I’m a super noob collector just a few months so cant offer advice but just an opinion. This has been my philosophy thus far:
More cards is better than less cards if you looking to do a collection.
If a set had 100 cards, I would rather have all 100
In PSA 8 rather than just 10 of them in PSA 10.
As finances and deals become available, you can upgrade your cards to 9 and 10s.
The 8s you can probably get your money back when you replace it with a better card.
I know some people have mentioned that their 10 looks like a 9 and their 9 looks like a 10 so therefore the 10 is not worth it.
Problem I think with that kind of statement is that PSA opinion carries all the weight - not the collector. PSA is quantitative while our opinions is qualitative.
If I knew a 9 was better than a 10, I would take the 10 just because the card is more credible?
Many cards I wouldn’t mind a PSA 2 or something just to own it. Perhaps a 60,500 difference between 2 and 10.
I think this only affects older and more popular cards. I strive to collect PSA 10s myself, but the only Pichu card which suffers from this large divide is the 1st Edition Neo Genesis holo. PSA 9s struggle to sell for £40 and PSA 10s have sold for over £400. I say have sold because they tend to sit unsold on eBay for 6+ months before anyone buys them. Meanwhile the unlimited version in PSA 10 can be picked up for under £80.
The 1st Edition Neo Genesis Pichu is one of the most heavily-populated PSA 10 Pichu cards (there are 21 of them), but there’s no way I’m paying 10 to 15 times more than the PSA 9 price to pick one up for my own collection. Case in point: the last PSA 9 sold for £31 whereas the last PSA 10 sold for £461 - that’s an almost 15x price gap.
I genuinely feel like its people with more money than sense who buy these, and that’s why sellers are happy to leave them there and not accept offers. I can comfortably afford to buy one at that price, but there’s no way I’m paying that much for a card which is ultimately nothing special.
@pichufan I was commenting on the overlap in quality that budgets photo demonstrates an example of. Not price. Anywhere I could get a PSA 10 for anywhere near the same price as a 9 I obviously would and sometimes you can in fact do that at auction.
But yeah. In a perfect world PSA would make no mistakes and there would be no subjectivity in grading. However there is and they do make mistakes or honestly even worse than mistakes IMO are inconsistencies in their judgement between graders and even with the same grader over time. I don’t think they are awful, but they are a whole lot worse than I think they should be hence why I maintain a collection of 9’s that I am quite confident 25% or more of them could attain 10’s on a re submission.
As a broad generalization, it may be more worth it to go for PSA 10s for newer cards but PSA 9s for older (particularly WotC cards) due to the differences in cost spread between grades as a result of older cards generally being more difficult to find in PSA 10.
I’m sure this is talked about on another thread but take a look at the cards on eBay and look at how many are new labels graded recently vs old labels/Cert #’s. You almost never see old certification numbers/labels anymore for major PSA 10 cards. Many of the people like myself who own those PSA 10 old Cert cards refuse to sell and have been holding for years. Down the road I think these old Cert. Numbers will demand a premium and I think it has already started to some degree. If you are familiar with PCGS it will be the equivalent of the green holder “rattler.” The highest growth from an invest standpoint will almost always be in the PSA 10 realm although as PSA 10’s become unaffordable for a specific card it pulls the price of 9’s, 8’s so on up as well. This price action doesn’t happen without 10’s rising in price first though.
Most people grade cards to sell them on, that’s why the market is heavily dominated by newer certificate numbers. The older ones have already been sold on to collectors and investors. I can see how some certificate numbers may be more desirable than others, but I don’t think the majority of collectors will place additional value in lower numbers.
Its funny then that most people seem to prefer the newer PSA cases, myself included. When PWCC list multiple copies of the same card in their auctions, newer case cards tend to sell for a bit more. Perhaps people expect less scratches on the case or perhaps people have more confidence in newer grades as PSA now should be more experienced in evaluating pokemon cards compared to years ago. However, for historic reasons I can see the appeal in having some of the earliest graded pokemon cards.
