Posted By:
warshawlawhow many times that card has crossed that company's threshhold. Whether a card crosses that company's path is the result of many factors that have nothing to do with scarcity per se:
1. Read a bit on this board and it is apparent that most advanced collectors either dislike grading services or dislike specific grading services and refuse to use them. No card I own will ever again make its way from me into a PSA slab unless things radically change over there. Lots of others with much better collections than mine feel the same way about PSA, GAI or slabbers in general.
2. A lot of people refuse to slab cards they have no intention of selling because they view the expenditure as unnecessary, especially when it comes to big ticket cards that have to be graded in expensive tiers.
3. Many people I've discussed this issue with agree with me that if they cannot realistically hope to finish a graded set, they see no point to slabbing commons from that set. People who think that a common is a rarity just because there are only a few specimens in a slab are deluding themselves. It may be, it may not be, but the pop report does not prove anything.
The only sound conclusion that can be drawn from what we all know to be true is that there is a big population of cards sitting out there that will never be reflected in the population reports of "X" slabber. Now, if you want to use the population figures as indicators of scarcity, that is your right, but arguing that a low population report figure = scarcity is simply not supported by the facts.