Strictly too PSA populations as BGS and CGC aren’t as wanted or collected than PSA from my understanding ,
Would population of a card matter too collectors still after all these years and so many cards sent into PSA with the huge boom of Pokémon go and 2020’s boom , as you see pop reports of cards that a lot of people love and want but now there’s hundreds and hundreds of 9’s and 10’s even !
I have been seeing even for Gold Star Rayquaza at it was at a 150 pop for a psa 9 around 2022 and now it recently too this date is at 211 pop for a psa 9 … that’s a pretty fast rate , at least for a gold star right ?
Do you think a graded population for a card in psa 9 or 10 really matters when it comes to value ?
As I mentioned there, I think the main piece of information you can get from the pop report is the 9/10 ratio, the rest of the information is often misleading or not informative
It’s a bit more nuanced than “yes” or “no.” Population size is half of the equation, and the other half is demand. If demand is sufficient, a huge population card (e.g., PSA 10 Moonbreon) will do just fine. Population matters for trophies and unique releases in my opinion (i.e., actually “rare” cards) but it doesn’t matter as much for high-demand set cards (i.e., often “scarce” cards but not necessarily rare).
Rarity means that the item is extremely difficult to source, but does not necessarily mean that it will be worth a lot of money. Scarcity means that the item is not available in sufficient quantities to meet demand. Most valuable Pokemon cards are not rare, but are scarce given the huge demand.
It depends. What it does to me is give a little insight into things like grading difficulty for certain cards/sets. For example, 1st Ed Base Set or other vintage sets with 100s or 1000s graded and many of them will have a low pop of 10s compared to the lower grades. This can tell you some things like how hard it is to grade a certain card on average and why the premiums may be as high as they are relative to other grades, etc.
With this said, many cards under 10 get cracked out for binder building or cross-grades or even re-grade attempts. So you can pretty much assume anything less than PSA 10 is an inaccurate population count for the majority of cards/sets.
Last thing is just the overall popularity. If a card is popular enough (Moonbreon, etc), even with 1000s of PSA 10s the supply continues to be absorbed and so the high supply doesn’t change things much due to the strong demand absorbing it. With certain vintage cards similar things can happen with the lower grades over time, like a 1st Ed Base Charizard that gets absorbed even in the lowest PSA grades. So overall, the population can only tell you so much with regards to value or rarity. What is more important to me is the actual card itself and how it fits into the market and less about the population reports.
Can you explain this further, in which way does it matter? For most cards that are extremely limited in number, the distribution method is known and that can be informative. What does the pop number add to that? In fact, the pop could be actively misleading. For example, the PSA pop for Ishihara GX is ignorant to the 11 that CGC just graded.
I will add the caveat that there are some set cards in which the pop matters just because the cards are so incredibly difficult to grade (e.g. Typhlosion 17).
It gives some understanding as to the general condition of the population of rare cards. For example, let’s suppose that the PSA graded Unikarps were almost all PSA 4, 5, 6, 7 with no mint or higher grades.
This would tell me two things:
A mint grade (if/when it shows up) should be worth a major premium beyond what is expected because the card may be legitimately difficult to find in mint condition.
I may want to purchase a raw copy of the card because it will be about the same condition as the graded population. This may end up saving me money as people tend to ask a premium for cards in any grade.
That said, I agree that the pop reports can be misleading, like you mentioned. This is just an example of how it would inform my buying behavior.
I guess I would distinguish information in the form of “population” and “grading difficulty”. I think everyone can acknowledge the distribution of the grades can be informative, as I mentioned in my first post (9/10 are the only two relevant grades for many cards in pokemon). But I think “population” meaning the actual number graded is often what people are using to make inferences, like in the OP. Personally I think this type of analysis will actually be misleading more than it is useful.
I think it’s helpful to know the population of rare cards because it can inform collecting goals.
For example, I’ll never own a 2001 TMB Tropical Wind #008/P because only 4 have ever been graded by PSA. But knowing that 95 1999 TMB Tropical Winds exist in a PSA grade is helpful and can push me in that direction.
In other words, it provides some context to the achievability of collecting rare cards.
I think it’s an oddity for sure. Low pop doesn’t mean anything. With this attempt to grade every card featuring Raichu as mint I’ve got some single figure pop cards but that’s just because nobody wants to grade those particular cards.
I’m in a grading middleman group and there’s a signing by one of the pokemon voice actors coming up and people are being secretive about what cards they are going to submit because they want low pop. That’s even more silly because the company only offers dual grading of both the auto and the card. So you might have an auto graded as an 8 and a card graded as a 6 at pop 1 - is that reason to celebrate? Probably not if you want any value.
But I can totally see why it’s a bit of a thrill. The whole thing is just a bit daft. I have a pop 1 card that will be pop 1 forever because PSA wrongly graded a reverse holo as a holo. So it’s sat on its own in the pop report. It’s just silly more than anything.
I actually think you are biased by external knowledge here. You know the 008/P is hard to get because of the extremely limited number of people that it was given to. The pop just supports what you already know.
If I told you mystery card X had a pop of 7 and mystery card Y had a pop of 4, what can you infer from that?
There are plenty of trophy-adjacent cards where I have no clue what their release was or suspected population numbers were. The pop report helps me even when I have no external knowledge.
And to that extent, it would help people with zero knowledge of those cards even more.
Is the pop report perfect? No. Can it be manipulated by sellers or misconstrued by buyers? Yes. But I do think there is some value in it when you have a little knowledge in the area to provide context.
Sure, a smart person would look up the release information and estimate a population number from that. But not everyone has the knowledge or time to do so.
Population reports are a tool that let you see how many times a card has been submitted. They don’t tell you if a card has been resubmitted or cracked or burned in a fire unless someone goes out of their way to let the company know.
If you want a complete picture of value you have to look at many factors and use many tools. When you buy a vehicle do you look at how many were manufactured or do you look more at condition, similar sales, scarcity, etc? The same thing applies to cards
So I’m wondering , as I am sure the POP report for the 1st edition Charizard is most likely not accurate , I am thinking maybe the pop report for Gold star Rayquaza is as well possibly ? Or maybe not since there rarer than the 1st Ed Charizard and much harder too grade from what I am hearing
Agreed. I think using the POP report is a more accessible and seemingly “informative” tool, but while information is always helpful, it’s not necessarily interpreted the correct way, and may not provide anything useful compared to information about the actual release.
I’ve come to see POP as providing information about the popularity of a card. Within similar releases, we can see how many have been graded compared to its siblings… Is this helpful? IDK. Just more information to try to counteract (or bolster, unfortunately) our own confirmation bias.
I DO think POP has been a great tool to douse my excitement for mint copies of graded modern cards, over the last few years.
But knowing that 95 1999 TMB Tropical Winds exist in a PSA grade is helpful and can push me in that direction.
