So there are three primary grading companies. PSA, BGS and CGC.
Why do you think Pokémon collectors tend to gear more towards psa as opposed to the other two? Where as sports and mtg collectors gear more towards bgs over psa.
I really do believe in terms of grading overall. PSA for anything under a 10 is much more accurate in terms of a cleaner card. For a pure 10, bgs (gold label) tends to have the cleanest card. I’m not including black labels because I personally believe that’s a whole other conversation. But for vintage that’s how I view it. For cgc I have no idea. I do like their cases but a lot of collectors won’t even touch a cgc card.
smpratte hits it out of the park again. Also, psa’s market share isn’t exclusive to pokemon. PSA holds the lions share for every card market, there are reason to go to other companies for sure, but those are the exceptions, not the rule
Personally, I’d rather read the market flow, than fight the tide.
Ok so in the time I spent mulling around thinking about the question and getting a coffee, @smpratte basically hit all the points I was thinking.
First, the only variable that ultimately matters is what he called “higher price realized”. Meaning the company that will make you the most money will be the one you use as a reseller. And resellers generally determine what’s available on the market for you to buy. Most of the sellers that were diehard CGC fans, including at least one that quit e4 over his preferred grading company, now use PSA. There was a period of time where CGC was the only realistic choice because PSA was shut down. But today, PSA is the financially obvious choice.
But a deeper question is why. I would attribute it to two factors. The first being that PSA has been grading Pokemon for over 20 years. The people who laid the groundwork for collecting and have a lot of influence today, started out in a time where PSA really was the only option. People like Rusty, gemmintpokemon, Gary, Pokerev, etc. Basically anyone who has a presence today that collected before 2020. Their default language and relationship to grading is PSA and that is passed onto new people who enter the hobby through something like a Pokerev video. That’s the history/inertia part.
The second factor is the simplicity of the grading scale and how well it’s understood. To explain the BGS or CGC scale, you have take 30 minutes to explain the details and history of changes in the case of CGC. And the key thing is almost certainly you’d used the PSA scale as a baseline to explain the other companies. For examples, you could say “a blue label CGC 8.5 is like a PSA 9” but it would be unusual to see someone explain what a PSA 9 looks like using the blue label CGC scale. With PSA, each grade has a bit of an identity that is easy to understand. The black label does too. But there’s no real identity today with respect to what a CGC 9 or what a BGS 8.5 is or looks like.
So yeah, the overall summary is that the simplicity of the PSA scale and the years of inertia it has establishes it as the de facto standard in Pokemon with respect to understanding condition and the language used to describe condition. This translates into familiarity and general consumer confidence and generally more consistent sold prices. Better prices means the people who supply a lot of the graded cards on the market will rely on PSA more and it all creates a positive feedback loop onto itself.
I promise I didn’t just copy Scott, these are all points I thought of before I read his post.
Yes mtg has many bgs cards, and yes people want the perfect grade for weiss and one piece. Do you have data to back up the claim psa has less in even a single category? Not trying to say any one company is better and honestly bgs makes more sense if a person thinks black label is a possibility, but everyone other company pumps out so few slabs in comparison…
Vintage MTG graded collectors are obsessed with their subgrades. PSA doesn’t offer that service and CGC no longer does, so BGS is their primary choice.
