How many/are there/where are/who has the PSA Graded Pokemon Cards that begin with Cert # 3? I have hundreds and hundreds of slabs and recently realized I don’t have one single graded card that begins with cert # 3. What are the odds of this? I’m not saying they don’t exist, but was Pokemon not very popular during this grading time period? Any information would be helpful and please share some pics if you happen to have some graded Pokemon cards that begin with # 3. Thanks!
PS. I’m very new to this and figured this was the best place to ask and share this thought so please forgive me if I don’t know what I’m doing.
Here’s a post showing a small window in which James got some 3x certs. They are very, very uncommon. Doubt anyone without a firsthand understanding of PSA’s system at the time will know anything definitive of what happened with 3x certs.
Seems like there were two time periods when 3x certs were issued. The early early certs where the case seems to be too large for the card, and the short timeframe in 2018 when the numbering made sense chronologically with other certs.
One thing to keep in mind is that PSA started out grading sports cards which tend to be slightly larger and thicker than ptcg. I tried to breakdown the generations of psa cases in a thread last year and I found that pokemon cards were graded in the same sport card cases since the late 90s:
Sport card cases saw a number of revisions to their cases through 2008. It was also in 2008 that TCG cards received their own version of cases which have a backwards “21” in the lower left corner.
So what I suspect is that in 2008 there was a small window where TCG were no longer slabbed in old sport card cases and before they finalized the TCG specific cases. This is me speculating of course. As for that Arcanine, that card could have been re-holdered anytime after 2017.
Unfortunately I don’t have pm’s anymore ( since those weren’t carried over here from old E4 ) but I still remember asking during deal did he recently submit Arcanine/Alakazam to reholder/relabel service.
It was quite big surprise to learn they were from most recent PSA submission, by that day I had only seen 3xxx certs posted by Gary and other more experienced users, all of those had similar inner sleeve as the Base Hitmonchan above.
There is always room for improvement (for everyone). I was poking fun at you because the picture of the Kabutops reminded me of your first ebay listings. Never living that down!
