3-5’s usually end up in binders. There are some people who go for all grades of a card, usually something more popular like base Blastoise or Charizard.
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Thanks for the response! That makes a lot of sense for them to end up in binders.
Which then still leaves me wondering - what exactly differentiates a 3 from a 4, or a 5 from a 6, etc?
The meaning of the intermediary grades are a bit nebulous to me. I think a scale from 1-5 would make the number system feel a bit more meaningful. We’re definitely past the point of no return for this though…
Anyways, I await the day that PSA 11 becomes a thing
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XY sucks. The game engine is slow, the models are bland, there’s a lot of added on frills that are just filler. Team Flare looks stupid. (Stupider than Team Galactic, who don’t seem too out of place for a campy space cult.) There are some very cool things about the game– I like AZ, and I like the split concept of life and death in a Pokemon game. Mega evolutions are fine. Coming from gen five, they had big shoes to fill… and do not live up to the expectation. I was so excited when my grandpa preordered it for me as a kid and was thoroughly disappointed a couple years later, when I finally got a 3DS to play it on. ORAS is cool, but suffers from the same engine & model problems that XY have. I like Zinnia and the Delta Episode. The online framework (PSS) was very cool and Pokemon really hasn’t topped it since gen six.
Speaking of gen five, a lot of the newfound hype around it seems inauthentic. I remember when the Unova games came out and they were universally panned by older fans. I was a terminally online kid at that age and just remember the huge amount of bashing that came from most fan sites and forums. Gen 3 remakes would have been better on its engine.
SM story is better than USUM story, especially for someone like me who enjoys Gladion. The battle UI of USUM is very boring compared to SM. Z-moves are easily the most forgettable gimmicks. Festival plaza sucked compared to the PSS.
I have over 255 hours in LGPE. I liked those games.
SWSH are pretty fun in retrospect. The gym battles are very hype and despite Dexit, there’s a fun variety of teams that can be put together over the campaign. Not a huge fan of the post game with those two idiots, however, and I felt like they could do a lot better with the lore they had been halfheartedly setting up through the game. Bede’s arc is one of my favorite in modern Pokemon games. The DLC is pretty okay too, with Crown Tundra being the most fun aspect of the game and the most interesting story. Isle of Armor is… eh? Not a huge fan of the legendary wolves. Y-comm is very unreliable and sucks.
Legends Arceus is very cool in theory. In practice, I did not enjoy it as much as I wanted to. The Pokemon available become extremely repetitive.
Here comes the possibly more unpopular opinion: I very much liked SV. I have played through the campaign 5 times. 4 on first-generation Switches, and once on my Switch 2. The game is phenomenal on Switch 2. Miraidon/Koraidon are very cool legendaries. The amount of Pokemon in the game is very cool. You can switch up your team frequently without much loss. The game is ‘easier,’ in a lot of aspects (egg moves and mirror herb, held items being readily available for purchase, grinding isn’t as tedious) but the difficulty in the DLC more than makes up for it. Without DLC, the game is a bit bland near the end, however. So prepare shelling out an extra 30 dollars. The only thing I can really criticize is how stupid and low effort the sandwich making game is. The budget for that was like literally 3 cents. Online connections kind of suck, but the raids they’ve done have been very fun and challenging. Also much better on Switch 2.
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The qualitative aspects are quantified to make it more digestible. Every grading company publishes their grading criteria to translate the quantitative grade to the qualitative aspects of the card.
You might be on to something here. The latter half of the scale is a dice roll for me. I just keep my 3s-5s close to my heart 
.
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You know what, fair.
I’m aware that there is a criteria, after all the numbers are not arbitrary, but the way that the overall score is typically presented and focused on by collectors (or probably moreso investors) rubs me the wrong way.
I do appreciate slabs that show the breakdown of a score on the front of the label but this is neither the default nor the norm.
My attitudes towards slabs would probably change if we normalized showing off the 4s and 5s instead of the 10s.
Okay, I’m done beating the dead horse - thanks for humoring me!
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In due time.
Us Pokemon collectors still don’t realize how spoiled we are at the moment. Myself included
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I picked up an ARS slab recently (and even though it was a 10+ 
…), I really liked how they put the score at the back. That would go a long way I think in putting the emphasis on the card rather than the score, which is how it should be ideally. I think it’s tough for others to adopt this model because they are incentivized on getting ppl to fixate on the score, but I think there’s room for a player in the non-Japanese market to do this too and differentiate themselves…
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