It may 9.5 with a 9 surface, but there is a good chance with the two scratches it would 8.5 surface.
All 9.5s vintages I’ve seen recently with a 9 surface have one minor issue (one tiny print line, one minor small scratch or a surface “hickey”, or roller lines on the back).
Still, there is always a chance!
Theres no scratching in your pics
Its possible psa damaged your card. Also possible thats just from the slab itself and psa just randomly handed you out an 8
If it were my card I would regrade elsewhere
Print lines are sometimes only visible from certain angles. Having said that, this looks exceptionally clean from the photos. Assuming there isn’t some hidden defect, this looks significantly better than a PSA 8!
No matter how much time I inspect my cards, and no matter if it’s a 20-card sub or a 50-card sub, PSA always gives me a random 5. Never fails.
I’ll also add that I have successfully cracked those 5s and re-subbed and received PSA 10s and 9s lmao
A psa8 isnt worth much more than the cost of grading the card. But a psa10 apparently sold for $2,500 in 2022 and there is one on ebay right now (worse than yours with a dinged corner) for $3,500 lol
With that spread, i would be irate. I fully understand 
That’s good to know. I just mailed a sub a hour ago with a fan club porygon in it. One small white knock on the edge. Hopefully a 9
oof i sold my cgc pristine for like 800 cash. oh well i paid way less than that if u can imagine 
I do wish that they had more clear guidelines on grading with other companies, I think the idea of TAG is amazing but to me it seems like there are so many problems, I wish there was a (non-ai) company that wrote detailed reports or actually had a set grading system so that it isn’t just what the grader is feeling that day, ai has way to many problems and if a person grades the card the opinion is to subjective, not much to do about it if your not happy with the grade you could crack it and resend or just forget about grading, personally if it was me I would probably send it to ARS but that seems like a pretty big hassle for one card I am a binder collector so I really don’t grade, also rip if PSA damaged your card it looks really nice
Without getting off topic (and I will go off topic), people dont care about subgrades (and im a BGS fan). They want a round number that is easy-ish to understand.
CGC said less than 10% of cards had the subgrade option.
TAG (S) is just glorified subgrades.
BGS will treat OPs card more kindly. They are less strict on surface than PSA.
Tell me about it I could probably go on random rants forever
I always liked subgrades telling me why the grader gave the grade they did, I believe that the reason people like TAG is because it gives them that fancy report to read and look at their card so yes glorified subgrades
Back to BGS lol
It’s clear everyone has their favorite grading companies someone should make a thread about everyone’s favorites
tag is subgrades on crack, why have a grading scale out of 10 when you can have it out of 1000
I only mentioned BGS as op said he was going to cross there. Made sense as I think it would get a bump.
But most people submitting are not doing it under the S level. Only S gets the “score” - meaning everyone else is just getting a 1 out of 10 number.
The card has to be high enough value for it to warrant S as its like $75 last time I checked.
I feel the market moves with hype. If people think they will get more $ with company A than company B, they will grade there (especially considering most grading volume are business submitters/resellers).
I don’t see many vintage collectors going to TAG any time soon as their score system is just glorified subgrades, making collecting even more complicated (“I’m only a 995 collector”) and they should in theory be harsh on vintage if they really do use AI…but honestly they arent, which is odd.
Most vintage cards I’ve seen have been over graded.
TLDR im wait and see at the moment with TAG.
Found some real 8s for sale
Some are missing the point of this thread
I noticed toward the end of last year that vintage is completely upgradable anymore with psa
Its like they feel guilty about high pops from years past
How can you possibly compare before and now
Its not my intent to poopoo on other ppls cards. But where is the consistency?
How can they grade this roughly and justify everything that came before? Its already hard enough to grade vintage as it is, but now it just feels pointless to send these cards to psa
I dont know if its because they are grading absolutely perfect minty modern cards all day so when vintage shows up on their table it just looks like trash to them?
Are they really holding ancient cards to the standard of modern printing??? If so then you might as well deactivate all the pre 2024 certs because thats NOT how you were grading before
What is the point of sub grades if they are consistent
That poor holo, that’s so many print lines, they need to get a set grading scale marking how many print lines for what grade and start doing things more consistency if I ever owned a grading company I would probably make a grading scale for cards with set rules in place I’m sure they have standards but I couldn’t find any set standards on how they dock and give points online
, I totally agree with people grading with the company A and B example I will see people grading with BGS if they think they can get black label, PSA if they want a 10 and CGC if the card isn’t perfect, makes me question why they do it
Well I did have a recent sub return last week. I have never received an 8.5 on any graded card since I started grading cards and in this sub I got 20-8.5’s.
Base 2 is one of the worst grading sets, especially the white back holos. Wigglytuff is just about impossible to get in a 10, as is Clefairy & Chansey. Terrible QC on this set.
Best grade PSA could ever give. 20 is a massive amount for one sub. Congrats.
