How do you guys feel about CGC at the moment?

Grading
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Wrote this back in October 2020 and my opinions are mostly the same except for a few things I’ll mention at the bottom:

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I don’t really get why it has to always be one vs the other. I’m currently using three grading companies.

PSA:
Preferred choice for mint cards that are slightly off-centered. BGS and CGC have stricter centering parameters than PSA. Value wise, if a card I am planning to sell will get a 9.5 due to 9 or 9.5 centering, but would be a PSA 10, I will send to PSA.

BGS:
Preferred choice for crossgrading strong PSA grades. I think BGS 9.5s are a great value right now. There is massive fluctuation in card condition within PSA 8 and 9 grades due to no subgrades and no 9.5. If I have a PSA card that is woefully misgraded it is easier to cross with BGS than to wait a very long time and pay an upcharge/high cost to review with PSA.

CGC:
Preferred choice for buying and collecting, I prefer binder cards in general but like the clear plastic and enjoy paying cheaper prices for same-or-better quality cards, especially if I am planning to crack for my binder anyway. Along with BGS, preferred choice if I don’t want to pay large amounts for service tier level due to max flat rate.

The high tier rates at PSA are a massive turn-off. If you find your old collection and it has a 1st Ed. Base Charizard, you’re looking at $500 to grade one card, and $1,000 if it gets a 7 or higher. If you’re not getting high enough offers due to not being PSA graded, you can always just crossgrade.

I’m running out of cards to submit, but if I can sort through enough to make a bulk order worthwhile, I will be sending to CGC, since I am not willing to wait a year or more.
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Changes over past two years:

Since this post, PSA has improved turnaround times and lowered rates, so I’ve begun using them for bulk again.

I’ve also purchased a few BGS 10s I thought were good value buys, and graded a sub with BGS I was explicitly hoping for 10s on.

I’ll pay a premium for old label CGC 10 but not new label which I don’t like the style as much. I had long advocated for lowering the centering standards for CGC which are prohibitively strict and kept many cards from receiving 10. Unfortunately they seemed to lower standards for the other three subgrades but keep centering just as strict. There are still no public centering parameters which there are for BGS & PSA. It’s definitely my biggest peeve with them.

I continue to send all errors to CGC and prefer my personal collection cards to be CGC. The 9.5s are a good value especially old label.

Wrapping up this post with the hilarious journey of this Flareon gold star. I graded it a CGC 8.5, sold to someone who cracked and graded Psa 9, who then sold to someone who cracked and graded PSA 10. That sums up some of my feelings about why I don’t collect PSA 10 Chanseys.

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Great post! The reality is, none of the grading companies are perfect, and they’ve all had some issues over the years in one way or another. We all have our preferences and biases, and what the company does as well as the ethics and others issue are ultimately out of our control in many ways.

This is why I mainly let others do the work of grading and just buy the graded cards instead primarily. Otherwise, I’m more into just buying clean raw NM cards for toploader/binder enjoyment. On the other hand, your strategy of cross-grading is a smart way as well. Even in the lower tier grades this can be done quite effectively too, but probably more beneficial at the higher end of things (i.e. a 9.5 can carry a much bigger premium than a 9 on some cards, compared to an 8 becoming 8.5).

In the end, I definitely appreciate that we have more options to collect & enjoy our cards in a variety of ways.

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people need to read this part more often

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I agree that it doesn’t have to be one or the other, but many prefer consistency in their collection (e.g., 100% PSA graded, CGC graded, BGS graded). This may be why there is such strong “one vs. the other” sentiment.

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Holy smokes. :flushed: Unfortunately that makes sense though. I checked out the CSG forums when they launched in 2021, after I subbed some sports cards. Those forums were chalked full of shills. It was unreal. Now that I see what happened here, I have no doubt.

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To add to this, im from Canada and there isnt a psa or cgc here otherwise i would send the perfect cards to cgc and slightly off centered ones to psa. But since im in canada sending one big sub to 1 company is more efficient, unfortunately.

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The fact that I can’t send a Topps card in the same order as a tcg card is a shame. They force another order which costs 80$ for [international] shipping .

I also wish you could send a submission with a mix of subgrades, no subgrades, errors, and whatever else designations CGC offers.

From my experience when submitting a small amount of cards, all of these barriers make CGC one of the worst companies to deal with.

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Because money is involved. If 100% of my collection is currently PSA, I want PSA to be successful and the most valuable because that helps me in the long run.

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100% agree with you. It shall be possible to specificly add subgrades per card and not decide between a submission with and withput subgrades -.-

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I collect pokemon with a red/orange background so the blue label just won’t do :joy:
I’d consider them with a better or custom label for PC. Stuff to sell currently has to be PSA for max value.

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I’m meh on cgc. PSA is the go to. Bgs is kinda meh unless it’s a 9.5 or a 10

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It is frustrating that CGC won’t change the slab like they did for CSG slabs. The new slab (right) looks far better than the old (left)

They could easily do something similar with CGC, but I feel at this point it’s too late.

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its wild that CGC has a label big enough to fit a Wailmer and they couldn’t put the serial number on the front

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Hey now, lets keep wailmer out of this. Wailmer wants nothing to do with that label either

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Beckett too. It’s not reassuring when listing a card that you can’t do a quick self check to make sure the front and back belong to the same card. (Of course being organized solves this but still!)

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Man, ive come to hate this so much especially when im shopping for slabs. Many times have to ask the seller to take a photo of the back too. Even though they should already have a back photo, serial or not lol.

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CGS slab looks really good. I’d rank it above CGC, PSA and BGS

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Had to look them up id never heard of them.

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If Jackson Pollock designed a label

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I meant CSG :skull_and_crossbones:

Ofc any three random letters will get you a grading company :skull_and_crossbones::skull_and_crossbones:

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