I would rather have the PSA 10 1st edition Zard over all of that. Way less storage space would be needed.
Are you trying to bait me? If so, it’s working 
I am finding it hard to see where you see the flaw in my analogy since you’re basically hitting the point I was trying to make. In the world of PSA card collecting, a complete 10 set is the absolute highest accolade. Nobody has to externally validate it. It stands on its own merit as the highest (literally) graded set any human can collect on Earth.
My point was that psychologically, 10 sets are much more satisfying because (in theory) you cannot do any better. Because of this, people are willing to pay more for the psychological comfort of having the 10s and the people with the deepest pockets that not settle for anything other than “best of the best” will be competing for 10s. This, at least partially, accounts for the big difference in price between a 9.5 in a 9 case and a 9.5 in a 10 case, as per the original topic.
But yeah, at a certain level of nuance the analogy will break down… just like every other analogy. I wouldn’t say it’s “awful” 
With regards to your opinion on 9s, I fully agree. That’s why the large majority of my cards in my collection are 9s as well.
I guess we can agree to disagree on the 10’s. PSA is the external validation themselves I was talking about. And they are a distant second to BGS 10’s which are distant from BGS 10 black label which again aren’t even themselves truly perfect cards.
The data will never exist but I would love to see the returns on someone submitting for review 100 PSA 10’s chosen at random. I’d bet people would be fairly shocked how many came back 9’s or less. Back to your analogy, often times a PSA 10 is exactly like climbing 98% of Everest and turning back or climbing 95% of it and taking a cable car the rest of the way. Hell sometimes it is even just looking through a telescope at the peak from the base lodge. I know it’s a minority opinion here and it may sound like I am trying to state it as fact though I’m not. I mean I’m glad the market values 10’s as they do because it allows me to collect 9’s the way I do very affordably. I just don’t think I’ll ever fully wrap my head around it and that’s perfectly fine too.
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I’m looking to submit about a 35-40 card bulk submission to PSA. I could toss in some pack fresh base set unlimited commons to get to 50 cards. The grading fees would end up being the same either way, but just a longer turnaround time. We could see the grades and then I could crack and resubmit again and compare grades. Only problem is that it would probably take a year to get the data and the sample size would be small. Might not be worth it.
This is a very interesting topic.
I have absolutely no problem with the price difference, as it’s like that for any collectables but you guys are spot on. Grading is way too subjective.
I hope that one day grading becomes automated. The technology is already there. It probably would take 5-10 seconds to accurately scan and grade a card on a 100 point scale within maybe 1-2% error margin tbh.
At the very least, I’d like PSA to give some subgrades. They don’t have to put them on the label, but one should have a right to know why their item received x grade. It would also be easier to get compensated if they make a mistake. If they give you a 10 surface subgrade and there’s a dent/crease/scratch, there’s just no way they could get away with it.
@charizandrew it will never happen because 1. it costs too much time and money to be worth it, especially when you consider the fact that some of the 10’s you crack aren’t going to come back 10’s again. 2. for every card that dropped lower than a 10 you would be subject to the suspicion that you damaged the cards upon cracking which is a valid concern.
I guess the data does actually exist only it is internal to PSA. They say that every card is seen by two graders and only when they agree on the grade the card gets that grade. If they don’t then it goes to a tiebreaker grader. It would be interesting to see what percent of 10’s need that tiebreaker grader. That would tell you a lot right there.To go further with it… if PSA were to take X amount of cards daily/monthly and pass them through every grader in the building it would be interesting to have the raw data from that experiment to play around with. Though given their unprecedented backlogs its never gonna happen and seeing some of the accidents that get into PSA 10 cases I question how two industry leading professional graders can miss something so blatant.
You’re right. All the data we would need is already collected during the grading process. I would love to see how many times a tiebreaker grader is needed on a 10.
Also, I’m assuming 10/9 splits that need a tiebreaker. But I’m sure there are some cases with a 2 grade split such as 10/8 or 9/7.