I completed a 3-card $50 Economy order to PSA. All cards were previously graded vintage holos from Expedition (CGC 8.5 old label), EX Team Rocket Returns (CGC 9 new label), and Skyridge (PSA 7 51 million cert). Slabs were cracked and cards were submitted raw.
Overall, I could not be more pleased with the results. The Expedition Gengar and TRR Dark Dragonite were exactly what I had hoped for after carefully reviewing the cards.
The Skyridge Vaporeon was shocking. I bought the PSA 7 slab around October 2021 because I felt that it looked incredibly clean. When I received the card, I could not find much damage at all, let alone something that would warrant a NM grade. I later purchased a PSA 9 in April 2022, and made the decision to crack and resubmit my PSA 7 when the submission prices dropped.
I couldnât believe my eyes when I saw the grade today⌠Once again, I reviewed the card for signs of damage and could not find much at all. It was genuinely misgraded. This experiment was a great reminder that grading is incredibly subjective and prone to mistakes. Because of this, you should buy the card, not the grade.
Humans are fallible beings and anything ever performed by a human has a failure rate. Baking pastries, carpet cleaning, rocket science, brain surgery, it doesnât matter. Humans are incapable of performing anything perfectly 100% of the time, but it doesnât invalidate the effort.
PSA grades in reference to its own standards and does so effectively with consistency. But human failure always stands out amongst any number of successes. In this case, the exception proves the rule.
Thereâs always going to be variance in grading, itâs just in the nature of the service, and it becomes even more difficult to ensure total consistency at scale. Training a handful of graders to put out similar grades is a task in itself, now add on hundreds, or even thousands, and youâve got yourself a real challenge. I think PSA (and BGS for that matter) over time have worked into their grooves of consistency and are the best in the business, but itâs very much a gamble and will always be until the robot overlords take over.
I think your odds are pretty slim solely based on the PSA 10 rate of about 0.8% (61 of ~7,700)⌠but you never know! Base 2 has a lot of issues with print lines, so that could knock you out of 10 territory.
Itâs very, very minimal. You have to completely tilt the card to find it. Itâs only on the bottom left corner that I can see at all. Very conservative on the 9 grade that CGC gave, feel it should be 9.5 based off my other slabs. Compared to my PSA 10 Mewtwo from the same set, it has less visible corner whitening to my eyes:
@Dyl - Iâve looked it over high and low, and compared to all the PSA 10 Base 2 Charizards I have looked at, its surface is like glass. No visible lines. Hereâs a PSA 10 I saw up close, mine doesnât have these and yet 99% of them seem to have some type of scratches/lines:
Yes, theyâre on the card which is why the seller blew it up under light just so people are aware. To be fair, Base 2 has these known issues and I think PSA factors this in when assigning the grade. I donât know if a single Base 2 card exists without some type of factory flaw. Print lines and borderline holo scratches or some type of whitening plague almost all of the holos it seems.
While my Mewtwo has bits of corner cut whitening from the factory, its surface is totally flawless compared to the Charizard (which had a flawless back). So there may be a little more wiggle room for minor flaws depending on the severity with this set for these reasons, but this is just my best guess.
Itâs definitely tempting to try and grade the Charizard again, but it might be safer to keep it as a 9.5. Even if it became a 10, I wouldnât want to sell it anyway since itâs purely a sentimental card for me.
This is the situation Iâm in with many of my CGC 9.5s. I have a Rocketâs Snorlax ex, for instance, that Iâm pretty confident would get a PSA 10, which would bring the secondary market value from ~$800 to ~$2500. If it got a 10, I would sell it and put that money into more PC cards. But I donât want to sell it in the first place lol.
So yeah, my conclusion was/is that itâs staying in the CGC slab lol. I realized that higher resale value doesnât really matter to me unless Iâm actually planning on selling the card.
If youâre not looking to sell, then regrading it at PSA only increases the risk that the card gets accidentally damaged or graded lower. Maybe best to keep it safe in the CGC slab? I think @zorloth said it bestâŚ
I realized that higher resale value doesnât really matter to me unless Iâm actually planning on selling the card.
Really old label PSA (no center of label psa holo) have a higher overgrade rate than anything from the last 5+ years where they tightened up and got significantly more accurate with pokemon. When people call them âweak 10sâ they really just mean âshould be a PSA 8â.
I donât think itâs a known thing, more so just the PSA standard. PSA deems a 10 as a âvirtually perfectâ card, which to me says âsome minor flaw allowedâ, or at least thatâs how Iâve always perceived it compared to BGS or CGC 10 or like a Black Label.
In addition, I think itâs also to do with the âcard qualityâ factor when grading certain sets, sort of like how Jungle holos have known issues with the rough silvering on the edges but can still score a 10 compared to other sets from the same era. Base 2 has itâs known issues on the holos or in some cases rough cut corners or edges straight out of a pack, so I think PSA factors this in. This is only my best guess though.
@zorloth - Very good point. I got the CGC 9.5 Charizard for a really good deal (below PSA 9 price at the time). I was really happy to pick it up, especially because almost every other PSA 9 I looked at had pretty severe print line issues on the holo. Upgrading it to a 10 would nearly 10x itâs value, I just donât know if itâd pull it off, even though it seems equal or as strong as my 10s from the same set.
