Note: this conversation branched off from this thread: Dilemma: Trophy card or a graded N64 game
Ukg is the only proper grading anything that anyone in the UK can think of. It sells basically the same as afa it’s that well regarded over here. If only there was a UK grading company for cards as highly regarded. No one seems to be able to make the breakthrough like Ukg.
exactly people have square heads. everything needs to be PSA. everything needs to be wata/VGA bull cr*p
A grading company is supposed to be a trusted third party company. Reputation is everything. If no one has heard of the company outside some small island nation, maybe it’s something to be a bit concerned about.
so if the whole of england trust UKG and others dont (not because the company did something but because it didnt expand beyong england) does that means the company is sketchy? not in my opinion
there is also a fairly new company for a year now called ESRGRADING its strictly based in asia so prolly not many will hear about it in europe or america does that mean it can’t be trusted? no in my opinion
No one used the word sketchy. If a company is not known to a market, then yes it can’t be trusted. Trust is based on reputation. Without a reputation, there is no trust.
You can make a personal choice to trust the company. Maybe it’s a great company with way better graders than any other company. But that doesn’t matter for a group of people that have never heard of the company before.
I can’t speak on behalf of the guy that suggested to recase it above. If you would have been fine with the company than I’d say to keep it as is. But that doesn’t change the fact that when I see UKG I think the same thing when I see KSA or MNT (Canadian grading companies). That is, it’s generally not trusted outside of a small group of people in a restricted geographic area. And if that doesn’t matter to you, then more power to you.
but if its trusted by canadian for example how can you generalize it as a “not trusted company” how many times psa did mistakes ? gave grades that dont deserve the card be it more than it deserves or less ? i have seen 8’s that should be 9’s or 10’s that should be 9’s so why is PSA trusted ? that is my point.
and yea i dont mind as long as the company is large and run long time enough. i dont collect for ROI
I think you’re confusing “not trusted” with “distrusted”. Someone who hasn’t heard of KSA is probably not going to put value in KSA’s opinion on a grade. In contrast, when I see a vendor at an event selling slabs from their own custom “grading company”, I actively distrust them - as in value them less than raw copies.
PSA is trusted because you can blindly buy a card and know what you’re getting the vast majority of the time. Exceptions exist, mistakes happen. But the fact that you know what a “PSA 8”/“PSA 9”/“PSA 10” should look like demonstrates why they are a trusted brand. Because their standard is known. I can look a the PSA 6 in your first post and know exactly the level of whitening it has and/or that it has an indent. I have no clue what a UKG 85 is going to look like, absolutely no idea.
Star wars and some of the other toys from my childhood is what I like most so I keep an eye on these quite a lot. Imo if a company outsells the major players in a country of 70 million it’s trusted.
but UKG is not 1 person privately opened a company 2 days ago that is the big difference
exactly it is not some private 1 man grading company that opened a week ago and no one ever heard about
My entire point is that if I’ve never heard of a company before, it might as well be 2 people in a garage. I’ve literally never heard of UKG and AFA until this topic. How am I expected to know they serve some niche geographically isolated population? By default they are not trusted.
i did research on UKG before i decided went to the website read onine etc.
whole of england would not trust a company working from a garage run by 2 man.
Why did you feel the need to do research on them? Perhaps you didn’t trust the company by default?
“didnt know them” is diffrent from “dont trust them”.
but i didnt reject them immediealty like you do just because i didnt hear about them before.
naturally it is a european version so mostly itll probably be graded by a european company.
how many people know IGS grading here ? i bet not many. yet i have been grading with them pokemon VHS for years
This is where we fundamentally disagree.
Not a single grading company is trusted, I might sound a bit arrogant, but for the cards I collect I know release and authenticity better than any grading company. When I buy a card I check the condition to see if it matches my standard.
well then we will agree to disagree 
Too true this
FYI AFA is a branch of the company CGA, the parent company of VGA. That’s the TL; DR, though TBH maybe this is TMI for a Pokemon forum.
This isn’t arrogant. It’s a low bar.
