Hello Friends,
As you may have guessed from the title, I have a few cards I’m going to be sending into PSA! MY question is, what’s every ones opinion on putting a minimum grade? Have you seen positive or negative results from it?
I have a card, that I believe fits barely within the PSA 10 range, as in the centering on the front and back barely meets the standard. What would you say is the best option when sending it in?
Thank you 
I personally like to use min grade, whenever I don’t I will get a bunch of 7s, 6s, and random 5s I don’t understand. When I use the min grade I may only get 1 card that doesnt reach the min grade set. I usually set it at 8 even if I think a card is worthy of a 10.
As for 1 card you are hoping for a 10 I don’t think it will help at all unless it actually deserves a 10.
I loved the minimum grade service.
When I submitted cards to PSA, I usually expected a specific grade. But when cards came back ungraded, I liked to inspect the card to see if there was a reason it didn’t hit that goal. This is much more difficult if the card is already encapsulated. If I still felt the card warranted a PSA 10, I could re-submit and PSA would evaluate the card without any biases (as opposed to submitting an encapsulated card for review). If I felt PSA was correct, I could either a) keep the card in a binder or b) sell and replace the card with a higher quality copy. Often times, the ungraded card was worth more than a PSA 8 or a PSA 9, even if the condition is identical. In my opinion, this is because ungraded cards have the potential to gain value when graded.
I agree with everything said here, but I personally don’t use the minimum grade service for a few reasons.
It deprives you of familiarity with lower PSA grades. Barring a mistake on PSA’s part, if a card grades lower than I expect it to I want to know why. By not placing a minimum grade I feel like I’m more familiar with the 7, 8, and 9 grades because I’ve seen more copies of them.
It’s an extra level of insurance for damage. If a card comes back graded a high grade (e.g. 8 or 9) but it’s significantly damaged, (as we have seen a few times) you can go through PSA and get some compensation. If it’s just “min grade” there’s really no way to prove the damage occurred at PSA.
I like getting all my cards back with grades. If I can’t score a 10 on a card, a 9 or an 8 will do fine as a placeholder in my collection. I don’t submit cards hoping for 9s or 8s most of the time, but I always get a few back per round. If it comes to it I can crack them out of the case if I think they’re really 10-worthy.
If you’re a highly experienced collector and you exclusively want high grade cards for your collection, the minimum grade service makes sense. If not, I wouldn’t recommend it.
Similar to fourthstar, I don’t like it and have never and will never use it. I pay $6-$20 for grading so for one thing I want to feel like something was done for my money. They supposedly grade these things in about 30 seconds and I don’t want to pay that much for a 30 second glance and then pop it back into my card saver. At least give me the fancy plastic and let me decide what to do with it from there. You can always crack out and regrade or review them down the line, you are paying the same thing, may as well have it end up in plastic. On top of that, I have had cards come back with damage in high grade cases (8/9/10) with huge edge dings/creases that PSA ended up paying me for under their grade guarantee. If they hadn’t been in cases, I would have been out those $$$.
Regarding the point that PSA will see the old grade if you don’t crack them out, isn’t that point moot?
What I suspect is that PSA receives ungraded/graded cards in an order, someone packs them out and enters them in their internal system with an internal ID and then those cards get randomly distributed between the Pokemon graders and then someone else encapsulates them.
If that’s true then the old grade has no influence whatsoever on the new grade, the graders wouldn’t even know that it was a card that came in for a regrading.
No, if you send a card in for review graders grade your card while it’s still encapsulated and make a decision on whether the grade should be raised. Only if they think the grade should be raised do they then take the card out of the case and put it in a new one.
In short, they can see the old grade. I’ve had success with both cracking cards out of the case and sending them for review (still encapsulated).
Ohh ok thanks, that’s quite surprising to hear as a newcomer. Did your rates of success vary based on whether you thought the cards deserved a raise or not?
I’ve submitted six PSA 9 cards for in-case review, and four have been upgraded to 10s. Out of those I think there was only one that I wasn’t confident in it being upgraded, so 4/5 is not a bad rate. I’d say I’ve had similar success in cracking and resubmitting raw.
Thanks for this. I got a lot of good information. I recently did a send off and tried out the “Min Grade” option on an Jungle Error Mr. Mime that I was a little “iffy” about getting a PSA 10.
I hope yours comes back a Gem 