Card grading

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Posted By: Bruce Moreland

That's certainly overwhelming, which is fine.

1) Writing. Let's take two cards. One is NM but has a wrinkle on the front. The other is NM but has the initials "KW" written on the back, neatly, in pencil.

Which of these is worse? The first one is VG/EX, no problem. The second one is VGEX or VG? You'd say VG -- it's a full grade worse. I can agree with that if necessary, but I'd love to hear what others have to say.

2) The VGEX card. I don't remember if it had layering or not. It was hard for me to find a scan of a VGEX '50 Bowman that wasn't VGEX due to wrinkling. EX is supposed to mean no wrinkles and square corners, but not much more than this. VGEX should be a little worse, but not really rounded off. I would have liked those corners to be a little better.

I should think about layering more and figure out how to handle it in there. It's certainly possible that I overgraded the card, although it's possible I wouldn't now, since I'm a little better than I used to be at mid- and low-grade.

3) Hager's book. I just read Purdy's article about Hager, so I have a little trouble sending that guy money. I should probably buy it anyway if it's the only credible standard.

4) Multiple problems. I don't have a system for this. Earlier standards counted "defects" and "micro-defects" and so on, but my fear here is that this leads to grading by calculator rather than by eye. I'd rather break the system and grade a card right than be forced to grade it wrong. I agree that this is where heavy subjectivity comes in.

Personally, I might allow one EX+ feature on an EXMT card, if the card is very nice in other ways. I typically include that in the narrative. If I start to get a long list of kind of bad EX features, I might call the card VGEX+, but if it has a couple of EX features, versus one EX feature and kind of EX+ otherwise, I think both are EX. There is room within a given grade for differences in eye appeal. Of course, having said that, doing it is always the problem.

5) Mint. I think that there is room for a mint grade, and gem mint is just mint with extra appeal. I don't think that mint itself has to be unreachable. Your description of mint is the same as others' description of gem mint, and I don't think that either is right. I'm not a big fan of gem mint, but I don't think that means perfection, and I've seen cards with this grade that I thought deserved it.

6) EX cards with wrinkles. I've seen plenty of PSA-5's with wrinkles on the back. I think this is fine from PSA -- people invariably go on in their descriptions about how the card was robbed, because they can't find the wrinkle. I won't call a raw card with a wrinkle on the back EX, because I think the risk of coming across someone who can't handle a wrinkle on anything better than VG/EX is too great.

PSA doesn't have to worry about getting a negative from an enraged bidder.

7) Point 3 in your "Problems in detail" section. In here you talk about a sort of linear downgrade per defect. This is never going to work. A print mark on a mint card destroys the card, but a print mark on an EX card is still EX. If someone wrote an expert system (an intelligent computer program) to grade a card, it wouldn't work by subtracting specific grade increments per defect, what it would have to do is figure in the major elements, in order to determine a basic grade range, and then use the minor elements to figure out where in the grade range the card is.

8) The hopelessness of the situation. I agree that it is hopeless. There are a great many cases where you can't distill a card down to just a grade, so I think that narrative is important. Even the cases where you get a card that's classic EXMT, the narrative should say that the card is classic EXMT.

I think that the professional graders should continue to grade cards and just give a number. This has use to the degree that you trust the grader to weigh the factors sensibly. I like the current 1-10 system, because you have a clue what you are getting (although sometimes you get a dud or a great card), and the cards are commoditized. I like the fact that if I get a PSA-7 on a card, buyers will trust this, they will pay through the nose for it (no guilt on my part for this, since the bidders set the price, and I've done my share of bidding as well), and they will be happy with what they get. I think this is most likely to happen if there is not too much distinction between grades. If you have five different shades of NM, I think that the buyers get split up too much.

What I'm getting at is how to grade cards for myself, in order to price them and give the buyer a clue as to what they are getting. If I have to explain each grade, that isn't a problem. I refuse to wimp out and just describe features and let the buyer determine the grade for themselves -- I think I can and should do better than that. I've always worried that the guys who don't give a final grade are going to end up sending me EX+ stuff when I want NM stuff.

Thanks for the comments,

bruce