Courtyard

You pay in dollars and open a pack, which reveals one graded card (PSA or CGC). The card is already vaulted and insured, held as an on-chain token that represents the physical slab. From there you have two choices: ship the physical card to yourself, or sell it back to Courtyard for cash. You can also list it on Courtyard's marketplace, which charges 0% seller fees.

Because the cards are pre-vaulted, what you're really buying is a randomized claim on a specific pool of graded cards — Courtyard shows the “heavy hitters” (top cards) that are actually sitting in each pack's inventory, not just abstract tiers.

Courtyard publishes one odds set per pack as USD value buckets — for example a $100 Pokémon pack might show a ~52% chance of a $70–85 card down to a ~0.2% chance of a $400–1,600 card — and those buckets sum to 100%. There is no separate “advertised vs real” distribution, so there's no discrepancy to expose; the odds it shows are the odds it pays.

The honest caveat is bucket width. The top buckets are wide (a single $400–1,600 band spans 4×), and within any band the cards skew toward the floor, so the midpoint overstates the typical pull. Courtyard's own on-site “expected value” is a flat 97% of the pack price applied to every pack — a tidy marketing figure rather than one derived from the buckets — so we compute EV from the buckets ourselves.

Value-weighting the published buckets at their midpoints gives a gross expected return of roughly 97–104% of the pack price, depending on the pack. That gross number is what the card you win is estimated to be worth — realizable in full only if you ship the card and resell it yourself.

The realizable-in-cash number is lower. Courtyard's published buyback ratio is about 85% (0.846), so selling a won card straight back returns roughly 83–98% of the pack price across the catalogue. That spread — gross if you ship, ~85% of it if you cash out instantly — is the clearest picture of the true cost of playing, and Courtyard is one of the few operators that gives you both numbers.

Courtyard pays in cash and, unusually, publishes the rate: sell a card back and you receive about 85% of its estimated value instantly. Alternatively you ship the physical graded card (shipping/withdrawal costs apply) and keep 100% of the value, or list it on the marketplace at 0% seller fees. The vault storage and insurance are handled by Courtyard while the card sits on-platform.

The buyback is the number that matters for a quick flip: it is the discount you accept to turn a card into money without waiting for a sale. At ~85% it's transparent and competitive, but it's still the house's margin on a cash-out.

Courtyard delivers real, professionally graded cards from an insured vault, publishes its odds and its buyback rate openly, puts a value on every pull in a public live feed, and runs a 0%-fee marketplace. On transparency it's the strongest operator we rate. The thing to understand — not a scam, just economics — is that the attractive gross expected value is only fully captured by shipping and reselling; the instant cash-out applies a ~15% haircut.