The theory that CGC grades harsher came from two things
CGC says they grade differently when grading with sub-grades. When you scrutinize a card for more time and apply the unforgiving mathematics behind CGC’s sub-grade formula, it was logical to assume the cards with sub-grades would receive lower grades.
When the pop report was released, cards without sub-grades received higher grades. This was incredibly apparent with vintage cards in particular. The majority of the 10’s and 9.5’s had no sub-grades. I’m not sure if this is different now given CGC’s more forgiving grading nowadays.
Subgrades can also help cards that instinctively look worse. A card with an 8.5 surface subgrade can get a 9 composite if the other subs are all 9 or higher. But an 8.5 surface subgrade indicates something seriously wrong with the card, and makes the card not “mint” (IMO). So I would say that the subgrade system is actually quite forgiving. That same CGC 9 with the 8.5 surface subgrade would likely cross to a PSA 8.
It’s also not intuitive to me that looking at a card longer → harsher grade. It can also work the other way – something that appears to be a significant issue at first can look less severe under closer inspection.
“The majority of the 10’s and 9.5’s had no sub-grades” – well, yeah – the majority of cards of any grade don’t have subgrades. What you’d have to do is check whether a higher proportion of 10s and 9.5s lack subgrades compared to lower grades. Because obviously most 10s and 9.5s lack subgrades when most cards graded with CGC lack subgrades.
What you’d have to do is check whether a higher proportion of 10s and 9.5s lack subgrades compared to lower grades.
Just checked. This also appears to be true. I haven’t done a comprehensive data analysis but if you look at the all the pristine 10s of vintage sets, you’ll very rarely run into a card with sub-grades. However, if you look at 8.5s, it looks like something closer to 40% of the cards have sub-grades.
Would love to see someone actually scrape the data and find a definitive answer though.
One fact that stood out to me when the pop report was released: there were 45 pristine 10’s from Aquapolis. 0 of them had sub-grades.
It’s also not intuitive to me that looking at a card longer → harsher grade. It can also work the other way – something that appears to be a significant issue at first can look less severe under closer inspection.
With every imperfection, you lose points from a base score of 10. The longer you look, the more imperfections you find. Thus more deductions will occur.
You can’t really look at a card longer and find more perfections.
With bgs i get plenty of off grades (both high and low) with and without subs. I really dont think companies look too close or long regardless. Though logic would suggest that subs get graded longer and therefore harder i guess
I also think it’s ridiculous that grading with sub-grades is literally a different service than grading without sub-grades. They should be the same service. The card should be evaluated in the exact same way.
Paying for sub-grades should be paying for printing them on the label and having CGC keep the sub-grades in a database. Both services should be using sub-grades to calculate the final score whether they’re on the label or not.
This never made any sense to me either. How are subgrades not known if the overall grade has already been determined, quite literally, using subgrades.
Something similar happened to my group early on when CGC started grading TCG’s. We had about a 100 card sub that we had submitted with subgrades. For whatever reason, they were graded without subs. They initially just said sorry and offered to refund the cost of the subgrading, but at the time subs were only $5 a card so it felt like having subs would make the cards slightly more valuable/easier to sell. So we asked them to just add the subs on, not knowing that no sub orders go through a different process, so there were no subgrades available for them to just, add on. They still ended up adding the subs but also making it very clear they were not going to regrade the order.
As a result we definitely noticed the subs were pretty funky, a lot of the exact same centering grades that really did not match the cards. Definitely fudged just to be there.
I’ve been looking at their website and the way they return the subgrade data would require querying every single subgrade separately for every single card… So it would take hundreds of thousands of queries Not very friendly to parse unfortunately
Not very friendly to parse unfortunately