The premiums for BGS BL are insane; itās something I donāt understand, and never will. Maybe Iām just not the demographic for them, but clearly someone is.
Would love to talk with someone that enjoys collecting BGS BL just for their perspective.
I like Black Labels because conditional rarity deserves to be recognized with more granularity.
I donāt like Black Labels because Beckett has, in the past (and forgive me for not digging up the story/link), shown that their integrity with Black Labels is random at best and downright shady at worst.
The only Black Label I own is a card I personally submitted, and I would never buy one. But the market for Black Labels is going nowhere, IMO. Never underestimate the power of people with more money than sense.
Black labels are artifical scarcity at its finest. Imagine if PSA randomly gave some of their 10ās a shiny label with no real discernable reason why.
This assumes a human (let alone a group of different graders) can grade to such a granular level in a consistent way. Without consistency, it just becomes an RNG lottery perceived as some objective system. The easiest way to tell that the BL is effectively bullshit is that no one on the planet can predict whether or not a card will get the black label before they get the grade back. How many times have you seen the line āhoping for the black label ā (almost always ends up a 9.5)
BGS does not have magic powers. If the submitters canāt determine what deserves a black label beforehand, what is BGS doing to make the determination?
Itās the measurement equivalent of weighing grains of sand with a kitchen scale
If the submitters canāt determine what deserves a black label beforehand, what is BGS doing to make the determination?
I mean, this happens with PSA all the time? Supposed 9ās and 10ās come back 7ās and 8ās and so on. Grading is subjective after all, and while I donāt at all disagree that BGSā metrics for a Black Label are better left to mathematically provable variables, I donāt know why the completely subjective nature of grading isnāt allowed to extend to conditional rarity grading.
I donāt disagree there is an RNG lottery going on with Black Labels, but I donāt think every Black Label is just random either. There wouldnāt be a market for Black Labels if cards with a Black Label didnāt pass the sniff test more often than not.
Again all this is to say ā Iām not gonna buy one, but hey if my card comes back with that label I wonāt be mad about it either.
Speaking of sustainability, I expected the other 53 Black Label Moonbreons to come to auction after the PWCC five-figure-fiasco. Wouldnāt most owners want to cash in on the 13x premium or are they worried that the next auction will end at a fraction of the previous one?
I would just say the difference is that while thereās some subjectivity/variability with PSA, an experienced person can (with confidence and accuracy) a realistic range if not the exact grade a card should get.
If anything this is further evidence that the level of precision needed for a 20x4 grading scale is just unfeasible if a company can barely handle one 10 point scale.
The irony is that the more granular the grading is, the less consistent it is yet the premium grows exponentially
Fair points, but are you saying Black Labels should be abolished altogether, or that grading standards for them should be less subjective? Also curious how you feel about CGC Perfect 10ās
My only position is that the market irrationally overvalues the black label. Often 90-99% of the cost of these cards is not paying for the raw card nor the condition value but just pure black magic. If you acknowledge that and still want to buy one for an instagram post or because you just like the ethereal idea of perfection or if the colour scheme matches the card then Iām not stopping you. I wouldnāt advocate for abolishing them, just a more grounded perspective on what they actually are.
The funny thing with the cgc 10s is that they are probably a more honest reflection of the price premium of what the black labels should achieve. Functionally they are the same thing. The fact that cgc can just flip a switch and pump out 10x as many of them should be a sober reminder of what weāre dealing with here