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A card’s price can jump fast — a buyout, reprint news, a tournament result — and automated pricing chasing that jump up (or the correction back down) too aggressively can leave you either underpriced or stuck holding an inflated price. Here’s what to check before your next sync prices it.

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Step 1: Confirm the spike is real

Check the card in your movers feed or its detail panel to see the price trend, not just the current number. A genuine spike shows a clear step change with volume behind it; a data glitch or a single low-liquidity listing often shows as a one-off outlier that doesn’t hold.

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Step 2: Check if a change cap already protects you

If you’ve set a price change cap (Settings > Pricing), Hoard already limits how much a single sync can move that card’s price, so even a real spike won’t jump your listing the full distance in one push. See how to cap daily price movement if you haven’t set one yet. Without a cap, a genuine spike reprices at full value on the next sync — which is often what you want for a real buyout, but worth knowing before it happens.

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Step 3: Watch out for bot-driven low prices during the spike

If your price source is set to TCGplayer Low, a spike event sometimes brings out lowball bot listings alongside the legitimate jump. Hoard already guards against this: a low-source price sitting at half of market or less is treated as a bot lowball and market price is used instead, so a bot listing during a chaotic pricing window won’t drag your price down with it.

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Step 4: Decide whether to lock the card

If you want to hold a price steady through a volatile window regardless of what the market does next, lock the card’s price manually from the Cards table instead of waiting on caps or rules. A locked price survives sync cycles and reprice jobs until you unlock it.

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Step 5: Let it settle, then reassess

Give the market a sync cycle or two to confirm the new price is holding before treating it as the new normal. If the spike was a genuine step change, remove any temporary lock and let your normal rules and caps take over again.

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If pricing overreacted anyway

If a push already went out at a price you don’t want, you can revert it — see how to undo a price push. See how Hoard detects price spikes for more on the detection side, and tracking today’s biggest movers for where spikes first show up.