Id say it’s more about nostalgia. Everyone wanted a charizard or said they did. More people are just grading their charizards to preserve it so I don’t think the grader has as much to do it with as other cards do where they want high grades.
I think this is the answer. If the data was analyzed showing grades 1-10 you can see charizard was graded much more at every grade along the entire spectrum. If I am grading a magneton it really needs to be a 10 to make money. 9’s on base set unlimited really don’t bring too much. 10 or bust so I am only submitting those that I think are solid 9’s at a minimum. I have seen PSA 5-7 charizards sell for $50+ and I don’t know why. They seem to have an almost guaranteed profit if you grade them at anything over a 5 from buying them raw. Not a big one by any means, but they are definitely inflated along the entire scale.
Also how many of these unl charizard psa 9s are just regrades? People shooting for 10s again and again
That is a good point that I never thought of.
Back when I graded my 10 it went for around $350 and now they go over $500. With 9’s being worth $100 then and about $170 now it would not be surprising for people to send dozens of 9’s in again and again. That is the thing with PSA grades, 10’s will only happen once but surely 9’s could happen 10 times on the same damn card. Any overgrade will forever live in that case and undergrades (or even appropriate grades) may be cracked and go back.
I recall reading of some people on here submitting the same card 4-5 times and definitely on other forums I have heard of people submitting 10 times or more just for consistency checking or shooting for that 10 grade. Often times the labels are prob not sent back to fix the pop report inflating the 9’s and 8’s, an effect the 10 pop would never see.
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Also a lot of people off the forums. On instagram
Quick new update folks! Version 1.2. Link here and in the first post. I added a several columns to the right with newly updated pop report data. I didn’t simply overwrite the previous data as I want to keep a running archive on pop report data for each date that I update this spreadsheet. I wish I could figure out how to automate it, but even updating semi annually for WOTC sets I think is something I will strive for going forward. PSA’s website doesn’t seem too friendly for copying/pasting let alone having scripts grab the proper data.
My curiosity and recent amazing PSA returns led me to checking the recent PSA 10 rates specifically for Base, Jungle and Fossil sets. That is all I really had time to work on today, but I plan to update this through WOTC era in the next few weeks. I have seen amazing results (high PSA 10 rate) in the last few boxes that I opened and I speculated that PSA may be giving out 10’s easier in the past year than in years prior. Here is a quick summary of some of my more interesting findings, the raw data can be found in the link.
Interesting notes:
More PSA 10’s graded in the last year than the prior 17 years combined for all jungle and fossil variants.
Base set 1st edition became slightly harder to grade 10’s while shadowless because twice as difficult.
The total population for all 3 sets graded between PSA 8-10 increased by 75% in the past year
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I know I built a program to scrap PSA’s website in the past, I used python. I don’t have the files anymore, but I remember the easiest way for me to do it was to go the psacard.com/pop/search section of their website and have the program run a search for the exact title in both the top and bottom search box to get one result.
The next issue is the signature cards adds an extra layer you have to check for to scrap the right info so even if I had the old program I built it would need some updating for that.
Nice work btw.
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Nice work for sure:)
Update: Total stats of Base-Fossil cards in PSA 8,9,10 grades only and their PSA 10 rates.
My thoughts:
Across the board it seems to be that proportionally less of the newly graded cards are getting 10’s as evidenced by the 12.6% rate for these sets between 7-18-17 to 8-7-19 as opposed to the previous 19.5% between 5-23-16 and 7-18-17. This could be taken to mean that PSA is grading cards harder, but what I think is more likely is that a combination of factors are leading to this. 1. being more PSA 8/9 being cracked in and re-sent. 2. Less pack fresh cards overall being submitted. 3. More binder/collection cards that have sat around 20 years finally being graded due to higher prices or just finally being graded first time. So essentially a lower 10 rate due to the lower average quality of submitted card.
Another interesting thing to point out is that in the past just over 2 years we have doubled the pop of PSA 8-10 cards for these sets again with 80,874 total compared to the 37,304 total on 7-18-17 and 21,380 total on 5-23-16.
WOTC sets only PSA 8,9,10 grades with rates of >8 as well as 10 rate by set. To see which sets are the most “difficult” to grade.
No big changes here. Skyridge, Gym Challenge 1st edition and Neo Destiny 1st edition remains the three easiest to grade sets. All PSA 10 rates seem to be dipping overall for the reasons mentioned above.
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This to me is the most impressive figure. Considering that just a couple people on the forum account for around half of the 2016 number. Very impressive numbers since then
Great work! 
Wonderful job.
I’d agree with the reasons for the %drop. Many of us have been sending in our second tier condition cards cause all our gems have been graded years ago.
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