Mid to higher teir vintage cards are the only ones that would make sense at $79.99.
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I think one of the biggest impacts will be on all the mystery pack shenanigans that rely on low value bulk.
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I am torn on how this will change affordability of collecting. In one way, a $100 modern card is no longer gradeable for the next 4 months, so do more people sell raw, driving price down? Or is the PSA 10 more “rare” so price goes up for both graded and raw.
Either way, everyone involved needs to increases capacity (PSA, TPCi, etc)
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this will play out differently than during Covid, right?
It’s not like supply will stop coming onto the market, they have 10m cards in hand ready to grade and ship out, and they are processing those as we type. It isn’t like Covid where they had a skeleton crew, or no crew at all, for months before being forced to ramp up.
paradoxically this might push some vintage supply into the pipe from slowpokes like me. And we’ll see that in 8 months or so.
It might also be the push for buyers with some PSA cards in their carts too though
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I think we won’t see an impact with PSA 10 prices because you’re right, supply of those will be consistent as PSA works through its backlog.
I’m most interested in seeing how raw single prices change, now that the value proposition of grading has significantly shifted in a very short amount of time. Right now the market at large is very unpredictable, so I’m not comfortable assuming it will actually have any impact yet.
I’m also curious about how this impacts the correlation between modern raw singles and PSA 9 prices. Recently, the raw price has been near 1-1 with PSA 9 prices, but if raw drops, do PSA 9 prices drop as well even though they technically cost more (from a time and grading fee perspective) to obtain? Do collectors shift to directly buying PSA 9’s more instead of raw, leading to PSA 9 prices increasing? I think there is a lot of interesting discussion and analysis to be done around PSA 9’s and the market at large, so maybe if I have time in the next few days I’ll write up a longer post. At least it would be a switch up from the normal boring market debates of “ArE wE iN a BuBbLe?”…
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Maybe it’s just me but honestly I’m totally fine with a pause in grading for a few months.
What’s a few months to someone who loves this hobby and has been around it since they were a kid. Maybe I’ll focus more on filling my binder or taking the time to go through the stacks of cards I haven’t had time to go through. Just seems like a tiny blimp in the grand scheme of things. I do like seeing the investor bros panic about it, makes me chuckle
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Agreed but I don’t think this will impact them in 2026 or early 2027. Still plenty of supply out there plus all of the backlog that’s currently being shipped out.
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One potential silver lining with a delay is that we will probably see more mint raw cards available as vendors and others will want to flip their cards quicker. I don’t spend as much time sourcing as many others on here do, but I find it difficult (not impossible) to find potential gem mint cards at shows etc. Could be off with this take, but I’ll be curious to see if this plays out for me.
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10 million is such a comically high number, I just imagine all the employees constantly trying not to trip over boxes sprawled across the office.
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Anyone using CGC knows the only way to submit with them is through Fanatics for $10 a card and a sub-20 day TAT. Or maybe not enough people know that which is why their Florida location keeps increasing their price and TAT while Fanatics remains the same…
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I used the multi sub in same box trick on my latest submission
It pushed my value plus sub at the same speed as my express sub
My value sub was in the same box and im monitoring if it can also see a bump up in speed
This used to work well. Doesnt anymore for bulk
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All the gambling companies are getting every card they can get their hands on graded to make up the floors in their stupid mystery bag game. And they need floors far more than hits to keep their ecosystem upfloat. People aren’t discussing that enough.
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out of curiosity what do you do with the cards after grading them with fanatics? Sell on their platform, withdraw etc? I’ve heard the withdraw process can take months which has put me off
Withdraw. You pay 3% of their assessed market value if you withdraw before 90 days (after 90 days it drops to 1% of their assessed market value) but still that is a drop in the bucket for the total graded card cost and turnaround time compared to regular CGC submissions. I’ve withdrawn a couple large submissions and they’ve always shipped out within a week or two.
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Very interesting, I wonder how it would work with withdrawing back to the UK. I guess i’ll give it a go and find out!
Cheers
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Welcome back 2020/2021 we missed you
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Great news. Every time it gets more expensive and harder/longer to grade is a good thing.
So much junk and toxic bullshit in this hobby is due to the grading/flipping ecosystem.
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iirc, the last value-tier pause lasted from March '21 to… May/June '22? and they had a claimed 10m card backlog then too. I’ll be interested to see whether the additional facilities/staff allow them to clear it more quickly this time 
The other thing I’d love to know is whether the forced disconnection with the grading process, removal of low-BTE card profit margins, and overall hahbee disillusionment from their previous shutdown contributed to the wider market cool-off in 2022, and if we see a correlation this time.
Oh well, aside from death and taxes, there’s only one other thing that’s certain
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