Oh look! More virtue signaling.
Uninformed people and/or people with money to burn? IDK.
Re: the idea that selling PSA 10 modern cards is “scamming” people: as long as the seller isn’t misrepresenting the item, I don’t see how it’s scamming. It’s no more scamming than selling off overvalued stocks.
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I like this analogy. Thanks for sharing.
Just giving my raw opinion. Obviously I have no experience with grading cards, so I may sound annoying or just wrong to you.
I normally buy raw NM cards under the assumption it’s going be at best a PSA 8 and at worse a 6-7 on any given card. If it truly is a 10 candidate than I may try and grade it, but that’s never my expectation because when I shop for raw cards they’re most likely going into a binder or toploader for storage.
As far as premiums, it really depends as well. Some premiums aren’t as bad as others. I’m usually comfortable with 3-4x price multiplier over an 8 or 9 as I feel that’s reasonable given the difficulty of scoring a 10 on some cards.
I wouldn’t be comfortable however paying a 10 or 20x multipler that some cards can have, for example 1st Ed Neo Genesis Lugia. With this card I bought a PSA 8 NM-Mint and cracked it out for my binder set for well under $1000, but yet the 10s go for $50000+ last I checked.
So that’s all fine if someone wants to collect it at that price & grade given how tough it is get in a 10, but for me personally it just puts me out of my comfort zone with pricing. Combine this with the fact I’ve seen some 10s still have some minor issues that I’ve seen on PSA 8 and 9s of the exact same card further steers me towards just buying a NM-Mint copy instead.
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I’m at the exact same spot. Thank you for your comment. Where do you buy your cards? Ebay?
Any premium that is too high doesn’t last long (especially with items bought and sold at high frequency) because the market will eventually settle at a fair equilibrium price
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Mainly eBay, but also PWCC Auctions for slabs. eBay is generally best for slab availability and prices I find. For raw cards I usually resort to eBay, but I will also buy from local game stores and TCGplayer. I’ve actually gotten some far better deals outside of eBay as well, as many times the prices can be inflated due to seller fees and other things. It’s good to shop around if you can, especially for more expensive cards. It can save you a lot long-term by doing things slowly and scoring the best deals along the way.
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As someone who collects 10s, both via the direct purchase of already graded copies AND via self-submission:
if your end goal is a PSA 10 copy for your collection, and you aren’t operating at least some level of scale (buying lots of raw cards → grading → reselling) then the most efficient method is to just buy a graded copy of the card in most every case. Especially now that more people are grading cards.
This becomes more and more true when:
- large numbers of the card are already being submitted by other collectors/dealers
- The delta between NM and PSA 10 decreases
- The net profit of sourcing → grading → selling a failure (PSA 8-9) decreases
- the difficulty to grade that card increases
Here is a hypothetical imagining a random low-mid tier vintage holo:
NM-M copy: $30
Grading Fee: $22
PSA 8 price: $40
PSA 9 price: $100
PSA 10 price: $300
PSA 9:PSA 10 Pop Ratio: 4:1
Assuming you are able to reliably find 5 pack fresh copies of this holo and you wanted to go for the grade yourself your costs would be:
NM-M copies: $150
Grading Fees: $110
Shipping+Insurance: $40
Totaling $300
So would could hunt down the raw copies, and roll the dice, and hope you have one good enough for that 10. If you do hit the 10, you can resell the 9s/8s (or even extra 10s) to profit from your effort, but if you fail to get a 10 from that batch you will break even at best with your time wasted.
As for whether or not it’s worth it to collect 10s instead of 9s or raw copies idk. I suspect we could argue around and around forever about that. it’s just a matter of taste. Regardless, for every person who posts about how irrational paying a premium for subjective grades is, there is another person who wants the highest grade for their collection. The real answer is lots of people collect both 10s and lower grades/raw cards at the same time.
There are certainly some cards where it might make more financial sense to buy a particular grade, but we can’t ever know what the future will hold for specific cards - it’s just speculation.
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As someone who was also just a ‘binder collector’ for over 10 years, I understand your struggle to see where the premium price for a PSA 10 graded card comes from, I was very similar however as someone who now grades for my business and collects some graded cards I prefer to have my favourites in the highest possible condition. Not only for monetary value but as a collectors piece.
Their isn’t exactly a massive premium on modern, the Umbreon VMAX Alt is a unique situation,
- High Demands
- Low Pull rates
Then creates this influx, however realistically $450 Raw or $900 for a PSA 10 its only a price increase of 100% , unlike vintage cards i.e Maskai Gengar $500 Raw or $8000 in a PSA 10
Theirs levels in this discussion it isn’t one way or another.
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Thank you for sharing. Do you grade modern or vintage?
A mixture of both, Depends what’s collections come in during that month really, I prefer to grade more vintage due to the margins