Why Moon Stone

I make my money on the membership, not the cardboard.

Moon Stone is a members’ club for collectors of sealed Pokémon card boxes. The whole model fits in one line: the membership is how I make a living, so I can sell every box at the live market price with nothing added on top. Here’s why that’s the honest way to do it, and why it works better for you than the way the hobby works now.

Box price Live market
Moon Stone markup $0
Where the margin is The membership
01

Why I price against TCGPlayer

Every collector already checks TCGPlayer. It’s the open, live market: the number the whole hobby uses to know what a sealed box is actually worth today. So that’s the number I use too. Every box in the catalog is priced at its live TCGPlayer market, and the market reference sits right next to the price.

There’s no “our price vs. their price,” no guessing, and no number I invented. You see the market on TCGPlayer, and the market is what you pay. When it moves, the price moves with it, up or down, and prices refresh daily.

02

The part most shops won’t say out loud

There’s almost no honest margin left in selling sealed Pokémon card boxes at retail. Allocation is tight, the printings that matter sell out in minutes, and the gap between the sticker price and what a box actually trades for gets filled by whoever moves fastest: bots, resellers, and people running more accounts than you.

So the collector who just wants the box ends up doing the work: refreshing restock alerts, racing checkout bots you can’t beat, driving around to card shops, or paying a reseller’s premium over the market. That’s not a knock on anyone. It’s just how a market with no retail margin behaves. Either way, getting the box costs you more time, more stress, or a premium on top of the market, none of which should be the price of collecting.

03

So I built the middle layer out

Because the membership is where I make my money, I don’t need to make any on the box. I source every box directly, sell it at the live market price, and my membership fee covers operations: sourcing, shipping, fulfillment, and answering your email myself. I make nothing on the product.

That’s the part that makes a fair price actually possible. A normal shop can’t sell at market, because the box is how it stays in business. Mine isn’t. So you get the box at the number you’d look up anyway, sealed, shrink-checked, and sourced directly, without the hunting, without the bots, and without a reseller in the middle.

What the membership actually gets you
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Every box at the live market price. Never above it. The market reference is shown next to each one.
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Free shipping in the US, on every order. No fees at checkout, ever.
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Sealed boxes, shrink-checked before they ship. Sourced directly, with no reseller in between.
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Up to 12 boxes a year, about one a month, across the whole catalog.
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One operator who answers the email. If something’s wrong, you reach me, not a queue.
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A member credit that comes back to you as you order through the year. Another way the membership, not the box, is where the economics live.

A calmer way to collect.

That’s the whole idea: prices that refresh daily against the open market, no bots, no hunting, no scalper tax, and one person on the other end who stands behind every box. If that’s how you’d rather collect, the membership is open.

Become a member Read the questions ›

— Max, operator