Everything You Need to Know About Card Grading
A little over two weeks ago, the company GameStop announced that it would begin to purchase graded trading cards - PSA graded, specifically - so long as they were at least rated an 8/10 on the overall condition scale. Additionally, the company added a pricing caveat - while card purchase prices would be based on the market value, the company would have a price ceiling of $500. So no, GameStop certainly won't be buying the One of One Ring any time soon.
Caveats and price restrictions aside, this announcement has brought some renewed attention (and questions) to the world of card grading. So, in this article, we’re going to tackle the basics: what is card grading; why would someone grade a card; and what are the premier services for it?
What is Card Grading?
To put it simply, card grading is the practice of having a professional service authenticate a card and certify its physical condition so as to remove as much ambiguity as possible. If you’ve ever taken a look at the TCGPlayer Condition Guide, you’ll notice that each condition is listed as a spectrum. Qualitative words like “minimal,” “major,” and “variety” do a pretty good job of narrowing down the classifications for card condition, but it’s far from an exact science. Card grading brings this qualitative practice as close to a quantitative one as is possible, using exact measurements and tolerances when determining ranks along a 1-10 scale.
Speaking of scales, card grading services often get even more detailed with their rankings by including subgrades, with the industry standards being edges, corners, surface, and centering. Each of these subgrades is pretty self-explanatory, but centering can be a bit trickier to understand for the newest of card graders, so we’ll dig into that one.
Unlike the other three, which are all primarily based on extraneous events in the history of a card (i.e. things that happened to it, like getting scuffed or bent), centering is foundational to how the card was made - you can open a card from a pack and then scratch it, but you can’t open a card and then recenter it. The reason this matters is because it puts a floor in a card’s grade - for most grading services, the overall grade can be no higher than slightly above the lowest subgrade, with the tolerance depending on the service. So, if a pack fresh card is all 10s but has a 7 center, then that card isn’t going to be graded as a 10.
This brings us back to the fundamental difference between calling a card mint and calling it a graded 10: transferability. There are plenty of pack-fresh cards out there being opened every day, but grading a card takes that general quality and applies a much more granular approach.
How Are Cards Graded?
So, now that we know what card grading is, how is it done? Overall, three companies manage the majority of the grading services marketplace: PSA, Beckett Collectibles, and the newcomer out of the big three, CGC.
As far as Magic is concerned, PSA and Beckett have the longest history grading cards and as such have earned a solid reputation - meaning that they are still the primary go-to for most collectors. That being said, CGC is growing in popularity and, as such, reputation, primarily because of their attempt at cutting down on the time lag that comes with grading.
On the card owner end, sending in a card to be graded isn’t the biggest hassle in the world; package it up nicely, send in a report to the grading company at hand so they can anticipate your order, and voila - you’re good to go. The problem, however, is that grading can take a long time. The cheapest option for card grading via Beckett, for example, takes a minimum of 45 days, and if you want that cut down to less than a week then you’ll have to pay almost ten times as much, with a very similar case coming out of PSA (65 day minimum for $25 vs five days for $150). CGC, meanwhile, has a similar pricing and timing structure as PSA and Beckett but with one very attractive exception: a $50 per card service with a three-day turnaround time.
Why Grade Cards?
We know what card grading is and how it's done, but why would a person want to do it in the first place? After all, you are paying money just to have someone look at a card you already own, right? Well, like I hinted at earlier in the section on centering, it all comes down to rarity.
Overall, there are three primary classes of cards that people get graded in the Magic world: Reserved List cards, old and iconic cards, and specialty prints (by which I mean serialized cards and artist-proofs, among other oddities). The reason for this is that getting a high grade on a card in any of these three groups is the best way to attest to it as being even rarer than the base card normally is. Just think - of all the
This rarity tracks directly over to price, and it's the reason that less-valuable cards are often graded with longer wait times (so as to cut down on the grading cost). A pristine graded
Wrap Up
With all this pricing and grading information, what’s a collector to do? Well, it all comes down to what your goal is. For large orders with less-valuable cards, then odds are the best option is to pay the lowest prices and simply wait. You’ll probably be paying $15-$20 a card here, so think about what your return expectation is if you luck out and hit a high grade. For expensive cards and smaller orders, then special attentiveness (i.e. a higher service fee and a shorter turnaround) is often the go-to. Afterall, if it's your favorite card that you’re sending in, the extra few bucks to get it back all the sooner might just be worth it.
Further Reading:
Harvey McGuinness is a student at Johns Hopkins University who has been playing Magic since the release of Return to Ravnica. After spending a few years in the Legacy arena bouncing between Miracles and other blue-white control shells, he now spends his time enjoying Magic through CEDH games and understanding the finance perspective. He also writes for the Commander's Herald.
