Are cards with older PSA cases worth less?
 

still kind of new to the grading thing, but figured i'd ask the experts here - are cards in older cases worth less money in your eyes? i'm constantly trying to determine market value and that's one thing i always wondered. like, why would a PSA 8 of the same exact card go for a lot more money than another one (barring some big difference with the actual card)?

I'd have to give a definitive yes to your overall question. However, there are caveats involved. You could always resubmit the card for reholdering (for whatever the fee is) and POOF!! now it's in a new holder and 'worth more.' Many claim that PSA's standards were lacking back then, so cards received higher grades than they should have and would these days. For me, personally, it seems PSA hammered so many undeserving cards with 'PD' qualifiers. They were certainly heavy-handed in that regard. The possible good news is, if a seller believes his card in an old slab is worth less (but looks pretty sweet to you), you may be able to pick it up at a bargain price.

In the world of coin collecting, older third-party slabs have become collectible themselves.

Collectors keep loving slabs. Third-party grading has brought enhanced transparency, liquidity and confidence to the rare coin market. Perhaps in recognition of this, collectors covet rare encapsulations from grading firms, especially Professional Coin Grading Service and Numismatic Guaranty Corp., and these unusual slabs have become collectibles in their own rights.

Complete article: How coin holders have become collectibles, Coin World, 10/25/16.

For those who collect plastic cases instead of cards, then i would guess the answer is...

Doug "none of my cards have plastic cases" Goodman

that's really the interesting thing about it - send the old slab to PSA and for $10, all is now new. it's all so bizarre. i've learned to be better about looking at the actual card vs the grade.

i have a few old SGC slabs of really nice cards, and was considering popping them out and re-submitting. not sure if that makes a lot of sense, but i do think some of them may be undergraded.

Really all depends on what the card or item is - grade, how the card looks, population. Let's not forget about the half grades as well, many of the older holders may not have been looked at for a bump in grade. Another factor someday with be if the card was the first card graded, or if the high grade is more important the first 9 or 10. Lot of different ways to look at this! In general though, many could be worth less depending how they may have graded earlier compared to today.

You also may want to switch this post to the main board that covers cards!

Happy Collecting!

Jimmy

As someone who has no experience submitting cards for grading, I am unfamiliar with how the process works. Are you saying that if you have a card slabbed by PSA, say 15 years ago, and graded an 8, that for nominal cost you can send the card back and it have it returned in their newest holder WITH NO LESS THAN THE SAME GRADE, regardless if the card by current grading standards merits that grade?

If that it how it works, and assuming the cost is truly nominal, why would a collector who is thinking of selling not do that? Or is the way the system works that in order to be re-slabbed at the same grade the card must by current grading standards deserve that grade? And if it does, is the fee nominal or would it be the same fee one would pay in submitting a raw card?

Much cheaper fees than ones being graded. Retains the cert number, so you can tell it's still an older grade though.
They used to reholder when you paid for a review (if you asked nicely), but they quit doing that a few years back. Cards reholdered at some levels now also get scanned and those images loaded onto psacard.com as part of the fee as well.

Plenty of reasons why people don't: expense, time lag, possibility of PSA saying the holder is cracked and has to be regraded. Some would also be worried about it getting damaged in PSA's hands or lost in the mail.

Add: very rare that PSA would downgrade a card during a reholder submission, it would have to be drastic like they see evidence of alteration, writing that didn't get a mark, or was actually counterfeit. But they'd also have to pay out on the grade guarantee.

So do you think that if Kendrick submitted the sheet-cut Honus Wagner to be re-holdered, PSA might assign it the proper grade of "A" :confused:

Nope; people who ask PSA that question get banned. Steve Sloan and Joe Orlando have a real bug in their butt about 00000001.

I wonder how the new management team (hopefully there'll be one in place soon) will respond to these justified, rational and inevitable inquiries?

I wonder if banning, canceling and censoring will be their "go to" protocol as well.

The first thing they should do is design a new flip. Then announce all cards graded before that flip does not qualify for the grade guarantee. Not fair for them to guarantee work they had nothing to do with.:)

That's a page out of the SGC book. Although if they did that, they wouldn't have any topcover of having to self-insure the grade guarantee with their progressive grading fees. Not that the market seems to care.

Their “standards” are still lacking. :cool:

It's not about the holder the card is in!!
 

It's about the card that's in the holder. The question and answer both serve to highlight the fact that 3rd party grading has been subject to levels of significant inconsistency. I recall early on getting some cards graded and comparing them to other cards of the same grade and seeing clear differences back when. I don't know whether PSA used to be lax or now they are too harsh, but grading today is definitely different.
It has been discussed multiple times on the boards - BUY THE CARD NOT THE HOLDER. There are over/under graded cards in old holders and in new ones. As a general rule I look more carefully at cards in older holders as there tend to be more that I find that imo I would call over graded.

Wouldn't they just send the submitter back to whoever they bought it from?

That way they can dodge responsibility, "review" the card and say it's fine and really have no responsibility.

Boy, would that be a fun class action unfair trade practices case to litigate. Kill your guarantee after people have paid you in reliance on it just to extract new fees from them...yeah, I am going to guess that the CU legal department would have kittens if anyone proposed it.

Of coarse not. That's just a gimmick to get people to resubmit. What a bunch of bologna.

Yeah, but the previous seller could tell them to pound sand, and PSA would have to pay out. Think of all the PSA 10 1986 Fleer Michael Jordans that Robert Block trimmed and got into PSA holders. Now that they're $750K cards, PSA has a much larger chance at having to pay out. I think just one of those would clear out their reserve. Wonder how their stock would react if 5-10 of the owners of Robert Block MJs sent them all back at the same time?

If the value goes down with old holders...Unless you are looking to sell in the near future, why in the heck would a anyone submit a card? Just wait until you want to sell it and choose the best TPG of that time. Arent cards graded with the same criteria 20, 10, and 5 years ago?

Nope, and the price increases for grading is nearly exponential as well. The EX of 15 years ago is the VG of now. Just two years ago you could submit cards at $6/card for bulk in 5 months, now it's $10-15/card and you wait 10 months to get them back.
But if your card value goes from $50 to $500 or $5000 which is now somewhat common in the current crazy bubble market, now you're paying a whole lot more than $15 a card; more like $75-200 to grade through PSA.

Then when the bubble bursts and the card values drop, you might have sunk more into the grading price than the card is worth. But FOMO/YOLO, ya know?

Any updates thoughts on this? Thanks

I’ve been seeing a lot of chatter and discussions on social media groups saying that overall, people want the newer slabs vs older slabs. So already people are wanting the newer cooler slabs which proves the point that todays slabs will take a back seat to the new slabs that gone out in 5,10,20 years! So the question now is why collect todays slabs when in the future they will be outdated much like the “older” slabs are today?

If the cert has no issues and I like the quality of the card I could care less if its in an old or new slab.

The card will ultimately determine if I proceed or not, not the age of the plastic that it resides in.

Certainly sellers love to highlight that their card is in a new holder, and therefore you should be willing to pay more for it. They also love to argue that the card is undergraded and therefore it’s worth a lot more.

And sometimes they are probably right, although I’ve never seen anyone ask less and highlight that their card is overgraded…

I think psa and sgc have gotten tougher on grading recently so a new cert number means that it passed an arguably tougher standard. That said, there are still plenty of old cert numbers that look like undergrades and new cert numbers that look like overgrades.

To me a PSA Slab Makes Zero Difference how old or how new it is. It’s about the card itself, each card is different regardless of the age of the holder.

I agree with all of the above statements 110% however eBay completed sales would disagree with us as buyers nowadays seem to want the newer slabs!

Maybe so but for me, the old slabs before the plastic redesign (maybe 2013/14) are oh so easy to open. Very very easy. Just a good fingernail will do it. Not saying the current slabs are foil proof but at least you need more then a good nail or dull butter knife.

Well it's an auction company so we're not "asking" any set amount, but we call out over-graded cards fairly regularly.

Good on you, mate!

“Generous” is the polite way to say it and I bought a card from Collector Connection that was refreshingly and accurately described as generously graded.

Slab
 

I agree. At least with the new slab you don't have to worry as much about a card being switched in the holder.

HA. I guess now I know what to look for. The terminology is a bit hilarious to me, but maybe I’m just easily amused.

IT's always nice to see a company describe a card correctly.

As to the OPs question, there used to be more lenient grading but I think you still have to take each card on its own...
.

Somewhere in the thread there was a comment that it would be rare for PSA to downgrade a card when it is sent in to be placed in a "modern/new" slab. If that's the case, then why would anybody give a crap about the age of the slab? The new buyer could submit it and pay the fees if a new slab means so much to them.

All these grading companies have to do is hire some smart hobby analyst (SHYT) that determines the new breed of hobbyist is an investor and then determine how to manipulate that idiot. The SHYT then hires a few E-trolls to post blogs and information about "new slabs" and how they're worth more than old slabs and voila - grading companies have a new revenue stream for re-submissions. The SHYT gets a cut and starts thinking about the next way to have these hobbyist put out more money to the TPGs.

Someone should start a thread about when they think this whole thing comes tumbling down. Probably never because the world is full of knuckleheads that will roll over for the next ploy. Is this really a hobby anymore? My hobby is reading these threads that say this is a hobby and wondering what flavor Kool-aid is being distributed these days.

Somewhere in the thread there was a comment that it would be rare for PSA to downgrade a card when it is sent in to be placed in a "modern/new" slab. If that's the case, then why would anybody give a crap about the age of the slab? The new buyer could submit it and pay the fees if a new slab means so much to them.

All these grading companies have to do is hire some smart hobby analyst (SHYT) that determines the new breed of hobbyist is an investor and then determine how to manipulate that idiot. The SHYT then hires a few E-trolls to post blogs and information about "new slabs" and how they're worth more than old slabs and voila - grading companies have a new revenue stream for re-submissions. The SHYT gets a cut and starts thinking about the next way to have these hobbyist put out more money to the TPGs.

Someone should start a thread about when they think this whole thing comes tumbling down. Probably never because the world is full of knuckleheads that will roll over for the next ploy. Is this really a hobby anymore? My hobby is reading these threads that say this is a hobby and wondering what flavor Kool-aid is being distributed these days.

To answer your question, sellers should give a crap about new vs old slabs because it makes a huge difference in final sale price. Bottom line is buyers want the new slab!

In regards to your question when will this be over? If the big card shows are any indication of the current state of the hobby then the answer is never! I say that because if you look at the bigger card shows, (at least the ones I’ve been too) graded cards are king. Graded cards filled every dealer showcase, every other person was carrying a pelican case full of graded cards, graded cards were being bought, sold and traded all over the place! There was no doubt to anyone in attendance that graded cards are here to stay! (And growing in popularity DAILY) I would say about 95% of the shows I attended were graded cards only!

Agreed.

I've been collecting data in an attempt to quantify this. It'll take a while for me to finish it (as I have little spare time), but what I've noticed is that it's really more the serial number than it is the holder itself (though they are highly correlated). The early serial numbers are almost all overgraded. There are exceptions obviously, as variance existed back then just as it does today, but the variance today is quite a bit wider than it was in the early days (which makes sense as they have a lot more graders today than they did back then). But the grade deltas aren't just 0.5 or 1 point off, they are often 2 full grades higher with early serials, and even sometimes upwards of 2.5 or 3 grades off (though that's rare). Putting a card like that into a new lighthouse slab might fool a few newer buyers, but it isn't going to fool the majority of collectors who are going to look at the card itself and make their own judgment.

I'm also working on a PSA serial number decoder algorithm to estimate when the card was graded. But cliff notes are that yes, early slabs/serials are absolutely worth less on average, and often times much, much less. This is more true for high-end cards than it is with set building commons since the set builders often care more about the grade than they do the card. But for guys like Ruth, Mantle, Mays, Jackie, Cobb, etc. it matters A LOT.

I think this just correlated generally - with definite exceptions - that an earlier cert number was a looser grading system than later cert numbers, particularly ones that start with a 6. Essentially people still pay for the card and not the holder but the more recent cert numbers tend to have nicer cards at the same
grade. Again, plenty of exceptions to the rule.

In Memory Lane’s Current Auction there are two 1953 Topps Cards for sale in PSA 8 grades with very old serial numbers. A 1953 Mantle and a Mays both are doing phenomenal so far, the Mays if it ended right now would be a new record sale for in a PSA 8 grade.
I’m going to stick with each card is different regardless of when it was graded.
Just my opinion. I guess a better question would be if one came up in an old serial number but the card looked great and you wanted the card for your collection would it matter to you as long as the card in your eye was graded properly? I would in a heartbeat, like the 53 Mays PSA 8 in the above auction.

Unless I’m mistaken, part of the fun with that 53T Mays PSA 8 is that it’s the first one to sell since the pandemic. So selling for a record price isn’t particularly noteworthy. But whether it sells for 3x, 5x, or 10x the previous price will certainly be noteworthy!

How can you tell from the serial number if a PSA card has been reslabbed? Is there a number that marks the line from old to new?

Old numbers (under about 25,000,000 and some starting with 30M, 50M, 90M) with a hologram or lighthouse style front flip have been reholdered. There are some differences in the flips and slabs that you can look at over time and figure it out.

No, they are not IMO. That is a new "fad" that certain collectors talk about. To me, I don't care if the card was graded 20 years ago or 1 day ago, I look at the card and make my own decision about whether I want it.

Any new updates?

IMO, I believe the true collector will always focus on the card rather than the grade, if graded. They will probably always have a couple of card projects going at the same time. For example I have been trying to complete a T206 back run
of McGraw glove, but the final 2 are proving elusive, and a card run of George Sisler. The collector will rarely, if ever, submit a raw card he loves for grading. Instead of looking for comps from VCP, the collector will be looking at as many examples of a card he seeks to draw comparisons before he pulls the trigger.

Any exception here if the collector decides it’s time to sell their collection to finance the collector’s retirement?

Or does a true collector sell at a below market price to avoid the taint of TPGs?

A true collector spends his waning years designing the mausoleum that will house his coffin, corpse, and collection of cards.