The Question Every UK Collector Asks
Every serious collector eventually asks the same thing: what is my collection actually worth, and how do I keep track of it without losing my evenings to a spreadsheet? If you collect in the UK, that question has a complication most guides skip. Nearly every popular tracking tool prices cards from American sales, in dollars. Your Base Set Charizard gets valued from US marketplace data, converted at today’s exchange rate, and presented as if that’s what it would fetch in London. Often it isn’t. The UK market has its own supply, its own demand, and its own prices. I’ve spent three years cataloguing and valuing cards for the UK market, first for my own collection and now for the public TCG Mart London collection. This guide is the comparison I wish had existed when I started: the three real ways to track a collection from the UK, what each genuinely does well, and where each will let you down.
Why Converting Dollar Prices Quietly Misleads You
The dollar-conversion problem isn’t theoretical. UK and US card prices genuinely diverge, for structural reasons.
Different Supply
Product allocation, print-run distribution and import costs mean scarcity differs between markets. A card that’s abundant in the US can be thin on the ground here, and the reverse happens just as often with Japanese product.
Different Buyers
UK demand skews differently across eras and characters. Vintage WOTC and Japanese exclusives behave differently on eBay UK than they do on American marketplaces.
Selling Friction
What a card is worth to you is what it fetches where you would actually sell it. For most UK collectors that’s eBay UK or a local shop, not a US marketplace with transatlantic postage, customs forms and currency spreads in the way. None of this makes US data wrong. It’s excellent data about the US market. It simply answers a different question from the one a UK collector is asking.
Option 1: The Spreadsheet
The honest starting point, because it’s where almost everyone begins, including us. The public TCG Mart London collection started life as exactly this.
What It Does Brilliantly
Free, private, and completely yours. No account, no company, no lock-in. Your data outlives any app.
Infinitely flexible. Custom columns for grading submissions, insurance notes, or where each card is stored. No app matches a spreadsheet for this.
Fine at small scale. Under a hundred cards, updated occasionally, a spreadsheet is genuinely all you need.
Where It Breaks Down
Prices rot. Every value is a manual lookup, frozen the day you typed it. Six months later your collection total is a historical artefact. This is the fatal flaw: the market moves weekly, and you will not re-price 400 rows weekly.
Entry is slow and error-prone. Set, number, variant and condition, typed by hand for every card. One transposed number and your Jungle Snorlax is a different card.
No completion logic. Chasing a master set means maintaining the checklist yourself, including reverse holos and variants.
Verdict
Right for small collections, for collectors who genuinely enjoy the upkeep, and for anyone who values total data ownership above convenience. There is no shame in a good spreadsheet. Just be honest with yourself about whether you’ll maintain it.
Option 2: The Established US-Built Apps
Collectr, the TCGplayer app, Pokellector, Dragon Shield’s scanner and others form a mature category: polished apps, large user bases, and years of development behind them.
What They Do Brilliantly
Maturity. Years of refinement, big communities, and deep US marketplace integration. If you buy and sell into the US, their pricing reflects your actual market.
Breadth. Several cover multiple games. If you also collect sports cards or other TCGs, a multi-game app may suit you better than anything Pokémon-only.
Convenience features. Scanning, want lists and checklist tracking are common and generally well executed.
Where They Fall Short for UK Collectors
Dollars first. Most price from US sales data. A GBP display setting, where it’s offered, is usually a currency conversion: the distortion described above, built in.
US-centric ecosystem. Marketplace links, grading integrations and sold comps typically point at American services a UK collector can’t use without friction.
Japanese coverage varies. Support for Japanese sets, a huge part of how UK collectors actually collect, ranges from good to patchy depending on the app.
Verdict
Right for collectors who transact mainly in the US market, collect across multiple games, or want the largest communities. If a dollar-denominated view of your collection matches how you buy and sell, these are strong tools.
Option 3: Cardfolio (The One We Build)
Cardfolio exists because of everything above. It began as our own tracking system, built when no tool would answer the simple question: what are my cards worth here, in pounds, today?
What It Does
UK prices, natively. Guide prices in GBP are calibrated against UK market data, including real eBay UK sold listings for actively traded cards, rather than converted from dollars. Values refresh on a weekly cycle, and every price carries a confidence rating so a thin market is never dressed up as a certain one.
English and Japanese, together. More than 72,000 cards across roughly 670 sets, from Base Set to the current Scarlet & Violet era, with Japanese sets treated as first-class citizens rather than an afterthought.
Scan to add. Point your phone camera at any card and it’s identified (set, number, rarity, English or Japanese, automatically) and valued in about a second. You can try the scanner without an account.
Collector-shaped tools. Binders, master-set completion tracking, a trade analyser that values both sides of a deal before you shake on it, sealed product tracking, CSV import for moving an existing spreadsheet over, and shareable collection links that never expose what you paid.
Free. Unlimited collection size, unlimited binders and master sets, and no card details asked for. A paid Pro tier funds development for heavy users, and at the time of writing the first 151 accounts receive every Pro feature free for life as Founding Members.
Where It Isn’t the Answer
Pokémon only. If you also track other games, a multi-game app fits better.
UK-calibrated by design. If you mainly sell into the US market, a US-priced tool mirrors your reality more closely.
Younger than the incumbents. Cardfolio is in open beta. It’s live, complete and improving weekly, but the US apps have years of head start on ecosystem features, and honesty requires saying so.
Which Should You Choose?
| You are… | Best fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Under ~100 cards, casual | Spreadsheet | Free, private, and enough at small scale |
| Multi-game collector (Pokémon plus sports or other TCGs) | US-built app | One app across every game you collect |
| Buying and selling mainly into the US market | US-built app | Dollar pricing mirrors your actual transactions |
| UK collector who wants accurate GBP values | Cardfolio | UK-calibrated prices, EN and JP catalogue, free |
| Chasing master sets or tracking Japanese cards | Cardfolio | Completion tracking and first-class Japanese coverage |
| Spreadsheet owner tired of stale prices | Cardfolio (CSV import) | Bring the spreadsheet over in one reviewed step |
Three Things to Do Whatever You Choose
Record Purchase Prices From Day One
Whether it’s a spreadsheet column or a tracker field, your cost basis is the one number you can never reconstruct later, and the one that tells you what collecting is really costing you.
Track Condition Honestly
A Near Mint value on a Lightly Played card is a comforting fiction. Any system worth using values the copy you actually own, not an idealised version of it.
Value the Whole Collection, Not Just the Grails
Bulk adds up, sealed product moves, and collections routinely surprise their owners in both directions. You can’t insure, sell or properly enjoy what you’ve never measured. However you track, the collectors who thrive are the ones who know what they have. Start there, and the rest follows.
Prices discussed are guide values for collection tracking: estimates, not appraisals or offers. Cardfolio and TCG Mart London are independent of, and unaffiliated with, The Pokémon Company. All product names are the property of their respective owners, and comparisons reflect publicly available information at the time of writing.