Sorry for the confusing title, but what I mean is, can the PSA pop count of a card be so low that it loses appeal for collectors? I’m thinking of cards that are part of a mini-set for example. If you take a look at Gold Stars, the PSA 10 pop count of them is not too high, so they will always be somewhat scarce in the future. However, their pop count is also not so low that it becomes completely unrealistic to acquire them (at least from the current perspective). So if the pop count of the Gold Stars was dramatically lower, wouldn’t that hurt the popularity of them since only few people could get their hands on them? And if that’s the case, what is the optimal pop count for a card to reach maximum desirability?
back to the no rarities, I think they suffer from their low pop. But those have been discussed a lot on the fourum in the last few weeks, I cant think of any other examples from the top of my head.
If, with for example 1st edition neo genesis, they are all relatively acquirable but there are a few cards with a ridicously low pop (t17, slowking) I do not think it hurts the card, it might even help the card because of set collectors hyping up the card. If the entire set has got a low pop this set can lose visibility which can be bad for that set. (this might also be why I cant think of any examples other than no rarity base.)
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I’m a little confused by your question,if the pop is really low and the card is desirable people with pay a premium for it. People love the chase for hard to acquire cards like the t17 and torchic gold star. Also, people will try to grade their own copies of the card (assuming we are talking about set cards) in order to get a copy.
@thymeee, @swarm, to provide another example to make my point clearer, I just read about a comparison between snap cards and unikarp in the auction thread. So the unikarp has a similar market value to snap cards despite more copies being available, and one theory is that a low pop as that of the snap cards leads to obscurity, which leads to less market activity for that card and hence less value.
Or in a hypothetical scenario, would the gold stars have become as popular as they are now if all of them had a PSA 10 pop count of under 10?
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OK I get what you mean know now. Yes, a extremely low pop on a obscure card can have a decrease in collector interest.
For the question about the psa 10 pop of under 10 for gold stars it depends on the pops of the other grades. Are we amusing the population of the lower grades went down in the same proportion or they stayed the same. If they went down proportionally, I believe that the goldstars would be seen as pseudo-trophy cards due to the extremely low pop and would not have the same organic interest, but would have much higher prices. However, if the pops of the lower grades I would expect the price to be slightly higher than they are now with a large amount of collector interest and demand due to the ability for collectors to buy psa 9’s and other lower grades.
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There’s a huge assumption here that people are only interested in PSA 10s. When 10s are unrealistic, people look to 9s. When 9 are unrealistic, people look to 8s and will even do mixed grade sets. Pop doesn’t really even mean much in this context either. Things like 1st ed base are not low pop but are effectively out of reach for most people in PSA 10 and/or rarely available yet it is arguably the most “appealing” set in the hobby. T17 has a very low 10 pop and yet it is one of the most expensive Neo PSA 9 cards. Many of the most expensive sports cards have few to zero PSA 10s.
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