Yeah as our discussion went on I realized you were talking about TCGPlayer near mint → PSA 9 for ultra modern. That I agree with more or less. It’s the older stuff that comes a lot more banged up, despite still being listed “near mint.” I will maintain my expected ~10% PSA 10 rate from TCGPlayer near mint though.
Maybe it’s more recent, but I’ve gotten back several cards recently that were 9s with the only visible defect being print lines.
Maybe it’s just me and I’m the jerk, but I only sell off my modern that has issues on tcgplayer. When I was selling some extra trainer gallery cards, I picked out all the ones that were more than 60/40 off-center to be sold on tcgplayer as near mint. I say that to say that I expect to receive PSA 7/8 when buying near mint on tcgplayer. It still meets their standard, but it’s being sold for good reason. Most of the etb promo charmanders I’ve been buying in listed as near mint have scuffs and are off-center, no way they’d get a PSA 10
Its not impossible, but very unlikely in the next 5-10 years. Maybe after that, if the pokemon company decides that they are moving away from physical cards…then you will see most of it deflating…
Pokemon moving away from physical cards would probably fail spectacularly. The game is nowhere near as popular as competitors like Magic: The Gathering.
That’s the rule of thumb on TCGP and what it used to be on troll and toad also. Just search the seller’s name and if they sell ANY slabs then you know you are getting a 9 card max cause they would have graded the 10 potential ones
Yes. There’s no point trying to buy gradeable cards from any seller over 10k sales, usually not even over 1k sales. I hadn’t considered trying to cross reference seller name to somewhere like eBay. My name on eBay and TCGPlayer is different, for no reason other than I made the accounts at different times. I would expect many smaller sellers to be the same.
I also just wouldn’t expect any copy of things like gold stars, 1st ed base, probably any WOTC set card to be worth grading when sold on TCGPlayer.
Sport cards are way more volatile/hyped than Pokémon because of new rookie classes every year. (and the card parallel insanity.) But this video shows some crazy price drops since the peak in 2021:
Who knows 
Many other collectables have come and gone - pokemon cardboard is not immune to this.
Moving to digital cards would probably result in all the physical cards going up in price
I look at something like stamp collecting (philately) and don’t believe this to be true.
Yes, that is true for many collectables that was once popular, but sometimes there are still value to be found in the extremely rare items. In this case, I will still bet that cards such as the prerelease Raichu or Illustrator Pikachu being valuable…But most of the rest, probably not or at least not at the level they are now.
We might get an initial boom, but I doubt it will last.
Basic info
95% MINT Raw
5% Graded.
Will just make blanket statements. (should hit six digit sales by end of month for 2024).
incredible stuff, 100 packages a day sounds like a lot haha
Makes sense. Raw sells crazy fast on eBay even well above TCGPlayer low prices. If you’re around TCG low and use promoted listings I could see easily 100+ sales per day with a large enough inventory selection available.
With all this love of grading in pokemon, a decently priced mint raw card will become as rare as a bigfoot sighting
“Stagnating” is a gentle word.
“Downturn” would qualify better the period we entered/are in.
It would be interesting to revisit the period after 1999 -2002 (3 years of a boom) that could be compared to the craze we got from 2020-2023 (3 years of craze) and see what happened from 2003 until 2016.
→ influencers, this is a call for you: please interview people with different profiles that navigated this period , flippers, investors, hype followers, players
The dynamic though is different , maybe.
So 6500 sales of 95% raw mint modern cards in less than 3 months?
Gotta ask where you are getting 6200 mint cards? You must have much more if that’s only sales.
we have 50,000+ mint raw (most ultra modern, modern, 1000’s vintage pre 2000
Never thought it would get like this. So started to grade more the last several months. Thinking about adding sealed next.
It is. I think customers appreciate the condition of our inventory. MINT/GM. Many say they have a high percentage of 10’s from our inventory.
