Id say a year? They didnt confirm anything, I just included them in my submission.
1 Like
I think the pop report is mostly insignificant, and to me the market is already very ‘efficient’ for the most part. For example, we all know that there’s 1000s of PSA 10 Moonbreon’s graded. Knowing the pop report really doesn’t matter because it has so much demand & trades hands quite often due it’s very high popularity & status.
At the same time, you could have a very low pop card that literally no one cares about and it makes no difference to know the pop report or not for the most part. Then you also have cards like Neo era holos that can be very low pop in PSA 10 that garner a significant premium for reasons that the market already knows (i.e. difficult to grade, etc).
I pretty much just assume as well that anything under a PSA 10 is mostly inaccurate. Lots of people will crack 8s to try and get 9s and crack 9s to try and get 10s on some cards. So these numbers to me could be way out of whack potentially for certain cards as well, making the pop report less and less relevant in the lower grade ranges.
So overall, it’s a way to gain a little insight when purchasing certain cards… but I feel it really doesn’t make much of a difference because the market already has the ‘knowledge’ or ‘insight’ about almost every card, at least the more well known ones.
While there are 1000s of moonbreons graded there are also a little over 4k 1st edition charizards graded at psa. Along with 9k shadowless and 62k unlimited. The print run for base set was extremely big. Even for 1st edition
Correct, but that’s sort of what I mean. Knowing these pop numbers years later doesn’t really tell us anything that we or the rest of the market didn’t already know. Even as a young boy I knew 1st Ed/Shadowless Base Charizard was much rarer/special than Unlimited versions. Knowing the pop numbers now doesn’t really change anything for me in terms of my market knowledge for this particular card/set.
So to me the most valuable metric with a lot of the well known set cards is the PSA 10 populations since that does at least tell us a bit about the grading difficultly of certain cards since pretty much no one would crack out a PSA 10 compared to lower grades which will always be less accurate in theory. In the longer run it may give a bit more insight into print runs as more cards get graded, but we’ll never have a truly accurate count either because of cracking & re-submissions.
1 Like
Not really. The only card I ever bought due to low pop was my BGS-BL10 Moltres, which is still pop-1 a.f.a.i.k. This was basically the start of my graded portion of my Moltres WotC #21 promo collection, my favorite artwork of the TCG. Although I’ve mostly focused this collection on the sealed part, which is currently complete (and the raw portion of the collection had been completed pretty quickly after I started collecting them). Now I’m low-key looking for some graded foreign versions to fully ‘complete’ this collection goal. 
But the pop of all my other graded cards I didn’t even know until this recent thread:
And it has never effected me when I decided to buy a graded card. In almost all cases when I bought a graded card, there simply weren’t any raw versions available at the time, or the graded card was the cheapest one available.
Greetz,
Quuador
1 Like
Not if you’re a binder collector
Yes. Obviously not always, but if I can find low pops in a set, I’ll likely buy a few for hopeful financial reasons. Doesn’t affect my true “collecting”