How to check Pokémon card prices on a laptop, without an app

If the cards are spread on the desk in front of a laptop, reaching for a phone is the wrong shape. You end up holding it over the card with one hand and sorting with the other, and the machine that is already open and pointed at you does nothing.

You do not need the app. There are two ways to price a card from a laptop, one entirely by hand and one through the webcam that is already pointing at you, and both work in a browser tab.

Route one: by hand, in about two minutes

This works on any machine, costs nothing and teaches you what the automatic version is doing. It is also the fallback whenever something looks off.

1. 01Read the card properly. Name, collector number and set total (the 025/165 pair at the bottom), the set code beside it, and whether it is holo, reverse holo or plain. Where each of those is printed if you are not sure.
2. 02Open eBay's advanced search form and tick Sold items. Search the name and the collector number together. Tick Listed as lots off your results if bundles are cluttering them.
3. 03Bin the sales that are not your card: wrong variant, graded when yours is raw, a lot disguised as a single.
4. 04Take the median of what is left, not the average, and count how many sales it came from.
5. 05Then search the same thing without the sold filter and sort by lowest price, to see what it would cost to buy one right now. Keep that number separate from the first one.

Two catches to know about before you trust an empty result. eBay's public sold search covers "only listings that have recently ended sold in the previous 90 days", so a card that trades a few times a year can show nothing at all. And eBay is not the only place cards sell: auction houses handle the higher end, and their results are often the better evidence there. The longer version of both points is worth reading in full if you are pricing anything you care about.

Route two: hold the card up to the webcam

The laptop already has a camera and a browser, which between them can do the identifying part. That is what looka is: a price checker for trading cards that runs off your webcam. Open the scanner, allow the camera, hold the card inside the guide. It reads the card, then shows what recent copies sold for.

What you get back is two numbers with equal standing, and the rows they came from:

• The median of recent sold listings, from eBay, Goldin and PWCC, which come in through 130point.
• The lowest live ask on eBay, with a link to the listing.
• Under both, the individual sold rows and the live rows, each with its title, its marketplace and a link, so you can see what the median is made of rather than taking it on faith.

TCGplayer and Cardmarket show up as market price points rather than as sales, because that is what they are. Buy links may be affiliate links.

Getting a clean read out of a laptop camera

Laptop webcams are not great cameras, and the part that has to be legible is the smallest print on the card. Four things fix almost every bad read:

Light the card, not your face

The lamp should point at the card. A screen behind you or a window in front of the lens will either blow the card out or leave it too dark to read the type.

Tilt foil a few degrees

A holo card in direct light throws a hotspot exactly where the print is. Angling the card slightly moves the reflection off the text without moving the card out of frame.

Keep the bottom edge sharp

The collector number and the set code live along the bottom, and they are what actually identifies the card. If the bottom corner is soft, move the card slowly towards or away from the lens until it snaps in.

Fill the frame, and hold still for a beat

Front of the card to the lens, filling the guide. A sleeve is fine and does not need to come off. If a read still comes back wrong, edit the name or the number and search again rather than rescanning: reprints that share artwork are the usual cause.

What to do with the two numbers

The median of recent sales and the cheapest thing listed right now answer different questions, and the gap between them is information rather than noise.

• Selling. The median is your anchor. Then take off the platform fee and the postage, because a sold price is what the buyer paid, not what the seller kept.
• Buying. The lowest ask is what replacing the card costs today. If it sits well under the median of recent sales, that is worth a second look at the listing photos.
• Trading. Price both sides the same way, from sold medians, and the conversation gets much shorter.

If the number comes back lower than you expected, there is a short list of usual reasons, and most of them are fixable in the search rather than in the card.

If the camera is already running

The reason any of this is on a laptop rather than a phone is that some people have a camera pointed at cards all day: on a stream, across a table at a show, over a counter. For streaming there is an overlay, a URL that OBS, Streamlabs or Twitch Studio load as a browser source, fed by the scanner in another tab, so the comps appear on air while the card is still in your hand. It carries a small looka.cards mark on the free tier. How to set that up is three steps.

For everyone else it is simpler than that. Open a tab, hold the card up, read the number.