Money in the hobby

[MattyC]

Originally Posted by Dpeck100

In recent years there has been a movement towards mid grade cards with great eye appeal. These are obviously perfect cards for collectors wanting to enjoy the cards and have a reasonably nice card to look at but make no mistake about it the investment potential is in higher grades.

There is nothing wrong with being average or owning average cards but the desire to be the best or own the best isn't going anywhere.

Define "average" and "best." And furthermore, who gets to define what's best?

If you want to think it's PSA, which is essentially some card grader, that's certainly your choice and to be respected as such. And perhaps a good amount of the time an individual collector shopping for what he subjectively thinks is best will agree with what the grader said. Yet let's not lose sight of the fact that the grading rules were arbitrarily codified by the TPGs, and are also subjectively enforced. Personally, I think each collector gets to decide ultimately what's the best card with his own two eyes.

I've seen plenty of cards in "average" grade that, to my eye, blow away another card with a 9 or 10 sticker on it. Now you may say that the card with the 9 or 10 is "best" because it sells for more money, and that's cool if money is your judgement criteria— yet a collector looking for aesthetic beauty to their eye uses that as their criteria. So one guy's "best" might not be PSA's "best," or the next guy's "best." No one's right and no one's wrong. Let's just not sweepingly impose a definition of such a key term on everyone in the same hobby. We may all collect cards, but we may not all necessarily kowtow to what some grader says, and we may not use price realized upon sale as the key determinant of what is "best."

I also wouldn't equate owning a card in an "average" grade with being average, as you did above. Nor would I equate being the best with owning the card that sells for the most or has the highest sticker grade. For example, there are cards with '9' and '10' on the sticker that I can afford, yet I can honestly say if I choose them over another card in lower grade that looks better to my eye and costs me less to boot, I'd feel more like a fool than the "best."