Our Story

An Independent Break Calculator

CardBreakCalculator.com is an independent project built by a collector who got tired of guessing what a break spot was actually worth. Every calculator, checklist, and AI insight here exists because it was needed for a real bid first.

In beta — launched at The National, July 2026.

Why It Exists

Break spots are priced by feel. They don't have to be.

In a random or pick-your-team break, the price of a spot and the value of what is actually in it for that team are two different numbers. Most of the time nobody calculates the second one, so the first one gets set by hype — a popular team costs more whether or not the checklist backs it up.

This site does that second calculation. It reads the full checklist for a product, works out how much of it each team holds, and uses that to split what the boxes cost across the spots — an allocation of the bill, not a forecast of what a box returns. You get hit odds and a max bid set by one dial you control. You still choose what to bid — you just do it knowing what the spot's share actually is.

Methodology

How the numbers work

In plain hobby language, so you can decide for yourself whether to trust a figure before you act on it.

Checklist-weighted team values

Every team's share of a product comes from the actual checklist — which cards exist, which team they belong to, and how many of each. Not a hand-tuned multiplier or a gut feeling about how good a team is.

Real completed sales where coverage exists

For products we have pricing coverage on, card values come from completed auction sales rather than asking prices. Where a card has no reliable sale history, it falls back to a conservative baseline instead of being guessed upward.

Two pricing tiers, never blended

Where a product has completed-sales data, the calculator shows what share of its value is sales-backed and when that pricing was last refreshed. Where sales coverage does not exist yet, the card carries a flat placeholder for its category — a flat catalog figure rather than one scaled off the box price, because the old scaling was wrong by an order of magnitude — and it is never dressed up to look like a sale.

One dial you control on every max bid

Pool EV is what the boxes cost, split across spots — not a forecast of what they return. So the max bid is your call, set by one dial: the share of box retail you are willing to pay (68% by default). At 100% your bid plus fees comes to the spot's whole share of what the boxes cost.

Net ROI, stated plainly

ROI here is net: 0% means you broke even, +25% means you got back a quarter more than you paid, and −25% means you lost a quarter of your money. Getting back less than you spent will never be shown as a positive number.

set checklists live

sports covered

Where the data stands today

Pricing coverage varies by set. Every calculator shows how much of its value is backed by completed sales and when that pricing was last updated, so a thin set looks thin instead of looking confident. The checklist library grows as sets are researched and seeded.

What We Stand For

The principles that guide everything built here

Data-Driven Decisions

Every number on a calculator traces back to a checklist row: card values come from completed sales where we have pricing coverage, and from a flat, deliberately conservative per-category placeholder where we do not. No guessing beyond that, and no rounding a placeholder up to look like a real sale.

Community First

Built by a collector, for collectors. This tool exists because overpaying for a spot and only realizing it afterwards is a genuinely bad feeling.

Transparency

The methodology is written down here, and calculators distinguish a completed-sales price from a placeholder rather than blending the two into one confident-looking number.

Built in the Open

The set library and pricing coverage grow week by week. What ships is what works today — anything still in progress is not advertised as done.

Questions, corrections, set requests

If a number looks wrong, tell us — that feedback is how the data gets better.

cards@cardbreakcalculator.com

Run the numbers on your next break

Pick a product, pick a team, see how much of the break that spot holds before you bid.