I wanted to ask for some of your opinions on recommendations for what next to collect. At the moment I’ve hit a brick wall in what to further collect. I’m not sure if I should stick to just getting the big three or branch out to collect all the shadowless holos, Team Rocket holos, or Gym Challenge Holos? At the moment I could only do one set of holos and not all. Below are the cards I have.
PSA 5 Shadowless Venusaur
PSA 6 Shadowless Charizard
PSA 7 Shadowless Blastoise
PSA 7 Shadowless Nidoking
PSA 9 Shadowless Red and Yellow Cheeks Pikachu
PSA 9 Dark Charizard holo
PSA 9 Dark Blastoise holo
PSA 9 Dark Venusaur Promo
PSA 9 1st Ed Dark Charizard non holo
PSA 9 1st Ed Dark Blastoise non holo
PSA 8 Erika’s Venusaur
PSA 8 Blaine’s Charizard
PSA 9 Giovanni’s Nidoking
I would say make a list of the sets you prioritize the most (top 3) then go through what the prices would be to aquire them in a grade You’re comfortable with. Then do some research to find the average price of them and make a budget based on your monthly expenses and income. I’ve found buying on auctions gives a better price then accepting a BIN on eBay. Other sites as well sometimes have cards that aren’t going to be as expensive sometimes. Researching is a good way to help save money down the road. Sometimes I’ve even found nm-m raw copies that are well centered for sell online and then grade them myself and have gotten 8s and 9s in the past. Me personally I’d try and finish the set I have most completed. Cheers! Hope you can achieve all of your collecting goals.
Both shadowless and team rocket are great so it’s between them two. I guess money also comes into play. I guess what would be a classic set but also not too pricey. Originally I was just going to do a big 3 set from the WOTC set era ex big 3 in unlimited, base set 2 but then thought maybe it will be cooler to do a full set holos from shadowless or team rocket.
Honestly I was looking at it the other day and think it would be pretty cheap to get full sets of unlimited base with 1st edition jungle + fossile, then upgrade cards 1 at a time as you find them. If you’re really huge on base set, you could expand that to 1st edition, shadowless, and unlimited - but personally Jungle is my favorite of the original 3.
For example, 1st edition “near mint” copies of commons and uncommons from Jungle are <$1 on TCGPlayer, a NM set was like ~$30 when I checked last night. Nearly all the money is in the holos, so if you just start at raw heavy played or something, you can have the whole set almost immediately for little money, then upgrade individual cards as you come across them and just slowly see the quality of your collection improve over time.
I think you’re spot on. 8x series PSA 8 is going to be at least as good condition if not better than 2x or 3x series PSA 10, and they sell for (most likely) less than TCGPlayer “near mint.” Obviously that last part won’t be true for the $0.50 commons and uncommons, but is very likely to be true for holos.
That’s a wild take. It doesn’t logically play out. Let’s agree for arguments sake that the PSA scale has shifted more than 2 grades in difficulty in the last 7 years. That means every PSA 8,9 or 10 today would be a PSA 10 back then. That necessarily means the average PSA 10 from back then has to be better than a PSA 8 today. The only way that wouldn’t be true is if we somehow have access to cleaner cards today that didn’t exist back then.
In reality, a huge number of 2xx holos were graded straight out of the pack. We are also talking about a time where a PSA 9 would usually mean a net loss. There was a strong incentive to only grade and collect 10s
I’m open to the idea that maybe the range of what makes a PSA 10 today is tighter and for that and other reasons you see more weak 2xxxs in the wild. But to say that the average PSA 8 8xxx is better than the average 2xxx PSA 10 is a bit naive. Why would the time with the highest availability of the cleanest copies of cards not have some of the best graded examples?
But that take is exactly that - the variance is much wider and a lot of the 2xxx that are seen on sale are likely the weaker copies, as collectors if they had multiple from back then, may sell that one first.
It Is somewhat objective though - just check out PSA weekly and search for base set 10s, quite a few would arguably not get PSA 9s by today’s standard.
Newer cert PSA 8s can be a wonderful buy if you have a good eye due to the price point and high quality.
I 100% agree. But the other side of that statement is that there are a ton of strong PSA 10s that are seen less. And there’s no reason to exclude them when making general claims about the first number in the cert.
I can think of 4 people off the top of my head that exclusively looked for “true 10s” back then and none of them have sold. If someone is trying to extrapolate an entire era of grading using only the data of the worst examples they see on the market, of course you will end up with a biased conclusion.
Overall it’s just a wild claim. To believe it is to believe that people like @gemmintpokemon and Rusty have a PSA 10 collection that is the equivalent of a modern day PSA 7-8 set.
Perhaps a better way to say It is that current PSA 8s (some, not all) can look comparable to looser 10s from all cert eras.
PSA 10s are a scale anyway!
At the very least, they certainly look stronger than older cert 8s
For example, those PSA 8s I shared above have super clean backs but have one minor print line each which I’m totally fine with (many PSA 10 base holos have minor print lines too) - in my experience they should be 9s at least.
Really great opportunities to find nice cards for cheap if you can find them and you are into the hunt!
I’m personally buying them and sending to BGS as Im building a BGS 9 set, and I also enjoy the process of cross grading.
