With all of the recent CGC changes, I have decided that I will be switching over to PSA for my non-error collection.
Things that made me switch:
- completely removing subgrades
- completely changing labels
- I prefer the new labels, but my entire collection matched before and I’m not going to spend hundreds of dollars to remove subgrades which I paid a premium for
- lack of faith that they won’t just change the labels again
- new labels mean it is essentially day one of a grading company in terms of the population of cards on the market with the new label
- lack of consistency among new labels (this has been covered extensively in this other topic)
I will update the original post as I start to switch slabs.
Math
I currently own 41 CGC slabs.
Assuming $30 a card ($15 grade fee + $15 subgrades), that means my collection is worth approximately $1230 in graded plastic.
If I were to submit those exact same cards today with their new grading fees/slabs it would only cost me $442.80 ($10.80 a card).
442.80/1230 = 0.36 or 36%, meaning the cost of the slabs in my collection dropped 64% overnight. I could grade 3x the amount of cards for that price.
If I were to reholder all of my cards then that would be $5*41 which would be $205.
$1230 (current cost) + $205 (reholder cost) = $1435 total spent on grading.
Now if we look at the cost of grading today compared to how much I would have to spend to make my collection match… 442.80/1435 = 0.308, or 30.8%. This would mean I would be losing just shy of 70% worth, even worse than the prior 64%.
-70%… Absolutely unacceptable.
And this number is actually even higher when you account for shipping…
Going forward
Since almost all of my graded collection is currently CGC 9 with subgrades, I think that I am going to sell all of my non-error cards at a premium since they have subgrades. Hopefully I will be able to make back most of my money, but I’m not counting on it. I’m not in a rush so I’ll see how it goes, but it will be a journey for sure.
I will be reholdering my errors with CGC because CGC actually recognizes them, but those are currently the only cards that I will be keeping with CGC. Future errors will also be submitted to CGC.
Overall
Overall this makes me pretty sad. I really liked CGC and supported them for a long time but my collection and goals have been drastically affected by their recent changes. Even if I bit the bullet and reholdered all of my cards, what’s to stop them from changing it again in the future? Their track record does not give me hope.
I am not trying to convince anyone to switch grading companies and I’m certainly not turning this into a CGC vs PSA thread. I’m sharing this with everyone so you can all see the thought process that I went through when deciding, and if anyone else is stuck in a similar situation this may give them some additional perspective.
Happy collecting everyone 