How the market will change when CGC creates a pack case

Assuming they dont fold up the packs, this will open a brand new market for sealed collectors who cant afford boxes but still want something from each set. I myself have been stockpiling mint light packs in prep for this event. However what do you expect will happen; will box owners open boxes and grade lights creating a surge of heavies? Will PSA packs be burned in a mass fire? Will CGC never make a case and lose out on owning this entire market???

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They have said it’s on the way (but who knows when).

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I think it will be chaos if the case is good. People will realize the value of light packs which have basically been useless for a while. The gap between lights and heavies will become graded and heavies and I think getting cheap packs of rare sets will disappear

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I wonder if they’d be willing to put weights on the back of the label…

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The only thing i think will happen is that there will be a surge of graded packs via cgc, causing more competition, ending in reduced prices. There is of course a market for graded packs, but it is very niche and will have very small impact on psa income.

I’m surprised PSA haven’t addressed the issue. I would have 100% graded all my lights had it not been for their awful encasement

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i hope not. sealing a heavy is dumb

They could state the weight of the pack on the back of the label, but without knowing the weights of all other packs in the box it came from it would just be a meaningless arbitrary number.‘Heavy’ and ‘light’ WOTC packs do generally tend to fall around a certain weight within several tenths of a gram, but going by a number alone is unreliable.

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I’ll be really interested to see what happens when this rolls out. There’s a few variables to consider like collectors’ willingness to disrupt the homogeny of their existing PSA label collections by venturing into CGC, grading cost, and how important having the foil crimp ‘showing’ is to sealed collectors. (IMO the latter being the main factor driving any potential new demand for light packs). With regards to PSA making a new case to fit this purpose, I really can’t see it happening. Pokemon in general is relatively small-fry for PSA, it just wouldn’t be worth it to them. Unless CGC and Beckett really start to make a crater-sized dent in the market I doubt PSA would even consider adapting their processes to the new levels of demand. And even in that circumstance I’m pretty sure they’d just yawn, kick back with a cuppa, and add another month to their turn-around times. Y’know, because #comfy majority market share 'n stuff. Lol the more I talk about PSA the less I like them

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Cgc with a 30 day turnaround and a case that doesn’t ruin the pack…compared to psa at 100 business day turnaround for ruined packs even before covid lol

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most wotc packs are very easy to weigh reliably no matter where they came from and its still pretty obvious for some ex packs

LOL when you put it like that it seems like an obvious decision right?? Gotta say, I genuinely believe there are collectors out there who are stubborn enough to forsake that in favour of keeping their collections in ‘PSA’ livery. Although, if CGC really do crack the market (pun intended), I reckon there’s a good chance more of those stubborn buggers will follow suit. Total uneducated guess mind you, I don’t even like collecting sealed packs :joy:

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Why is sealing a heavy pack dumb? I think there would be a premium for knowing that there is a holo encased. I think putting the weights on CGC cases would be a good thing, even more new market explosion

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I think putting the weight on the back would be fine as long as they don’t comment on whether it is heavy or light themselves because of the variance issue with print runs and that basically you could only confirm heavy/light if the grading company themselves were sent sealed booster boxes and verified their legitimacy before opening the box and slabbing them in whatever quantities requested. And even then in many sets its not an exact science with weighing.

A third party grading company putting the weight on the case is a horrible idea. Not only do they have to weigh the packs themselves, there is so much added liability on their end.

And if they aren’t labeling them as heavy or light - why even do it in the first place?

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Packs are just hard to deal with in grading format which is probably why we don’t have a good option yet. You either cram them in like PSA does to avoid movement, or you don’t fold up the sides and the pack can move and get damaged, a lose lose. It’s just better to keep the packs loose for the sake of the pack. We’ll see but I feel like they’ll take a similar route to PSA tbh

Why does PSA fold up the pack anyways? It completely ruins the point of a graded pack.

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it’s not necessarily dumb, just depends on what the collector intends to do with it. if you have a heavy and you just want to keep it forever in your collection, it is not a bad idea. obviously, if you want to sell the heavy later on, grading it would impact the value, because you’d have no way to prove you have a heavy, unless of course, cgc provides the weight of the pack with the grade. i think it would be smart because this is now a thing and can never reverse course. i hope charlie can get cgc to include the weight. this would be a game changer and cgc would win the entire pack grading market overnight. however, i can also understand there might be some risk, although the weighing itself should be pretty objective i think.

Agreed, I don’t think it’s dumb. It’s just a number lol It would be awesome for hardcore collectors though, which is who cgc seems to be aiming for. As we’ve seen time and time again even heavy numbers don’t necessarily mean anything depending on the set

Not much market for it now, but I was saying if they do this properly it could create a whole new market like with sealed video game grading. It was one of the few areas I felt they could dominate PSA with.

If PSA didn’t do such an objectively bad job at grading packs I think there would already be a large market for sealed graded product by now.

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