I am currently collecting all the FA and EX versions of the XY series (eventually I want to expand into holo’s and other sets). To protect and value my collection, I have decided I want every card in PSA 9 or 10. I am now putting all the cards I consider to be PSA 9 or 10 (based on some videos of Trainer Tony and Gem Mint Pokemon) in sleeves and top loaders, but I am looking for some in depth videos on how to decide these specific kind of cards are of a PSA 9 or PSA 10 quality (and the reasoning behind it).
Aside of that, does anyone have some recommendations on where to find these cards raw in aforementioned condition aside of eBay? I have been struggling to find some despite going through eBay with the most diverse amount of keywords. Might be me being a rookie, but I’d appreciate anyone pointing me in a direction!
Buy booster boxes for a set while they’re cheap and cross your fingers for a good batch of cards. You might pull 9s and 10s. As for buying good quality singles, I wish I knew the answer myself.
Get yourself some card saver 1’s if you plan to submit to PSA. They do not accept cards in toploaders. Many sets of the past few years have a high rate of sub 9’s straight out of the pack, so solving the problem of finding 9/10 candidates will be the tough part. Best of luck. Hi res scans of 9’s and 10’s are all over eBay as well as the collection thread of the forum. Can’t hurt to buy a few examples to have in your hand and inspect well before you take the plunge on grading. Great deals can be found randomly, especially when these types of cards go to auction and especially on 9’s at times.
My words of advice are to go ahead and just do it, the amount of research you want to do prior to this depends on the amount of money you have to spare, but most knowledge is obtained by just doing it.
You can find the cards on eBay generally by searching for “cardname number/setcount”, for example “charizard 101/108” will already pull up the FA Charizards from Evolutions. It’s going to be tough (I think) to find graded cards of regular EX cards as it’s often simply not worth grading, on the other hand FA and SR should be a lot easier to find in graded condition.
Buying ungraded is simply very difficult, that’s all there is to it. You could try buying cards from bulk resellers, though I’d stay away from Trollandtoad simply because I think (maybe incorrectly?) that they often sell cards that came in via binders as “NM”, you still should take the card’s graded population into account, though it may be shifted by people refusing to submit really lowpar cards or having a min grade in their submissions. For example the Charizard card can be found at www.psacard.com/Pop/PlayerSearch?term=charizard&categoryid=0 then very far down you’ll see 101 FULL ART/M CHARIZARD EX and it has 4x PSA 8, 1x PSA 8.5, 86x PSA 9 and 148x PSA 10, though Evolutions is well known for high quality cards, other sets will not be that good. Also keep in mind that people may be selling of their in their eyes ungradable cards on Ebay as NM/Mint as they are pack-fresh.
My current reference to pregrading cards is that an all-mint or card with very small whitening on a border can get a 10, two or three times whitening is a 9 and anything else is not even worth considering, this does assume that the centering is very good. I have not yet submitted to PSA though, but it’s on my list.
