What is it, exactly, about grading?

[Archive]

Posted By: steve yawitz

I don't know that I'm necessarily anti-grading, but I generally no longer find it worth it for my collecting style. To try to keep a long, convoluted story short, I guess I've made a few realizations over the last year.

One - and this may not pertain as much to this forum since most of us aren't collecting cards at the high end of the scale - is that the premiums paid for cards in x condition over x-1 condition are insane given the often negligible difference in actual condition between the cards. I basically reached a point where it seemed foolish to continue collecting high-grade postwar stuff.

Perhaps closer to our prewar hearts is the fact that there's much greater variability within a given grade when you're at the lower end of the scale, which is prety much what I now exclusively collect. I've bought a bunch of 3's and 4's that I have quickly resold because the image looked like dump. I suppose these cards still meet PSA's criteria for their given grades, but not my eye appeal standards. I'll take a card with nuke-yoo-ler color and dead-on registration even if it would otherwise be a 2 over many of the 4's I've handled. Like some of us said on Gilbert's thread, ultimately one has to trust his or her own eye.

Finally, I'm simply no longer as confident in graded cards as I used to be. Whether it's trimmed or altered cards slipping by, tales of people spinning the Wheel of Crack 'N' Resubmit time and time again on the same card, scandalously overgraded cards, or boneheaded label errors (which suggest the possibility of a lack of attention to detail in other aspects of the enterprise), the difference in my confidence levels between buying graded and buying raw has narrowed considerably.

On the flipside, I think some of the benefits of grading are overstated, especially the protection issue. I'm hardly the most deft person in the world, but I swear that PSA has inflicted more damage to my cards than I have over the last half dozen years. Yeah, the cards are probably safe once they're slabbed, but there's a small but real element of risk associated with submitting cards.

I'm sure I'll still buy graded cards when it comes to making major purchases, but for the great majority of my run-of-the-mill purchases, it just isn't worth paying that much of a premium. And I can't see myself submitting that many more either. Given a choice between submitting two or three cards or picking up a new T206 common, I'll now take the latter almost every time.

Oh yeah: It's not like I'm fondling my raw cards on a daily basis or anything, but there's something really cool about truly handling old cardboard. Not only that, but it's a heckuva lot easier to flip through a stack of Card Savers to view my cards than to lug around a huge box of slabs. In my more cynical moments as a graded card collector, I felt not like a cert collector but a scan collector.