Search tips

The five fields that identify a card

Industry-standard required fields for any card record:

1. Category — Baseball, Basketball, Football, Hockey, Soccer, Pokémon, One Piece, Marvel, Multi-Sport, UFC/MMA, Wrestling. (We extend beyond Card Ladder with TCG coverage for MTG and others.)
2. Year— for multi-year vintage use year_label (“1909-1911”).
3. Set— often includes brand (“Panini Prizm”, “Topps Chrome”).
4. Player / Subject — one or more. CardboardChasr stores as an array so dual-auto cards are searchable by either name.
5. Condition— “Raw” is a first-class value. PSA/BGS/SGC/CGC + numeric grade is the graded path.

Query operators

Appending Rawto a query returns only ungraded cards. Useful for “find all my raw Topps Chrome” in one shot.

Power-user rules of thumb

1. Avoid the card number if you can.Card numbers drift between base and parallels (“#1 Base” vs “#1 Silver Prizm”). Start with player + year + set, then narrow.
2. Use exclusion for parallels. The cleanest way to get base cards is to exclude known parallel names: Prizm -Silver -Gold -Mojo -Hyper.
3. Grade goes last.Identify the card first, then add “PSA 10” or “Raw” to filter condition.
4. Parallel names vary by brand. Panini uses Silver / Gold / Mojo / Hyper / Choice. Topps uses Refractor / X-Fractor / Orange / Gold. Bowman uses Sky Blue / Purple / Red / Atomic.

Why we differ from Card Ladder

Card Ladder manages parallels via long exclusion strings in the search query (e.g. -Silver -Gold -Mojo). We store brand and parallel as first-class typed columns, so you can filter cleanly without relying on search syntax. Both worlds work — the query syntax above is for when you want the speed of keyboard-only filtering.