TCG Grail Editorial Policy

tcggrail.com is built by automated data collection with human review before publication. This page explains exactly how a page is made, checked and corrected.

The rules we write by

No hand-typed numbers

Every figure on a card page is read from a data file. Nobody types a price, an HP value or a rarity into a page, which means a page cannot quietly disagree with the data behind it.

No estimates

If we do not hold a value, we fold that section away rather than fill it with a guess, a placeholder or a rounded-up approximation. An absent figure is honest; an invented one is not.

Facts and opinion kept apart

Collected data and our own commentary sit in clearly separate parts of a page, so you always know whether you are reading a measurement or a judgement.

Nothing is for sale

No advertiser, seller or marketplace can pay to appear in our data, to change a price, or to alter a ranking. Advertising is clearly marked and kept away from the figures.

Dates on everything

Each price carries the day it was collected, so the age of a figure is visible on the page rather than hidden.

Step 1 — Source check

Before a source is used at all, we confirm it is publicly available, that its licence allows our use, and that its card identifiers line up with ours.

Step 2 — Automated collection

Collectors pull prices and card facts on a schedule and write them into per-card data files. Values that fail a sanity check are held back rather than published.

Step 3 — Human review

TCG Grail Editorial reviews the generated pages, looking for figures that do not match the source, sections that have broken, and wording that could mislead a reader.

Step 4 — Publish and monitor

Approved pages go live. Later collections are compared against the previous ones so that a sudden unexplained jump is caught rather than published quietly.

How the automation is kept honest

Scheduled collection

Price points are gathered daily and card facts are refreshed when a source publishes a new set, so the data behind the site keeps pace with the market.

Outlier detection

A price that moves by an implausible amount against its own recent history is flagged for a person to look at before it reaches a page.

Cross-checking

Card facts are matched across more than one open database. Where two sources disagree on a card, we do not average them — we check which one is right.

Human accountability

Automation is a tool for gathering and formatting, not a substitute for judgement. Responsibility for everything published on tcggrail.com rests with TCG Grail Editorial.

Corrections

When we find an error, or when a reader reports one, we fix the data file the page is built from rather than patching the page. That way the same mistake cannot reappear the next time the page is generated.

Reports arrive through the contact page and we aim to verify and correct within one to three working days. If a correction changes a figure materially, we say so on the page rather than changing it silently.

What you are entitled to expect

You can see where any figure came from on our data sources page, including an honest list of the things we deliberately do not publish. You can report an error and get an answer through the contact page. You can read what we do with your information in our privacy policy, and the limits of our responsibility in our terms of service and disclaimer.