Shiny vs Courtyard
Courtyard and Shiny both sell digital packs backed by real graded cards in a vault, with instant buyback if you don't want the card. The biggest difference is the buyback: Shiny's zero-fee packs pay 100% of market value with no fee, while Courtyard's standard Pokemon buyback is 90% of market value.
| Shiny | Courtyard |
|---|
| 100% EV packs (100% instant buyback · Zero fees) | Yes | No |
|---|
| Every card shown (With its value and odds) | Yes | No |
|---|
| Published expected value | Yes | Yes |
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| PSA-graded cards only | Yes | No |
|---|
| Verifiable randomness | Yes | No |
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| Randomness from an independent public beacon | Yes | No |
|---|
| Full Pack Fairness Replay (Every card, its odds, your roll and where it landed) | Yes | No |
|---|
The details
| Shiny | Courtyard |
|---|
| Buy $10,000 of packs, sell every card back | About $10,000 back on average (100% expected value × 100% buyback, zero fees) | About $8,640 back on Pro Packs (96% average value × 90% buyback) |
|---|
| Instant buyback | 100% of market value with zero fees on zero-fee packs | 90% of market value (up to 95% on select packs) |
|---|
| Full Pack Fairness Replay | Yes: your Roll History shows every card in the pool with its exact roll range, where your roll landed, and the cards just above and below it (kept 30 days) | None published |
|---|
| Who controls the randomness | drand, a public randomness beacon run by ~15 independent organizations (League of Entropy). Shiny doesn't run it and can't know or change your roll | Not published (Terms say items are "determined randomly") |
|---|
Sell back what you pull and Shiny's zero-fee packs come out even on average: $10,000 of packs returns about $10,000, versus about $8,640 on Courtyard Pro Packs. Shiny's Full Pack Fairness Replay shows every card in the pool, its odds, your roll and where it landed; we found no published way to verify a Courtyard draw at all. And Shiny's random number comes from drand, a public beacon Shiny doesn't run, committed on-chain before it exists, so nobody, Shiny included, can know or change your roll.
Competitor details come from their public pages and docs as checked on 2026-10-01. Sell-back figures are averages from each site's published expected value and standard buyback rate; individual results vary, and each site values cards its own way. Live values (prices, odds, EV) change often. If something here is out of date, tell us and we'll fix it.