“Buying a PSA slab significantly de-risks finding a dent or scratch compared to the small premium you pay for it.”
Ah but gambling on the cheap bad-picture card involves no premium! (And I rarely try to resell) ((and I hate slabs))
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nicely done, out of curiosity is this on ebay?
it’s neither the question of modern nor vintage as some implies and still want to create this weird divide as if Pokémon card attractiveness had a time variable (each period has its merit and selected cards in any of those periods are worth grading (e.g. gold stars, alt arts)).
Pokemon is slowing after a period of euphoria, it’s fact and i don’t think people are surprised by it. It’s actually healthy as it was unsustainable… the destructive forces will come to play that regulate the pokemon market: At the end the “weaker” will go, the “flippers” will go … only sellers/individuals that managed their inventory/collection correctly from a quality and quantitative aspects and kept in check their finance (no leverage) will strive… and the market will restart healthier on a stronger basis.
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As someone who isn’t a seller (anymore…?) I wish the cards would go back to like… 2015 prices. Is that even possible?
No
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In many ways we’re back to normal now. Some things still need to drop but they move slowly. It’s at the point where for the English market you need to think twice about grading Holo 9 quality set cards that are not main chase cards. You can lose money or break even at best on these cards.
During covid anything Holo was worth a ton in the 9 grade. 8-9 have reverted to essentially raw value as there are just too many cards out there. Also many 10s have halved from their highs. It’s only natural
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It’s kind of crazy that a PSA 9 more or less equals raw “NM” price for modern cards.
More than 9’s being underpriced, I think it would be better to say that raw, pack fresh “NM” cards are vastly overpriced currently. Production quality is too low and print runs are too high imo to justify this.
I’d be curious to know what the grading percentages are like if thousands of packs were just opened and all cards directly graded without any screening or human decision making in between.
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I wound not say that 9s are particularly underpriced. The whole market just takes some time to correct itself.
We’re in the early stages of that. It’s hard to come off the high we were on. I mainly just deal with English set cards and boxes. But they’re simply not scarce so there needs to be something truly special about the ones that maintain or grow in value
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I buy my “NM” raw ultra modern from tcgplayer and most of them would achieve a grade of Mint 9 or better. It’s the condition you can expect from the average order, so a premium isn’t warranted.
I think that just says more about PSA’s lax standards than anything else.
Modern pack fresh cards shouldn’t be guaranteed 9s just like how JP cards shouldn’t be guaranteed 10s but that’s almost always how it goes.
And of course neither they nor any of the grading companies care about tic tac toe printlines on modern cards either which is a farce.
This has not been my experience at all. Almost invariably they have chips all over the back side, are terribly off center, and/or have extremely visible print lines. I would not expect more than a 7 from the “average” TCGPlayer “near mint” listing.
I have to hard disagree with you there too. If anything, PSA is the company that does care about print lines and surface quality far more than any of the others. The aspect they are most lax on is centering, which is strange honestly since that’s really the only objective measure about a card’s grade.
Standards should not be artificially raised so that grading maintains a bell curve. If manufacturing and print quality is such that TPCI can mass produce visually flawless cards, it’s ok for the majority of cards directly from packs to be graded a 10. English is not there yet. Many say Japanese is. I am not very familiar with Japanese, but my understanding was that the print lines issue was equally if not more prevalent there. I don’t know at all about centering, would they still make it through if PSA tightened centering standards?
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Well, they aren’t guaranteed, it’s just the most likely outcome when buying ultra modern “NM” cards, which are almost always “pack fresh”. I don’t think this is an issue with PSA having lax standards, “pack fresh” cards should be a 9 or a 10 out of the pack.
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100%
Not to start some kind of rage flame war on the internet, but if you really believe that I’d love to see a blog post or something about how you mass bought the cheapest 30 of whatever card you pick off TCGPlayer, sent them directly to PSA, and what grades came back as.
I’ve done the first part, on multiple cards. The ones I picked out are at PSA now, and it wasn’t all of them. It was less than 10% actually that I expect to get 10s, and that was even including some speculative cards where I’m trying to gauge what level of “one tiny nick” can still get a 10.
I bought all the ShWh TG cards from tcgplayer; perhaps you have been extremely unlucky, or I have been extremely lucky. Maybe around 20% I have had to replace with copies that I would consider “Mint”. People aren’t playing these cards; they usually just sit in inventory, and that is the sort of condition you can expect from them. Mind you, I have submitted just over a hundred modern cards to PSA and only one has achieved a grade lower than 9, so I’m confident in my assessment.
Mint 9 ultra modern aside from big chases are just junk slabs; unnecessary bulkiness, undeserving of a premium, and impossible to easily view or move around.
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Please go check your yellow border Brilliant Stars and Astral Radiance trainer gallery cards. I’ve literally bought 100s of them and the vast majority were obviously cut with an extremely dull blade resulting in fraying along the entire edge. Brilliant Stars Jolteon and Astral Radiance Kingdra in particular were exceptionally bad.
Maybe I did just get extremely unlucky. That would be a good data point to know as well.
No, as a few collectors would buy every single PSA 10 at those prices xD
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Yes, some of cards I own from Brilliant Stars have dull “fuzzy” cuts, but no chipping or whitening along the border. I don’t consider these to be “not Mint” as I see many in Mint 9 holders displaying similar qualities. It’s not wear; it’s no different from the many Mint 9 cards from Jungle and Fossil that have poorly cut borders.
I think the difference here may be that my definition of “Mint” is consistent with PSA, while you have different parameters for what a “Mint” card is.
I only know they mark you down for printlines from WOTC.
I’ve seen many printlines in modern PSA 10s - even PSA9s shouldn’t have printlines IMO.
JP centering is a lot better than ENG, but to me personally, it’s the least relevant. Centering unless it’s miscut will not detract from the artwork. Printlines do. The priorities are messed up. And JP, at least prior to SV era, had x100 more printlines than ENG, being on practically every single holo rarity besides CHR/AR. Now SRs seem to have switched the base holofoil too, but it’s present on all others like usual and including ACE SPEC.
Of course TPC/TPCI don’t care whether grading companies care about printlines and probably will not bother changing their stock, but who knows? Right now most people either accept or overlook it because grading companies don’t care but if they did, maybe it would have some change eventually when discourse starts highlighting the poor quality control.
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