I have referred to pop reports while researching the history of some Japanese promo cards just to check if the reports co-relate to the statements made in the article or data I am trying to understand. So just as a supporting reference tool.
It is more annoying that they arent that accurate in some cases. Eg. BGS 9.5 shadowless zard pop has doubled in the last 2 years, but I know for a fact that there is one guy who cracked open a PSA 10 shadowless zard (I know, insane), and who has subbed many times to BGS getting 9.5 each time and therefore artificially inflating the pop.
In this regard, all of the pop reports are messed up and inaccurate. PSA, BGS, and even to a lesser degree CGC.
None of the totals are the true total of cards that are slabbed or at a certain grade for a company (other than 10s maybe) because of the prevalence of cracking and resubmitting.
Not only that, but when you submit a card for review in it’s case to any of the big 3, they end up making a new cert for the same card if it gets bumped up.
Much better way at looking at pop reports is to convert the totals to percentages.
Video post crack - I think came back as altered first, lol, and then came back 9.5 with a 9 surface (like mine!). Big ouch though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcgxQ8QThbw
I genuinely wonder how many times its been sent in haha.
Yep, in my experience PSA and BGS will not deactivate a cert for a card they bump if you submit it in the case and it sounds like from your experience they dont want to take the time to deactivate them even when youre transparent about cracking them. Could be because its too costly to pay someone to go deactivating them and could be that they like and prefer the inflated pop reports.
No but I have occasionally used pop reports to help anchor my expectations when thinking about how long it should take me to acquire a particular card. It’s a good sanity check when a saved search hasn’t hit for months
Yeah but most ppl look at the pop of the psa 10 mostly anyway and it’s incredibly rare to crack a psa 10 card. Only if it was SO strong they were incredibly confident they can 10 it again with psa while actively trying to get a gold label from bgs. Thats an extremely rare scenario
I would say the most cracked slabs are psa 8s and 9s, but nowadays when someone cracks a psa 9 its because the card is a strong 9 and most likely they dont resubmit to psa again so it doesnt show up again in the pop report
I think pre 2022 ppl would indeed resub to psa
But nowadays ppl wave the red flag send their strong 9s to either cgc for a 10, or bgs for a 9.5
Additionally, while pop isnt entirely accurate like you say, it’s consistent… and that matters
If skyridge charizard has lets say 2000 subs and rocket zard has 10,000 subs, well you have to assume cracked cards are distributed equally among the sets
I still gives me useful data
It could tell me team rocket zard is 5x more common, maybe also putting a ceiling on potential value. Since resubs should be equal among the sets you can still deduce a lot of information by comparing
I agree with you and that’s why I said I convert the numbers to percentages when I’m looking at the pop reports because at least it’s telling me the rate at which a company gives a specific grade. Which is really the information people should want
There is only really one pop report that affects my collecting and it is PSA Pop report.
As it’s been out there the longest and covers the Grading Scene from the start till the present.
I don’t get any valuable data from a Pop report that has not been used since the very start of the TCG.
Being a grading company since the time of Pokémon TCG being released doesn’t mean a whole lot when they barely graded Pokémon in 1999 and didn’t take Pokémon serioisly for 2 decades
It only effects how hard I’ll go after a card when I see one come up at auction. Lower pop rarer cards I’m more prone to overpay to just get the card I want. Instead of worrying about a few bucks and missing out on what I want.
Only once it did affect my collecting, i wanted a town on no map grimer in psa 9 for my display but at that time the pop was only 5 so i prepared myself to grade it myself, i did try to buy one raw copy for grading (which got cancelled by seller) until one psa 9 popped up for sale on ebay, even though i knew i was one of the very few people in the world wanting it i jumped on it immediately since it had a reasonable price tag