    "Just buy from Europe" is one of those things the hobby treats as obviously true and never actually checks. So I checked it, against every card where I have a trustworthy sold price on both sides.
    
    
    The catch most of these comparisons get wrong, and the first thing people rightly attack: they screenshot a Cardmarket asking price next to a US sold price. That is meaningless. An asking price is what someone hopes to get, a sold price is what a card actually traded for. When I first ran it that way it looked like a coin flip, because a few overpriced European listings drag the asking numbers around.
    
    
    So I threw the asking prices out and compared realized to realized. Cardmarket's 30-day sold average against PriceCharting's 180-day US sold median, converted at the day's exchange rate, only cards with real sales volume behind them, about 2,800 of them.
    
    
    One thing I want to be clear about up front, because it kills the obvious objection: this is an English card against the same English card. The "Japanese is cheaper" thing is a totally different print and language. Here it is the exact same English card priced in two marketplaces, so there is no language or print difference doing the work. One object, priced twice.
    
    
    Europe is cheaper on 77% of cards. The median card sells for 28% less. A third are at least 40% cheaper, the same card same condition for 60 cents on the dollar. The gap is widest in the EX, DP and HGSS era (a 38% median) and tightest on modern cards (15%), which makes sense, modern was printed and distributed globally from day one so the two markets never drifted as far apart.
    
    
    A few real ones, all heavily traded cards (60+ recorded US sales each over 180 days), Cardmarket 30-day average vs US sold median:
    - Gengar ex (Temporal Forces): around 25.72 EUR vs 55.78 USD, 47% less
    - Rayquaza VMAX (Evolving Skies): around 39.36 EUR vs 79.00 USD, 42% less
    - Pikachu (Cosmic Eclipse): around 77.14 EUR vs 148.34 USD, 40% less
    - Lugia-GX (Lost Thunder): around 16.24 EUR vs 30.24 USD, 38% less
    
    
    The one honest catch: if you are in Europe this is just the price, the discount is yours. If you are in the US, shipping and the odd customs charge eat into a single-card import, sometimes enough to erase the edge on a cheap card, rarely on a 75 dollar plus one. So it is not "import everything," it is "the home price is not automatically the fair price, and on a real card it is worth checking the other side before you buy."
    
    
    If you want to find the Pokémon cards actually worth buying right now, that is the whole reason I built tcginvest.io. It ranks them and prices each one on what it really sells for: tcginvest.io

I Compared 2,800 Pokémon Card Prices Across Europe and the US. Europe Was 28% Cheaper.