fired
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CGC changing their standards again to help their business is not on my bingo card
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its the normal cycle
psa was very lax compared to bgs for years and grew exponentially. Now they are tight as heck. In many ways a psa10 today is very close if not in many instances identical to a bgs 10 gold. So now that they have the market share they want to say “you have to grade with us because a psa10 is worth big $$” and part of that is the faith of the psa10 being truly a 10 and less population
What cgc is doing is par for the course hate it or love it
Sure, but the PSA 10 premium is a sweet spot that hits a broader target with a broader premium. The black label is the biggest super 10, and is great when you hit it, but its greatness is because most won’t get a black label. I think the health of a grading company is better demonstrated in the success of their lower grades, or even better their full scale.
With that said, it would be interesting if PSA added a super 10 grade, but I doubt they will ever do because of the previous point.
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I would love to see it but i doubt it. I think it may devalue the regular psa10. They dont even have a psa9.5 which is smart
psa set up their 10 to be the money shot and it’s worked
also to Will i DO believe current psa10 is getting close to bgs 10gold. They have no tolerance for white specs anywhere even in corners like they used to. right now a psa10 is imo like a bgs 9.5 9.5 10 10. Its way up there with the standard which is a good thing imo. psa10 quality is higher than it ever was and that helps values of 10s. people really respect the ten grade from psa which isnt always the case with regular cgc 10
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99% of people praise this
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I certainly hope they don’t, because I already think pristine 10 and black labels are kinda silly.
On a scale of 1-10, this 10 is more of a 10 than the other 10s? Normally we would call that an 11 lol
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*99.5% 
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Is PSA in trouble?
No.
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It’s interesting to focus on one month when the first half of the year shows that the market share is pretty defined. It’s been around the same split since 2024 as a matter of fact.
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I’m a fan of CGC but they are not ever overtaking PSA, ever. I could, however, see stronger growth continuing for CGC ($10 vs $28 is a big deal as you noted) and a bit of a narrowing of the gap but I could never see PSA not having at least 60% of the TCG market.
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A lot of posts that look at grading comparisons really seem to love the MoM data, I guess because it’s easy to digest. But 1 month data is statistically meaningless and we need to stop pretending it’s not
I didn’t know they shared (or someone calculated) market share. That’s intresting to see
The market share data is good and actually @Keiii made my point too and i just didnt see it. the gem rate data is kind of nonsensical though
Why would PSA be in trouble? Thats like saying Pokemon is in trouble because One Piece TCG is going crazy right now with a massive boom.
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I just realized I didn’t crop that screenshot how I wanted, but yeah, the gem rate data is really a non-factor into everything overall. Just an interesting statistic Gemrate reports.
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So this gemrate answers the question (or appears to?) what is the overall likelihood of gem status for a given grader. But if you’re looking at market analysis a more interesting analysis would be for common high value cards, what’s the gemrate by grader. Because that would tell you things like for e.g. Champions Festival, CGC grades 22% of trading cards but constitutes 33% of gem grades
