Hey all, I mentioned a few months ago that I was doing some experiments with TAG grading to see how they measured up against PSA and other grading companies. This post will show my results. I would like to make it clear at the start of this that I have no affiliation with either PSA or TAG and this is just a factual review of the crossover results.
I have submitted 100 raw cards and 15 cards that were previously in PSA slabs. These are the 15 cards that were crossed over:
As you can see, every single card except for the Dark Blastoise either remained the same grade or increased in grade. What I found quite surprising was that some of the PSA 9 cards that became a TAG 10 were ranked very high in the TAG ranking system, for example the Mew EX is rank 18 out of 339 cards and the Charizard EX is rank 24 out of 686.
I had found from my first submission that TAG is harsh on centering & whitening along the corners/edges, but very lenient on surface defects. In my first submission I sent in a Base Set Mewtwo with a significant scratch/indent and it receieved a relatively high grade of 8.5.
Because of this, I deliberately made sure some of the cards I crossed over to TAG had surface defects or issues. The Masaki Machamp has a full roller mark across the card, the Magikarp had deep indents/scratching on the back and the Dark Blastoise had a crease along its edge.
Machamp:
Magikarp:
Blastoise:
The Machamp & Magikarp increased slightly by 0.5 of a grade whereas the Blastoise dropped from PSA 6 to TAG 5.
I cracked the Blastoise out of its TAG slab as I wanted one for a binder collection, this confirmed to me that the TAG slabs are very brittle and shatter very easily. When you crack a PSA slab apart it generally peels apart with little effort whereas the TAG slabs splinter and break off in chunks. This brittle property makes them easy to damage when dropped. One of the slabs I graded arrived to me broken, this has never happened to me with PSA and I have submitted over 5000 cards to them.
To my surprise the TAG slabs that I have listed on ebay have sold quickly and at the same price as PSA, this experiment has actually made some significant profit for me, I went into it expecting to lose money.
To conclude it seems like TAGs grading system is looser than PSA, I love the concept of AI grading but TAG has some glaring issues when it comes to surface defects and also their slabs durability. I do think they look the better than any other case and I was surprised at how big the market is for them despite only recently appearing on the scene, the reports are awesome although they dont always seem to make logical sense. A good example of this can be seen with this TAG 10 Bulbasaur Chrome card. It has a score of 950 and is graded Gem Mint (950) yet it has 22 listed defects in the report, how can a card have 22 defects and be a 10?
This was a lot of fun to do, I will probably try and crossover a few more cards with the aim of bumping up the grade to make a bit of profit. I will remain with PSA for my own collection. I would love to hear if anyone else has done anything like this and what your thoughts on it are.