Advice on Early 70's sets

[steve B]

Some good points there. For "investment" I suppose I mean anything that isn't exceptionally nice. Investment to me means working most of the potential angles, including the registry crowd.

Personally I consider "mid grade" to be what's usually vg through vg-ex. So no creases but worn corners, and typical early 70's centering. Or maybe sharp corners and typical centering. That pretty much describes my whole collection as far as 70's goes. I know I have some worse and some better, but It's not something I worry about.
I only have a few graded cards, nearly all prewar, and nearly all ones I sent in. The few modern ones are from packs, I think a couple "edge graded" football and maybe one or two random graded baseball that came in a lot.

The grading is something I'm ambivalent about. I typically base my decisions on my own grading scale
Awful - trimmed, missing bits, writing, stains etc.
Not horrible- worn, maybe a couple creases.
Pretty good- no creases but not great corners.
Nice- decent corners and no creasing.
Really nice- sharp corners decent centering.
wow- nearly perfect

And I enjoy some of the written on cards as much as the nearly perfect ones.

I don't worry much about the cards matching the rest of a set either, but I know I'm a bit odd in that. (I did briefly consider trying to complete some set with a wax wrapper stain on each card, but that would take way more focus than I have)

Steve B

Originally Posted by betafolio2

Funny, but there are probably as many definitions for "mid grade" as there are baseball card collectors. Some would probably consider mid grade to be anything that doesn't warrant a PSA 7 or higher, while others might consider mid grade to mean cards that display obvious corner wear, perhaps a few light creases, some surface wear -- in other words, more like a PSA 4 or 5. I'm convinced that the average meaning of mid grade has tended to slide downward as PSA has created and then continued to feed the artificial appetite for super-high-end cards that qualify for PSA 9 or 10 status. I for one belong to the club of collectors who receive great joy in cracking cards out of their plastic prisons, so I'm obviously not hung up on a PSA number. My chief concern is how nice a card looks to my own eyes -- and how consistent it'll look alongside other cards in my set binders.