PSA gradings of Pokemon Cards has increased significantly over the last few years, and I think significant enough where PSA now seem to be making labelling mistakes more than ever.
There is so much inconsistency with labelling of the same cards. Whilst it is only a cosmetic issue on the surface is creates issues on the POP Report. I have seen 4 different labelling variations on 1st Ed JP Gold Star Raikou.
Not to mention the wrongful labelling of a JP trophy card from a member here.
PSA need to get someone hired or trained to create more consistency with the labelling of Pokemon cards.
And send us pokemon promos and such lol instead of baseball. I think the only reason they don’t is that there manager collects sports cards. And they want that to be the focus even though the overwhelming majority of send offs is pokemon and yugioh
No, sports cards are PSA’s massive main business. No way do Pokemon cards make up a majority of the submissions. It would be interesting to know the exact percentage though. @garyis2000 you have any information on this?
You also have to realise that Pokemon cards are nowhere near to hitting the sales figures of Sports Cards, especially Baseball. There is a reason that big 7 find was such huge news.
Like, not even close. I think it is hard for us to understand the size of the sports card markets. Imagine if every deal you saw of ungraded cards was graded. That’s as close as I can get to explaining.
Yup type Pokemon card into eBay and imagine every single listing fully graded. In comparison, It would still just be a fraction of the graded sports card market
They should just build a branch made just for Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon since it will really help out more in my opinion but there is a few issues with that since some people do send football baseball basketball cards along with pokemon. So they would have to send the cards to the other branches but I think they could just make it so you need to fill out another forms for the other sports/tgc cards so they can keep track on whos cards are whos instead of making one person grade all the cards alone since it does confus them .
I know there are times PSA for sure mislabels a card, but there are only multiple entries because of the individuals submitting the cards.
Last time this was discussed, I referenced the Trophy Kangaskhan card. The “original” entry is more generic, where the newer entry is more specific. The same is true for the Masaki cards. They have multiple entries because of people submitting the cards.
I personally sympathize a bit with PSA, as I collect sports cards. We have to understand that Pokemon has so many variants and/or varieties. Most sports cards, especially pre 1990-2000 contain: Year, Set Name, Players name, Card number. Pokemon has: Year, Language, Set Name, Pokemon Name, Card number, then the crazy amount of variants, which can be multiple at times: Holo/non-holo, 1st Edition, Glossy/non-glossy, Event name (if a promo), Shadowless, Points (players/fan/daisuki), Gold star, No Rarity etc…
I too get frustrated with a mislabel, especially an egregious one, however, I have more sympathy as the variants/varieties in pokemon are over 9000.
Just a quick example, a 1986 fleer basketball Michael Jordan rookie card has 6692 PSA 8 copies, and ROUTINELY (multiple every week) sells for around $1500.
That card by itself has more population than the ENTIRE base set pokemon (ALL print runs) combined in PSA 8.
While it’s not a perfect comparison, there’s no way pokemon/yugioh are PSA’s main grading audience.
Think of Michael Jordan like the 1st edition base set Charizard. Not incredibly rare like a trophy card but high demand. The market is way larger in sports cards so even though there are so many there are still enough buyers that auctions for it run like clockwork.
Price wise I’d say it is also on a similar trend as Charizard in the sense that it has been steadily increasing over the years.
Yes, Pokemon represents a very small amount of the total submissions but it’s growing and have always been taken seriously. The attention to detail should improve as interest will greatly increase due to new developments happening this year.
@smpratte If it seemed like I was unsympathetic to the task of labelling Pokemon cards for PSA that wasn’t what I intended. The reasons you stated with so much variation on Pokemon cards is actually exactly why I think they need someone there to oversee or control that.
