The quick answer
Courtyard publishes what the cards are worth but not the chance of a specific one. Arena Club publishes the chance of a specific one but not what any of them are worth. Only Courtyard’s half of that adds up to a number you can act on, and that is why it takes this comparison.
Courtyard sits at 8.5 and Arena Club at 8.1. Both scores predate our research on either app and are queued for a re-run against how we rate.
Two kinds of disclosure, and only one of them prices out
This is the whole comparison, so it is worth being precise:
| Courtyard | Arena Club | |
|---|---|---|
| Odds published | Value bands + stated average | Probability against every single card |
| Granularity | A price range | A named card |
| Card values published | Yes | No — none, anywhere |
| Break-even chance computable | Yes, 17–28.9%, from its own screens | Only by pricing the cards yourself — we did, for one pack: ~35% |
| Return floor | Statistical, ~82–86% | Contractual, at least 80% for a 10% premium |
| Grades its own inventory | No | Yes |
| Seller fee | 0% | 10% |
Arena Club’s Slab Pack Checklist is genuinely the finest-grained disclosure in this category — a rate against each card, in three tiers, and the figures partition the pull to within 0.2%. It is better information than Courtyard gives you about which card you might get.
The difference is where the work falls. Courtyard’s bands are coarser but complete: with a stated average and a ceiling on every pack, its own screens contain enough to say your chance of finishing at or above cost is 17–28.9% — which also means a 71–83% chance of finishing below it. Not flattering, but knowable from the app.
Arena Club’s equivalent is knowable only if someone prices the cards. We did that for one pack — Emerald Pokémon, 12 of its 50 Lineup cards against eBay sold — and it comes out at roughly a 35% break-even chance on a median pull worth $325 of the $500 paid. So Arena Club’s odds of getting your money back are better than Courtyard’s, and its typical outcome is worse. Both facts took a week of work to establish, and neither is anywhere in the app.
Price and value
Courtyard is cheaper: $25 against $50. Earlier versions of this page put those at $2 and $5 — both wrong, both withdrawn.
Courtyard is also far broader. Its shelf carries 15 categories including One Piece, Magic The Gathering, Graded Coins, Comics, Watches and Sealed Booster. Arena Club showed four: Pokémon, basketball, football and baseball, seven packs in each. We have captured its full basketball ladder plus two Pokémon rungs, and those two match basketball to the dollar — $500 Emerald, $1,000 Diamond — so the $50 floor looks category-wide rather than a basketball-only artifact.
One thing to know about Courtyard’s pack screens: the Heavy Hitters gallery is not that pack’s contents. Across the 24 screens we hold we proved it is one vault-wide leaderboard cut at the pack’s stated ceiling, and on 21 of them every card in the window sits in the pack’s rarest band. Arena Club’s checklist, whatever else it lacks, really is the pack’s contents.
The floor, the exit and the conflict
Arena Club is the only app in this category that will sell you a guaranteed floor. Collect Safe charges 10% of the pack price and guarantees an offer of at least 80% of it, regardless of the card — confirmed on eight packs from $50 to $2,500, in two categories. Your worst case becomes a 30% loss instead of a total one. Against your full outlay that is 72.7% back, lower than Courtyard’s ~83% statistical floor, but it is contractual rather than statistical. You are buying certainty and paying for it.
Courtyard, by contrast, advertises an instant buy-back on every pack screen and never publishes the percentage — or whether it settles in cash or credit. Arena Club does not publish its rate either, but it is the clearer of the two on the money: deposits fund a wallet that withdraws to bank or debit at a $1 minimum with no Arena Club fee, so even a credit-settled offer converts to cash freely. Earlier versions of this page credited Courtyard with +5% buy-back promos; we found no evidence in any capture and have withdrawn it. This page also used to say Arena Club’s “payout specifics are less publicly documented” than Courtyard’s. That was exactly backwards.
Two things cut against Arena Club here. It grades some of what it sells — its own AC label appears inside its Pokémon checklists — which puts it on both sides of the single biggest driver of a card’s value. And it charges 10% seller commission while claiming the “market’s lowest seller commissions”, a claim Courtyard’s 0% falsifies outright. Getting your own vaulted card back also costs $1 per card plus shipping.
Which should you pick?
- Pick Courtyard if you want to price the pack before you buy it, want a lower entry, want 0% to sell on, or want a category Arena Club does not carry.
- Pick Arena Club if you are hunting one named card and want to know its actual odds, or if you want the only contractual floor in the category and will pay 10% for it. Its marketplace runs auctions and fixed-price listings too, so it is the better venue if you would rather sell to a collector than back to the app.
See how both rank against Triumph and the rest on the master ranking, or read Triumph by the numbers for what full disclosure looks like once you do the arithmetic.