I used them a fair bit for about a year and done well from selling their graded cards.
Having said that, they are no longer a company I would use.
I stopped using them before they secretly changed their grading scale. Pre grading scale change, I was able to get I think it was 11x 10’s (3 Perfects and 7 or 8 Pristines) in a 30 card sub with the rest being 9.5. So I got their grading scale down pretty well after some time.
The biggest gripe I had with them was the variation in their centering grades, often across the same sub. There are cards I got back that were given 8.5 centering that when measured at pixel level were close to 50/50. Then there were cards that looked o/c given 9 or 9.5 centering. It threw too many cards down towards lower subgrades and their inconsistency just got too annoying to deal with. Since then, I took a bit of time to just wait on PSA offering better services which luckily didn’t take too long.
For me, there is now no reason to consider CGC. They really lost credibility when they changed their grading scale. PSA are now turning cards around in much quicker timescales and their encased cards offer the highest resale value - there has always been such a gulf between the CGC 9.5 and the PSA 10 price and I’d guess it’s only got worse since CGC lost that credibility recently. In my opinion, it’s better to grade with the market leader even if you don’t intend on selling now as for 95% of the people here, the day will come that their cards will go and whether its you or family selling, you want the best price you can get. It’s better to be prepared for that day now IMO.
Really, I can’t see any reason why someone would use CGC for grading a TCG right now.
No choice for certain cards. PSA doesn’t grade Pokemon Art Academy cards and Magic The Gathering Heroes of the Realm cards. Between BGS and CGC, I would heavily prefer CGC.
A few overzealous CGC employees came to this forum to shill CGC and trash PSA. There’s no evidence, though, that CGC actually directed the employees to make these comments.
Personally, I think it’s pretty ridiculous to hold a grudge against the company solely based on the actions of a few of its employees. Though, of course, what the employees did was inexcusable and I’m glad they were outed + banned from the forum.
I personally think this is a reason to not use cgc. To put into context how insane this situation was, ever major company has or had an account on this site. Even down to the small no name start ups. None of them ever did this.
These cgc employees knew exactly what they were doing, and it only stopped because I caught them. Some of the accounts go back over a year. Also these are just the accounts I could find. There were so many alt accounts with identical ip addresses. The whole situation was completely inexcusable.
I am saddened to hear all the negative CGC has brought to the hobby with their Atroturfing and bad business practices. Personally I was rooting for them as tough graders and upgrades to the protection of the card along with a grading company ACTUALLY listening to their customers with problems (slabs being not sealed enough, grading scale, exc.) I personally collect and prefer the crystal clear CGC slabs. I am interested to see where they end up for the future and if they cut the bad business practices and crap out of the company. Not matter the company, I like the competition in this market since ultimately it gives us the consumer and buyer power to choose and change what we find needs to change instead of companies telling us what we should like or not like.
That is my 2 cents
It’s really crazy to me that something like this went on when you consider CGC already seemed to have a ton of free advertising from fairly prominent YouTube channels and else where back then.
Now I don’t know if these channels were being paid to promote them at the time or whatever, but it seemed like within weeks the ‘harsh grading’ meme spread like wildfire.
However, CGC already was a well established 3rd party grader for comics, so did they really need to do all this extra shilling/promotion? It’s not like they’re a startup grader trying to break into the market. They’ve literally been around for decades prior and had a respectable reputation built as a grading service/company.
Sadly, a lot of people probably don’t even know this went on and also don’t know who could be potentially being paid to promote them or another company and just assume it’s all legit.
In the end, I still buy cards from all these graders, however the ethical side of these things is definitely something to consider when using the service as well.
However, CGC already was a well established 3rd party grader for comics, so did they really need to do all this extra shilling/promotion? It’s not like they’re a startup grader trying to break into the market. They’ve literally been around for decades prior and had a respectable reputation built as a grading service/company.
To emphasize again: none of us know that CGC directed the employees to do this. It could very well be that these were just a couple of overenthusiastic employees doing this on their own volition.
The way your and @Slade’s posts are phrased insinuate that this was CGC astroturfing this forum. But we literally have no basis for concluding this. Sure, it’s possible that this was a coordinated, directed effort. But it could easily have not been one.
While I understand and empathize with Scott’s frustration at this (I would be equally frustrated were I in his position), we really should avoid making baseless assumptions about CGC’s involvement in this.
I understand where you are coming from, but when it got to a point where scott noticed this being a problem and they were quite literately banned from E4 makes me think there is at least some truth to it. I don’t know of any other post I have seen from scott that someone was banned from the platform not to mention a whole grading company. I think there is a ton of TOXIC behavior between people on opinions with grading companies. Probably one of the biggest let downs of the pokemon community besides the Rip,Dip,Ship 420Blazikens of the hobby and even worst, literal fraud found like parasites in this hobby. At the end of the day you are paying for someone’s opinion and plastic case around your card to increase it’s protection and value. That’s it… It reminds me of this WONDERFUL meme about sports:
No one’s doubting the accusation that the CGC employees were on this forum doing what they were accused of doing. What is in doubt is whether this was directed by the company. If it was directed by the company, then CGC deserves blame for this. If it wasn’t, then CGC doesn’t deserve blame for this. It’s as simple as that, in my view.
do we know who was doing this at CGC? I doubt the min wage graders care enough to spend 1 more minute talking work outside of the job. Does not mean that it was management, because obviously there are jobs between grader and management. If I had to guess it was people from marketing since they seem to have an extremely active marketing team advertising every new grade. They even reply to no name IG users immediately who tag them
Right, and thats why I do want to give it some benefit of the doubt, given they have been around for a while and so on. I guess it would just be nice if CGC as a company would come clean on the issues raised and just clarify the details around these employees further. Were they just casually promoting the company in goodwill, or were they actually purposely going out of their way as a means of creating a narrative that favours them for business purposes?
The reason I say ‘narrative’ is because not only were the posts happening here, but I saw it happening on other sites. Big YouTube channels and other social media. All of them were saying a lot of the same things and taking specific jabs at PSA, BGS, and others. It just seems weird in that sense, and then it sort of just stopped happening after a while.
Anyway, we’ll probably never know for sure. It was a crazy time back then and a lot of things were going on in the hobby with a lot of moving parts. In the end of the day, I’ll still buy graded cards and all one can do is use the best possible judgment when choosing between companies/services from here on.
I mean, I’m on here defending CGC yet they haven’t paid me a single penny. And there are people here trashing CGC despite not being on PSA’s payroll. So I don’t think it’s a farfetched scenario that a couple of CGC graders engaged in these conversations without properly disclosing their association with the company.
I agree it is almost definitely not the graders or management. Both of those parties have better things to do. Marketing however seems likely since their job is good press and that could easily be done with or without management’s approval. They could just see a community of pokemon graders and want to interject and see it as part of their job.
It is possible it was mimimum wage employees. At that time, there was uncertaintity with everything in life. They might have thought pumping up CGC would create job security.
it is possible and that is a good point, but I still think you may be overestimating min wage employees. Min wage is literally the min wage for a human being to show up and do the bare minimum. When I worked at McDonalds and someone told me they preferred Wendy’s I said me too. I didn’t fight McDonalds battles
One was the head of social media, and the other was one of their graders. Neither were minimum wage employees.
@jabby That feeling you had was accurate. Cgc was the first company to pay shills. There are numerous people who are paid by cgc as a “consultant” to promote their brand. That is something that grading companies never did prior. So it makes sense why you saw that sentiment out of nowhere. Ironically it’s what exposed the employees here. They were advertising details about grading before it was publicly available.
