Methodology
PokaFind rebuilds pre-order benefit photocard lists from retailer pages, web archives, secondhand listings and community reports, and measures how often each card appears for sale. Every figure is shown with the kind of evidence behind it and the size of the sample — and where the evidence is thin, we say so.
Why anything needs rebuilding
Album retailers announce a pre-order benefit only as “2 random from 24 unreleased photocards”, and never publish what those 24 cards are — not at pre-order, not after release, not years later.
So the list exists nowhere as a list. It has to be reassembled from records that scattered once the cards shipped. That is the work.
Sources
Sources differ in how much they can be relied on, so we grade them.
| Grade | Evidence |
|---|---|
| Read directly from the shop’s product page | |
| A past version of the page in a web archive | |
| 3 or more listings from different sellers describe it the same way | |
| Fan archives and reader reports, credited | |
| Evidence below the threshold |
The grade is derived from the evidence, never stored. New evidence raises it automatically, and changing the rules re-derives every grade on the site.
Supply and rarity are kept separate
They are different things, and conflating them produces wrong answers.
- Supply — how many are listed right now. A fact we measure.
- Rarity — how much collectors want it. A judgement the fandom makes.
Zero listings has two opposite causes. Everyone wants it so nobody sells (a grail), or nobody wants it so nobody bothers listing. Listing counts alone cannot tell those apart.
So every card starts as Common, and we do not raise it before collectors have weighed in. Calling a card nobody wants a “grail” is worse than saying nothing at all.
| Tier | Who decides |
|---|---|
| Common | The default for every card |
| Rare / Very Rare / Grail | Collectors, with the basis recorded |
| Unrated | Not yet observed enough to say |
A tier always appears next to the supply fact we measured — “3 listed now”, “none listed for 90d”. The first is ours; the tier is the fandom’s.
When we decline to say
- Under 14 days of observation we do not report supply either. None listed and we have not looked yet are different things.
- Under 3 data points we mark the figure low-confidence.
- Without a published total we show “total unknown” instead of a completeness bar.
How prices are shown
Always with the sample size and the date. One listing from three months ago is not a market price.
What we exclude
- Unofficial and fan-made cards — they distort prices (how to tell)
- Full-set listings (OT8 and similar) — priced on a different basis, so they are not mixed with single-card prices
- Listings with a member dropdown — one listing covers many cards, so it is not a price for any one of them
- Listings naming several retailers — if we cannot tell which benefit it is, we do not pick one
Known limits
- Prices and difficulty are measured on international marketplaces. What circulates inside Korea is not counted.
- A card traded heavily within Korea can therefore look rarer here than it is. For someone buying from abroad, though, that reading still holds.
- Cards that never trade accumulate no data. We show that gap rather than hide it.
- These are asking prices, which can differ from what cards actually sell for.
- We do not rule on whether any individual card is genuine.
Corrections
Found something wrong? Report it from the page it appears on and we will check it. People who contribute records are listed on a credits page.
Related: About · Affiliate disclosure · Bot policy