I’ve personally graded 95% of the cards in my collection and the other 5% are PSA 10s I’ve purchased because I either had difficulty finding mint raw versions to send in, or the price for the 10 was attractive enough to not worry about the hassle of finding raw and playing the PSA gamble.
When I first started collecting in 2018 I was binder only and was happy with NM cards. Then I bought my very first PSA 10, a CD Promo Charizard for $55 on ebay. Which led me to buying the Blastoise and Venusaur.
It was all downhill from there. At the time I started sending cards to PSA, 9s were often times neutral return or a loss, depending on the card. A lot of 1st ed holos (rocket, jungle, fossil) were around the $50 mark for PSA 9s at the time, depending on the card. So I’d be figuring out, is it worth it for me to send this card, pay a grading fee, and then try to sell as a 9. After 13% ebay/paypal and shipping should I just resell raw? I ended up not even grading a lot of NM WOTC which I regret, and all the 9s that came through were immediately sold to recoup capital.
Here are a few I sold in 2019 for $40-$60/ea because they weren’t 10s and I figured i’d be able to get better raw copies eventually…
I think this has been a very long winded way of saying, I hold 10s because my cost basis to get them has basically been raw value + bulk grading fees, and now that I have so many, I’ll hold any 9s I grade that I don’t think i’ll ever get again, but I don’t have any interest in purchasing 9s.
WOTC I do 9s for the reasons OP stated. They are old cards and even the 10s can have have issues we look past. I think 9s are neat without the price premium, and they are still quite rare.
Regarding anything more modern, 10s is the way to go if you want to maintain any semblance of rarity.
Humans and cpu assisted grading still has subjectivity involved. And it could be as simple as a ‘car(d) made on a friday’ kind of thing. Or after lunch. Or any seemingly extraneous factor that may or may not be caught to distinguish a 9 from 10.
9s are pack fresh cards, and frankly a lot of 8s are too. The perfect exemplar making it through the machines is 100% coincidental
I’m of the same opinion. That’s why I collect 9s and I sell 10s when I need quick bucks to buy the 9s I need (with obvious exceptions, but this is my way to do in general).
I agree with many of the points raised here and personally I do not observe a major difference between 9 and 10. I 100% agree with the above comment that the difference between 9 and 10 is just luck of having a card experience a ‘perfect’ journey through the printing machines. If you’re collecting for personal collection, I think PSA 9 is great. I am fine to admit most of my most prized collections are PSA 9 (Shadowless and No Symbol WOTC sets)
However if you are collecting as an investment to sell later, I am not sure if going for PSA 9 is the best choice with modern cards. If we look at the pop numbers of modern sets, there’s already a lot of PSA 10 in existence. Card printers are better, the print process is more consistent, and more people sleeve/care for their cards than they used too. As a result, I do not see a future where modern PSA 9 cards are worth much, just because PSA 10 will be relatively common. If you’re into cards as an investment, you probably should go PSA 10 on modern cards to maximize how much your collection will appreciate in value.
There should still be a market for 9s though that’s healthy. They just won’t gain as much marginally is the most likely scenario
