So, I bought this card for about 90 euro. The card is pretty much flawless, so I couldn´t resist. I get that these photo´s aren´t enough to really determine that, but yeah, it´s really clean.
It seems like PSA really starded grading hard. I´m kind of in the middle of if this is a good thing or not. Some of my cards that I think should have gotten 10´s, got 9´s, but it also means I can buy cards like these for a lot less.
It sometimes feels a bit weird to see a very clean card as a 9, but it also makes sense that they would want to keep the Gem Mint label for ´perfect´ cards.
Honestly I think the 13xx and 14xx 9s are a breath of fresh air for collectors. Typically really beautiful cards for 1/30th the price of 10s. I feel the same way for CGC 10s. I like them both a lot.
And it makes PSA 10 prices all the more irrational (or at least for the 99% of vintage pokemon PSA 10s that aren’t 13xx or 14xx cert).
Purely in terms of condition, if you buy like 5 new cert PSA 9s of a given card, I suspect you’ll pretty reliably get at least one that’s stronger than the average PSA 10 that was graded before like a year ago.
CGC has tightened up, too. I’ve been pretty consistently happy with 6xx cert CGC 10s, whereas I was only maybe content with ~30-40% of the 4xx cert CGC 10s (content meaning that I was very confident, after examining the card in person, that it was genuinely mint).
And dare I say that I even have been happy with many of the newer CGC 9s lol. That shift has been even more significant, because CGC 9s used to be a total mess (basically only indicated that the card was between PSA 6-9, with roughly equal odds of each, IME).
At the end of the day, though, buy the card…I have weak and strong examples from every cert era at this point.
Yeah, that’s why I said 99%, but maybe 99.99% is more accurate lol.
I’d be very curious to hear vintage PSA 10 collectors chime in on this. Do PSA 10 collectors realize that if they cracked and regraded with PSA their entire collection that the majority (if not the vast majority) of cards won’t regrade a PSA 10?
Does it not give people pause that the value of their “collection” is so reliant on the value the market places on a grade that usually can’t even be reproduced at all, let alone reproduced reliably?
I think it was PFM who made this (or a very similar) point originally, and it’s what convinced me to switch away from collecting PSA 10s.
Not a lot, that´s for sure. It depends on what you call vintage. There´s some M Rayquaza´s from XY, but when you go older it becomes very rare.
I mostly have PSA 9´s, but I do find satisfaction in the few PSA 10´s I have, even if the card is less crisp than one would imagine. The highest grade has become a commodity of it´s own, even if true collectors usually don´t like this.
I strongly disagree that they’ve ‘upped their game’. I got a sub back today that had multiple mint, new back Japanese cards graded 7s and 8s, while other copies of the same card, in the same condition, got 9s and 10s. Ordinarily I’d put this down to having missed some damage but the rate at which this nonsense is happening is too great.
Harshness is one aspect, which I agree is tougher now than even a year or two ago, but the biggest frustration is the sheer inconsistency. Great news though, you can send them thousands more dollars and try again
Can’t accurately grade cards, and when they do they help themselves to 10% of the card’s value Biblical levels of greed by the current ownership.
Just like during CGC blue label 38xxx era, those cards being undergraded, the new PSA 13xxx/14xxx/15xxx are also undergraded. Ive been buying undergraded psa 9’s lately to stock up for future regrades. Cards that are flawless.
Some years companies grade super easy, others hard. It’s cyclical.
I also have a theory that graders are so used to seeing thousands of modern pack fresh cards a day that when they see a vintage card that has a different material, surface, cut, but still flawless they undergrade it because they are just swane by modern quality. I think they are treating vintage psa 10’s like giving out a black label, extremely rare/hard
I agree, a lot of 13x-15x 9’s look like their typical 10’s and a lot of 8’s look like 9’s. Definitely some opportunities for regrades when they come back to ‘normal’ eventually!
Thought about that as well. Not planning to do that right away, but there´s something cool about buying a seemingly perfect card for the price of a raw copy.
Biblical levels of greed by the current ownership.