About Insider.Cards
The hobby’s front page — one river for sports cards and TCG.
Hobby news is scattered across dozens of sites, auction-house blogs, subreddits, YouTube channels and X feeds. Insider.Cards pulls them into a single river, groups outlets covering the same story under one headline, and ranks that story by how fresh it is, how many outlets are on it, and how trusted they are. It’s a hobby-native take on the Techmeme idea.
How the river works
- Ingest. Every 203 sources’ public RSS/Atom, Reddit RSS and YouTube feeds are checked every ~15 minutes. We keep a rolling 7 days of headlines, short excerpts and thumbnails — never full articles.
- Cluster. Headlines are compared with TF-IDF cosine similarity (names, sets and dollar amounts count extra). Items about the same story become one cluster; each cluster remembers why they were grouped.
- Lead. The headline you see belongs to the best-graded source that reported it first. Everyone else sits under Also covering.
- Rank. Score = lead source weight + 0.7 × the weight of every additional outlet, decayed with a ~20-hour half-life. POP n is simply how many outlets are on the story, like a pop count.
Source grades
Every source carries a grade like a slab label: Tier 110 primary and flagship hobby outlets, official sources and top auction houses; Tier 29 strong niche outlets and creators; Tier 38 communities and long-tail voices. Grades affect ranking and who gets the lead — not whether a story is true. Always click through.
The sections
- The Pull Sheet
- The top pulls of the moment — highest-ranked stories right now.
- Gem Mint
- The week’s biggest stories, ranked with slow decay.
- The River
- Everything, newest first, grouped by story.
- Hot Rips
- Breaks, box openings and pack battles.
- Pop Report
- Grading news — PSA, BGS, SGC, CGC and friends.
- The Block
- Auction results and upcoming lots.
- Chase Board
- Players, characters and sets the hobby is chasing, by distinct outlets mentioning them.
- Slab Talk & Top Voices
- Creators, breakers and communities.
- Sealed Wax
- Product releases, checklists, preorders.
Fine print
Insider.Cards is an independent aggregator. It is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, any grading company, manufacturer, auction house or publisher listed. Headlines and short excerpts link to the original source. Missing a source? It’s a one-line addition to data/sources.json — see the Sources page for what’s already tracked.