I didn’t mean to come across like that I merely was pointing out that ebay is widely used in Europe 
there are more sellers from the US in the pokemon market compared to but that’s because most of the product is from there.
I live in Japan and after only 250 grades I’ve brought the entire overall cost down to $6 USD per card. It’s definitely more worthwhile buying ungraded and grading yourself.
How? The best recent monthly specials have been $6 per card base grading cost. Last year some as low as $5.50 or $5.25 if i recall, but that is without counting return shipping and shipping out to them. Do you not factor that in?
My all in average is somewhere around $7.50 per card counting shipping both ways, grading fees and supplies (penny sleeves and card saver 1’s). ~$8 per card if I count the membership fees in as an overall cost (which is the better way to do it). That is on about 1000 cards over 18 months.
Sorry, major typo there! Meant £6. This is an all-in average. Shipping both ways, supplies including savers (imported), card sleeves, packaging to the rubber bands and sellotape, the membership fee etc.
It really looks like finding Mint cards is harder than I thought, I still think it should be possible if I could find the Mint cards.
I do see Base Set English Unlimited booster boxes/packs getting sold, where the packs are sold for 50$ each. Only I’m really struggling to find a reason why they are selling for so much? As far as I know the odds on a holo are 1/3, there’s no guarantee that your cards are going to be properly cut and even PSA 9 holos do not get back your money by far. How can they be sold for $50 then?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl99aW_E0w0
Be prepared for quite a few ebay packages to arrive similar to this even after asking questions and looking at all pictures on, “MINT CARDS STRAIGHT TO SLEEVE, NEVER PLAYED!!”
Most packs of that age are bought by collectors who plan on keeping them sealed. Opening Base boosters is almost a guaranteed loss.
Right, those two supposedly Mint cards look pretty bad, the Blaine’s Charizard I would see immediately, the Shining Gyarados is a bit harder to spot indeed.
Now seeing how hard it is to find Mint cards in the first place, and then when receiving it’s not even always Mint, I wonder why the PSA 9/10 cards are not worth even more? It seems really hard to get them, so much that $30 for a PSA 9 Clefairy (random example) from the Base Set is just a steal compared to the difficulty of getting one. And for this one it even seems like it could’ve gotten a 10 if not for the centering that’s way off.
supply and demand, 9’s arent popular at the best of times, its amplified when its a cheap card
if any of the big collectors bought all there cards graded, then they wouldnt have the amazing collections they have.
Before grading myself, I could barely get anywhere. Once I started grading, it was then I knew! there is no turning back!
CHeck out people like pokemonmaster556, Gem mint pokemon ect… They would never be able aquire there entire collections by buying them graded, nobody would. Secondly once you start grading and getting some gem mint 10’s you can decide whether you want to keep going with getting 10’s or keep the massive amount of 9’s you will aquire with ease, and sell the 10’s for a good profit.
Just recently by messaging people privately pokemonmaster556 got like 140 minty pack fresh wizards holos Off one dude… They be out there dude. When you see some minty looking holos, message the peeps privately, and alot of the time they will have awesome mint stuff and you usually can tell when there big minty fresh collectors.
Ive seen 2 complete sets of shining GEM mint english come up in the last 2 months. There is plenty around. And with set cards there is always another copy.
There is alwways that card you cant get your self, and just end up buying it lol. Those are exceptions though. xD
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@acebren Are 9s really not popular? I’m pretty sure base set 1st edition 9s are popular at the very least.
I know they’re no match for the popularity of 10s, but I feel like they can still be a nice compromise for people looking for pack fresh cards but don’t want to absolutely break the bank.
Although I will say, that while some 9s are what I would call pack fresh, others are definitely not. So sometimes I look at a 9 and think “who needs a 10?” Other times I look at a 9 and think “Damn I should have just gotten a 10.” But at the very least, 9s are in the conversation for me. Many of them do meet my personal standard for “Mint.”
Anything 8 or lower doesn’t interest me though. At that point I think to myself I would rather just buy ungraded and put it in my binder. I would make an exception for very rare cards though, like trophy cards.
the more expensive a card, the more popular the lower grades will get, take the 1st edition base charizard as the best example
@skiwi You’ve probably been discouraged so far with what you’ve seen. While everything that people have said is true. I’ll give you an insight into how I do it.
Mislistings, lack of proper terms being used, and low feedback people often result in your best deals. Here’s some examples of things I’ve bought this week only.
No Stage Blastoise for Blastoise price. Here’s an easy money maker, simply knowing rare variants of cards helps a lot. I’ve gotten good at looking for Blastoise cards missing their stage I can spot them from the small images eBay uses when first searching. Once you find a listing that has this it’s often better to ask the seller if they’ll sell it to you for the going rate and take it off eBay right away. If you don’t you end up with a bid war with someone else who does the same thing, which is why this listing when for as high as it did. This seller didn’t want to take it down so I had no choice.
Free Cards. This is one of my favorite deals of the week. Simply knowing what the going rate for cards is always going to help. I pay $200 for mint shadowless charizards all the time. so getting an entire base set with a shadowless charizard for $230 is basically getting free cards to me. This listing actually shows a lot of what I love, the person has a poor feedback score, but when you read the negative it’s regarding combined shipping, something I wasn’t going to do anyway. It also said poor communication, but that doesn’t bother me either, the only negatives I worry about are scamming and poor descriptions. The person also had extremely good descriptions on the cards in the details section. Anyone that points out minor damages is a great seller because they’ve thoroughly checked their cards, still I asked them for a image of the back of charizard because I don’t want to get burned with poor condition cards. After reviewing the image it looked good. I placed my bid and got a great deal.
Too good to be true. Here’s one that I expect to have to go through an eBay case. Buying a card for half it’s value, especially when it’s been sent to PSA, doesn’t happen. People who send their cards to PSA know what they’re doing, this is why I often don’t buy raw cards from people who have PSA cards on their account. So to find someone who has one half off I don’t expect to get the card. So why did I buy it? Because eBay has me protected. The risk is nothing, and the reward is huge. If you can’t afford to have your money on hold then don’t do this, but if you can you might find the one deal after going through one hundred attempted scams.
This last one started out by finding someone selling a French and German Charizards. When those listings started they had no back picture. I never buy a card that I can’t see the back on. So I messaged the seller and they provided the back pictures. They put them on their listing. The back images are very dark, if they would have had one listing I wouldn’t have bought it. But they had two and both images combined looked great, the description said mint, and they were using screw down cases. So I looked at their other listings and found these, Jungle and Fossil 1st edition, they again were using toploaders, their description says the same as the other listings but there wasn’t any back images. There was enough evidence for me to decided to buy them anyway and assumed that the cards were protected the same as the charizard were. If I get them and they’re NM I’ll resell them down the years for the same price I bought them. If they’re Mint I’ll have them PSA graded and make far more than I paid.
So there you go there’s my weeks worth of buying for you. I haven’t gotten the cards yet so I don’t know if I missed on some or scored on another. I feel confident that I’ll come out ahead on these. So to answer your question yes it is possible to buy raw and get PSA 9-10 cards. There aren’t many of them out there and you have to put in time to do it. I think @smpratte put it best, experience is key. Experience tells you don’t buy a card that uses a white background, experience tells you how to look for a no stage blastoise using the small images, experience tells you how to judge if a listing is a good deal or not.
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I want to know if the too good to be true one comes off!
Also in the UK/Europe I think we don’t get as much opportunity for deals on ebay as in the US even if I’m including worldwide in my searches.
@fireftw87 You can always use eBay.com to search. The problem becomes asking people if they will ship to your location, but if the deal is good enough it’s worth the extra shipping cost. It’s the equivalent of me going to ebay.co.uk and searching for things like this.I’ll let the forum know how it goes.
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@cullers looks near perfect except for the silvering on the left edge wouldn’t you say? I would think it would be graded a 9 because of that?
Thanks for the tip 
also I don’t know how I missed this charizard you quoted on ebay uk I’m constantly checking for these! 
Had to do some math with my stuff, when it comes to current psa haves only slightly under 20% has been graded/reviewed by myself ( read: different middlemans ), rest have been purchased or traded via various sources and even after that I’m still here. 
Idk overall this route has been better solution imo. , don’t have the patience to hoard hundreds of cards so grading+shipping fees would be justified since I’m located in Europe.
For guys saying it is always easy to buy ungraded and grade, remember the OP is referring to WOTC cards, not japanese. Even if you find an ungraded WOTC card advertised as “mint” majority of the time it is already at the price point of a 9, or will be after grading fees, shipping, etc.
Also, most of the old back in demand japanese cards are not easy 10’s either (masaki, shinings, quick starters, coros, base holos, most unnumbered promos).
It’ll be lucky to get a PSA 8, the bottom back is pretty bad (I noticed it well before buying). I haven’t gotten in the mail yet so I could be wrong, but I doubt I’ll be sending it off to PSA.