So to you, “near perfect…” means “NM/M”? Hmmmm…gentlemen, I think we found the problem;)
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Honestly I’ve had a lot of luck with “local” sports card stores.
One other thing that should be mentioned (that I don’t believe has been yet): there are rarely arbitrage opportunities like this in markets as active as this. If PSA 9/10 quality raw cards could be reliably and readily acquired, there would be little (if any) difference between the price of raw and graded cards. The reality is that PSA 9/10 cards carry a premium precisely because of what the OP has observed. There’s a reason why nobody gives two shits about PSA 9/10 MTG cards (or ones printed after 1993/94, at least) – because anyone can easily acquire raw pack fresh copies of a card. If I want a pack-fresh mint raw copy of any post-1994 card, I could go and purchase one right now. Perhaps I’d pay slightly above market price since I’d be limited to certain vendors, but I could reliably do this and likely only pay marginally more (if more at all). In Pokemon, the price gap between PSA 9/10 graded cards and raw cards should make it obvious that there’s not going to be an opportunity like this. After all, why would anyone pay $1000 for a PSA 10 graded card if they could just purchase a raw one for less and grade it themselves? I don’t believe the Pokemon market is quite as efficient or optimized as it could be – so I do believe there is some opportunity for those with the right knowledge and experience. But certainly nothing as easy and obvious as what the OP is hoping to do.
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So you are “that” guy
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Hi @kingboo64, depending on where you’re based, you can try to pick up some locally as well. Are you near any local game stores (LGS)? I’m from a small country where you’d expect all of the supply for vintage cards to be bought up, but there are still people around who have these cards lying around. Notably, they’d be from Base unlimited onwards - at least where I’m from, since 1st ed/shadowless didn’t make it to Asia.
Just from my experience - my LGS mostly does MTG, but people come by here and there to try to sell the shop some pokemon cards that they didn’t know had value, alongside with their MTG collections. It’s a mixed bag but I picked up a couple of nice ungraded blastoise(s) that way.
Last I heard PSA 9s and 10s sound reasonable getting what you’re looking for, maybe try those?
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I have actually had some success buying EX stuff from STFGaming. But yeah. His listing practices aren’t the best. For example, if he has five of a particular holo card, he’ll just list it as a quantity of five and put up front and back photos of one card, so it’s hard to know the exact condition of the card you are receiving. I understand that vendors who have thousands and thousands of listings don’t have the time to take photos of every single card, but when it comes to valuable cards, you should have specific photos.
You’re also dead on about him with offers. You can make an offer within 5-10 percent of his list price and he’ll just decline and increase the price, as you said. I’m not even sure why he includes best offer on his listings.
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Yeah, I’ve gotten a handful of nice cards from him. I still occasionally order from him if the price is good enough to make the risk worth it. I think he includes the best offer option as a way to receive alerts if the price of a card has increased a lot. Like he’ll list a card that’s worth $25 at $40. If someone offers him $35 for it, he now knows the card is increasing in value so he makes it $60. It’s like a reverse Dutch auction.
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