, so expect to see those prices start to rise.

Individual CC and DJC packs are starting to head over $10 each when purchased in small quantities, as are MI packs (which are rarely seen). Late in the fall, PotC packs were readily available in lots, but haven't been seen in a while. If I were to group sets into pricing tiers, FN and SCS continue to sit in the "A" tier (above $10/pack), MI, DJC, PotC and CC are in the "B" tier ($5-$10/pack), and everything else is still in the "C" tier (under $5, and in cases still under original retail price). Add a couple bucks if you buy individual packs. The only place where boxes and individual packs are roughly the same price is Rev; and BC and RotF are weird outliers (booster boxes were slightly more expensive per pack than buying individual packs).

Singles:

Prices continue to rise (some would even say, soar) across the board. As a result, several collectors auctioned off a lot of rare ships in the last 3 months. The Guichuan continues to be the most sought after card, and commands higher prices than even the Zeus. The large number of Baochuans on ebay likely depressed its price nearly down to the $100 range. Of course, we saw two Obago Deuces come on the market, with one sold in a large collection, but at $1225 it remains the most expensive card to date (at least until the owner of the ships in a bottle decides to sell or some other unique item appears on the market). A number of factory sets and other oddities came on the market and were snapped up almost immediately. Other rares, even crew and one-masted ships, saw a price increase. Rare 5-masters are solidly in the $15-25 range now, although as always you can still find bargains.

Hot take:

From 11 November 2020 through 7 February 2021, in just loose boosters alone, 1017 booster packs were sold and totalled nearly $5500 - not counting those sold in mixed lots, collections, booster boxes or tins. Add almost another $8,000 in booster box and sealed tin sales.

*See my notes in the PDF on methodology for how I did the data collection and math.