Sleeping Giants, Flash In The Pan, Slow Burners: what the labels mean.
By the person who runs Giraffe Trendz · October 2, 2026 · 4 min read
A price by itself doesn't tell you much. Two cards can both be $200 and be completely different situations. One hasn't sold in a month. The other climbs a little every week. So I built labels that describe how a price has behaved, not just where it is. Each label is a rule. No judgment calls. Here are the three that are live, with the rule spelled out.
Sleeping Giants
The rule: the card is worth $50 or more, and its price changed on fewer than 15% of the days I have recorded.
2,875 cards carry this label right now. These are expensive cards that barely trade. Mew Star from EX Dragon Frontiers sits at $3,500 and didn't move in nine weeks. Shining Mewtwo from Neo Destiny sits at $3,000, same thing.
What to do with it: don't trust the price too hard. It's the last sale, and the last sale might be old. When one of these does sell, the number can jump a long way in either direction. One on the list, a Rocket's Mewtwo winner promo, went from $1,450 to $2,400 on what was probably a single sale.
Flash In The Pan
The rule: the price jumped 40% or more in one day, then fell back to within 5% of where it started inside two weeks.
1,306 cards have done this. It's the pattern you get from a single high sale, a pricing mistake, or a quick burst of hype that nobody followed. The spike was real for a day. It wasn't a new price.
What to do with it: if a card has this label and it's spiking again, I'd wait. It has already shown you it does this. A 1st Edition Lapras from Fossil carries the label and is at $219 against $110 nine weeks ago. Maybe that one sticks. Its history says be careful.
Slow Burners
The rule: up between 15% and 80% over 60 days, with no single day above 10%, and low day-to-day swings.
1,052 cards qualify. This is the one I like most, because it's the hardest to fake. A single sale can't produce it. The price has to rise a bit at a time, over and over, which means different buyers kept paying a little more.
| Card | July 30 | October 1 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Charizard GX (Secret), Burning Shadows | $607 | $806 | +33% |
| Team Aqua's Kyogre EX, Double Crisis | $504 | $590 | +17% |
| Pikachu EX XY124, XY Promos | $427 | $495 | +16% |
| Gengar & Mimikyu GX (Full Art), Team Up | $330 | $391 | +18% |
Notice the era. Sun & Moon and XY. Old enough to be out of print, new enough that plenty of copies still trade. That's where steady climbs come from.
More labels are coming
Three more are written and waiting on data: Fallen Grails, Steady Eddies and Coiled Springs. They need 75 to 90 days of history to mean anything, and I have 61. I'd rather turn them on late than turn them on wrong.
One limit on all of this. A label describes what a price already did. It doesn't predict what it does next. You can filter by any of these in Analyze under Price story.
Keep Reading
- Old sets went up. New sets went down. Here is how lopsided it was.Nine weeks of nightly prices across 184 sets: 119 rose, 34 fell, and almost every faller was printed in the last two years.
- Japanese or English? The same Pokémon is not the same price.For 130 of 153 Pokémon, the typical English card costs more than the typical Japanese one. Umbreon is the widest gap. Pikachu is one of the few exceptions.
- One in five cards moved 20% in nine weeks. At every price.I expected cheap cards to be jumpy and expensive cards to be steady. The data says the jumpiness is about the same from $1 to $100 and up, and the reason is how few times a card actually sells.
Market reporting, not financial advice. See how the numbers are gathered.