Now this is amazing… who did they have to pay off to get 28(?!) sequential PSA 10s? Modern Japanese print quality is perfection.
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Wow… The fact that they’re all sequential
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It’s hard to buy JP CHRs that aren’t 10s tbh. Non-textured sheen holo means the worst case is being slightly OC which you can easily screen for.
The more impressive part is paying over 10x the total card price in grading fees.
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I see some of these for less than 100 yen. If I was grading these using PSA Japan (3,300yen per card) then it would more like 20x to 30x for some of these lol.
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Note the word “total”.
This is a good point. What does this mean for the modern Japanese graded market? An overabundance of 10s and little value added above NM raw for grades 8-9 like in Modern English?
It just shifts the baseline for conditional rarity. PSA 10 is the expected default, PSA 9 is effectively worse than raw that might be a 10, and premiums move up to pristine 10/black label.
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The only thing I’ve noticed on some of the Japanese CHRs and Alt Arts is that there tends to be some little bits of chipping along the front borders, especially if the borders are black.
I haven’t graded any of these cards yet, so I’m not sure how/if PSA really docks for that.
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This is exactly what I was trying to say on the thread about conditional rarity. Now that PSA 10 is whatever, the only place to go is for the perfect 10 label. So effectively perfect 10 is gonna now be what PSA 10 used to be. For modern at least. Vintage doesn’t really change.
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CHR came out nice, some of the baby shinies in shiny V suffered print lines, along with other cards, sets, but majority of japanese modern just takes a quick look at centering and if its close its a 10 nearly always
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Only thing ive noticed is a lot of print lines lately. That and as others have mentioned, the CSRs can have some front whitening, easily noticeable on black borders. As for what this means for Japanese cards, i feel like its been this way for a while. Potentially why we see a tighter price spread across NM to PSA 9 to 10. Even in vintage, i find cards raw, to high grade have a much smaller spread in terms of price. PSA 10 will be like $350, 9 will be like ~$150 and raw will be somewhere between 8-9 prices depending on condition.
So, my observation is Japanese sets will remain cheaper in general compared to English, but with much smaller gaps between varying conditions, relative to english. I love the consistency in Japanese cards lol
So CR’s are super consistent.
CSR’s are hard to grade.
I use Ace Grading as I’m a UK collector and have been trying to get a full set of 10’s.
As a random sample, the fact that 10’s don’t even exist for all of them yet is crazy.
I’m currently cross grading 20x CGC 9.5’s but I’m not hugely hopeful that many will make the cross.
TLDR: CR = easy, CSR = super hard
Less consistent than CHRs due to texture chipping, sure, but “hard to grade” is a bit of a stretch.
edit:
Some of the cheaper CSRs are around $5 and Ace Grading is a tiny fraction of all graded cards, so to me it’s crazier that any are graded at all than that there aren’t any 10s.
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Which grading company is that?
Why it’s the most used grading company for Pokémon and the one mainly being discussed in this thread that’s right I’m talking about none other than the Professional Sports Authenticator
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Lol, okay - Modern Japanese Print Quality is reliable at scoring a PSA 10.
Compared to other historic sets that is noteworthy and if you are grading with PSA, all power to you.
None-the-less, the print quality is hardly perfect.
One of the most extreme examples of the huge difference between English and Japanese print quality is XY Evolutions / CP6. Especially when you look at some of the regular holos.
Consider the Evolutions vs. CP6 Holo Hitmonchan populations.
English:
PSA 10: 5
PSA 9: 1217
PSA 8: 615
Japanese:
PSA 10: 451
PSA 9: 260
PSA 8: 48
Just think about that. Only 0.25% of English Evolutions Hitmonchans are PSA 10 worthy, whereas 60% of the CP6 equivalents are.
The consequence of this is extreme condition rarity and a huge price premium given to English 10s.
In contrast, Japanese 10s are expected and 9s go in the bargain bin.
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Maybe they mark down print lines, which the CSRs had an abundance of.
CHRs didn’t from my experience.
PSA doesn’t seem to care about print lines.
Maybe this depends on whether you’re taking about vintage or modern. Many Vintage Japanese PSA 9s are PSA 10s with a print line 
.
this answers literally every thought i’ve had about this topic. i really enjoy japanese cards, so maybe i was thinking too hard about it because it seems so obvious now that im reading it lol. the differing print quality creates a larger condition rarity gap in English. smh
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