With that said, Shohei is a cultural icon and an all-time great, so we don’t want to stop buying Ohtani cards altogether. Instead, we will increase our target return on investment for his cards.

Note that all this is based on an Expected Value approach. You can find the formula below, but you can also read the Complete Guide to Expected Value here.

Expected Value = PSA 10 Value x Gem Rate + PSA 9 Value x (100% - Gem Rate) - Grading Costs - Selling Fees

Looking At a Concrete Example

2018 Shohei Ohtani Topps Chrome #HMT1

This is a good example card, because it’s one we are actively buying using this methodology. Let’s start by calculating the Expected Value of the card.

PSA 10 Value | $785
PSA 9 Value | $280
Gem Rate | 62.5%
Expected Value | $453.67

Our general target ROI is 25%, which is the threshold we use for cards where we don’t have elevated exposure. The maximum price we can pay is EV / (1 + Target ROI). If we buy at that price, we expect to hit our target return on average.

Target ROI | 25.0%
Max Bid | $362.94

Given our current Ohtani exposure, we’ve raised our target ROI specifically for his cards to 35%. Here’s how that changes our maximum buy price.

Target ROI | 35.0%
Max Bid | $336.05

On the surface, a $27 difference in the maximum bid doesn’t look like much. But this can have a real impact. While we’ve bought a few of these cards lately, there’s also been multiple Ohtani cards that we’ve narrowly missed out on buying because of this adjustment. With the adjusted threshold, we only buy this card when we find a very solid deal.

You can apply the same logic to any card where your exposure is running high, but you can use any ROI target you like. If you had heavy Konnor Griffin inventory heading into his debut, you might push your target ROI to 45% given the high risk of investing into an unproven prospect.

The specific number matters less than the principle: when concentration goes up, your required return should go up with it. It’s a simple way to let the math do the risk management for you without having to set hard limits on what you’ll buy.

What A Slant Looks Like

The 2025 Mega Evolution Charizard X ex #125 is about as clear an example of a slanted card as you’ll find. The borders shift noticeably as you move along the card, and in my opinion the centering at the worst point was well outside of PSA’s 55/45 guideline for front centering. It still came back as a PSA 10.

In general, I don’t recommend submitting cards with slants this extreme, but I do think this card serves as a good example to show both what a slant is, and that PSA is willing to give these cards PSA 10s.

When To Submit Slanted Cards

The Pikachu Mega Evolution #277 is a better example to walk through the evaluation process. This one has a more subtle slant. Below, I’ve zoomed in on just the very top and very bottom part of the border. At the top, the left/right centering is nearly perfect, but at the bottom, the left border is noticeably wider than the right border.

Top Part of Border:

Bottom Part of Border:

Our approach is simple. We ignore the favorable end of the slant and measure from the worst point, which in this case is the bottom. In the end, we measured the left/right centering from the marks in the image above at 57/43.

Since that’s outside of PSA’s 55/45 guideline, we decided not to submit it. But if that same worst-case measurement had come in at 55/45 or better, we would have submitted it despite the slant.

For a review on how to measure a card’s centering, read our Complete Guide to PSA Grading.

The core issue is that if someone is an experienced grader, there’s a good chance they already know which of their cards can gem. That means the raw cards they’re selling are probably the ones that can’t. You’re better off avoiding these kinds of sellers altogether.

Who to Avoid

Large sellers, shops, and consigners rarely sell cards that are PSA 10 candidates.

If someone has thousands of cards listed, it’s a pretty safe assumption that they know what they’re doing (unless everything looks like it was recently pulled from a pack). A shop is even worse since you have no idea how the card was handled before it was listed on eBay. Plus you don’t know anything about why the original owner decided to sell to the shop rather than grading themselves.

Consigners are another category I avoid. In general, we don’t get good cards from consigners. The problem is that experienced sellers with high volumes of inventory use consigners more than the average collector, and therefore most of the cards are not PSA 10 candidates, even if they look like they are in the listing.

How to Evaluate a Seller’s Profile

Another important thing to search for on an eBay seller’s profile is their graded card history. PSA certification numbers are sequential, so if you see a seller with several high cert numbers, that tells you they’ve submitted to PSA recently. If a seller has certs in the 100000000 to 150000000 range, there’s a decent chance they’re actively grading and you want to avoid buying.

What you want to see is either no graded cards at all, or older cert numbers that suggest they haven’t graded in a while.

I also look at the overall shape of their inventory. Does their store have a lot of random 2025 cards across different sets and sports? That’s a good sign they’re just opening packs and selling. A small account with a mix of recent product and no graded cards is about as good as it gets.

Another good shortcut is to look for sellers with some feedback but not thousands of reviews. Fewer reviews usually means the seller is less serious, which is what you want. An unprofessional or random username and no profile picture are also good signs. It sounds counterintuitive, but those tend to be the people who are casual sellers, and therefore the people you want to buy from.

Takeaways

I’ll note that this is not a perfect system. There are plenty of PSA 10 worthy cards being sold from big accounts, and there are small accounts that are run by people who grade. But this is a strong prescreening method and needs to be a part of the evaluation process for any serious card grader.

The Expected Value math on this one has been good enough to keep us coming back, and I’ve covered the profitability calculations in detail in previous posts.

What I haven’t talked about much is the physical condition of these cards, and honestly, it’s been on my mind since we started getting them. We submitted 9 so far to PSA and haven’t gotten any results back yet, but we’ll learn a lot when we do.

Common Defects: Edges Are Consistently Inconsistent

These cards consistently have rough edges. The level of defect can range anywhere from rough factory cuts to more noticeable chipping.

Here’s an example of a rough factory cut. This is common on sports cards and doesn’t kill a card’s chance of grading as a 10. Still, I’d obviously prefer to submit cards with perfect edges.

I’m generally more concerned when I see chunks out of the edges. Not just roughness, but visible material missing. We’ve decided not to buy a lot of copies because of this, but even the ones we submitted aren’t perfect.

Why Is the Gem Rate So High?

Here’s what makes this card interesting as a grading case study. Despite all of the above, the listed gem rate on this card is strong at 61.0%. That’s surprising given what we’re seeing on the edges.

My best guess is that PSA is lenient on the edge issues specific to this card. This happens. PSA’s grading isn’t always consistent across product lines, and there are cases where a defect that kills one card gets overlooked on another. Case in point would be the 2024 Donruss Downtown Football cards, which had a set-wide Gem Rate of 22.2% due to very similar edge defects.

In general, when a card has a weird defect I will look on eBay for recent PSA 10 sales, and analyze what those cards look like. And based on what I saw, many copies of these with imperfect edges are gemming. Which again, leaves us with the takeaway that the ones we’ve submitted have a chance at getting PSA 10s, but we’re having a hard time estimating exactly what that chance is.

In other words, our next set of results will tell us a lot about this card.

Do you have experience grading 2023 All Aces cards? If so, please feel free to comment and give your thoughts.

There’s a sweet spot when buying cards to grade. It comes after a card has been on the market long enough to have both Gem Rate data and sales data for PSA 10s and PSA 9s, but before most of the clean copies have already been graded. Before that sweet spot, you don’t have enough information to make smart buying decisions. After it, there are gradually fewer and fewer raw cards available on the market.

For example, we’ve been buying lots of 2023 Prizm Victor Wembanyama rookie cards lately, and every copy we’ve bought looked clean in the listing pictures. And yet, we decided not to grade quite a few of these.

This makes a lot of sense because the Wembanyama Prizm rookie cards have been profitable to grade since it released. People have been buying and grading clean copies consistently for two-plus years now. The result is that the best cards have already been submitted, and the raw cards that are still ungraded tend to have issues.

The opposite is also true, and it’s something we’ve been taking advantage of lately. If a card has only recently become profitable to grade, there’s a much better chance that clean copies are still out there.

The 2018 Topps Chrome Shohei Ohtani #150 is the clearest example I can point to right now. A year ago, a PSA 10 of this card was worth around $200. Today it’s worth over $1,000. Because the card wasn’t a smart grading candidate until relatively recently, a lot of collectors who pulled clean copies just put them in a case and forgot about them for years. Those copies are now hitting the market as raw prices rise. We’ve been grading these well, and I think the abundance of clean raw supply is a big part of the reason why.

A similar dynamic applies to older cards from eras when PSA grading was less common. The 2011 Topps Update Mike Trout rookie is a good example. Grading wasn’t nearly as popular in 2011 and the years that followed, so a lot of high-quality copies were stored rather than submitted. We get about 60% PSA 10s on these, in spite of it being a 15-year-old paper card, and I suspect it’s for the same reason. Because grading wasn’t as profitable when these cards were pulled, more clean raw cards are available now.

The idea is that where a card lands in the grading cycle is a variable worth considering. For example, if I see a Wembanyama card that we previously would have assumed had a 60% chance of grading as a PSA 10, I might now assume it’s closer to 45%. And if a player breaks out and becomes a grading candidate (like Cal Raleigh last year), even if the card is a few years old, I’d expect clean raw copies to grade closer to the average Gem Rates.

We purchased a $300 Victor Wembanyama Phoenix White Lazer RC from a seller on eBay. Shortly after the purchase, the seller started messaging us with updates. There was an issue at the post office, then a problem printing the label. He ended up shipping us the card about two weeks late. He felt bad enough about the delays that he offered to throw in a free PSA graded card as an apology, which he said he would ship separately.

When a package arrived with the tracking number associated with our order, it contained a CJ Stroud Prizmatic PSA 10, worth about $60 and no Wembanyama card.

Here’s the problem. On eBay, you have a 3-day window from confirmed delivery to open a return request. If you miss that window, you lose buyer protection on the order. The seller told us to just wait a few more days for the Wembanyama to arrive. If we had done that, we would have been outside the return window and had no recourse through eBay.

Two weeks later, the Wembanyama card still hasn’t arrived, leading me to believe that this was intentional, although I can’t be 100% certain.

Intentional or not, we have to act in a way that keeps us safe from any scams or issues. This highlights the importance of knowing the rules of your buying and selling platforms. Had we not known that the 3-day return window had started when the Stroud card was delivered, we probably never would have gotten a refund.

So this is just a reminder to everyone. eBay is a pretty safe place to buy and sell but be aware that things do happen and to stay cautious.

Last year during Raleigh’s breakout campaign, we bought his cards pretty aggressively. As his market rose, the Expected Value of grading kept improving, and we found ourselves winning nearly every auction we bid on.

There was also a ton of gradable supply hitting the market. People were taking profit on ungraded copies and graders had never cherry-picked the cleanest copies, since grading them hadn't been profitable before last season. As a result, the supply flooding eBay was mostly in good condition.

In total, we bought and sold 32 Raleigh cards across 2025 and 2026, which is a lot of exposure to one player. The first 17 sold in 2025, and here’s how those looked:

Purchase Price | $4,110
Grading Cost | $552
Profit After Fees | $2,537
ROI | 61.7%

Out of these 17 cards, we submitted 11 to PSA and sold 6 raw. Deciding not to submit 6 out of 17 is unusually high for us, but we more than made up for it in grading: 9 of the 11 submitted cards came back as PSA 10s.

This brings us to probably the most important concept in our business: buying into hype windows.

When a player is in the middle of a breakout, raw supply tends to flood the market, giving you cards to buy and grade, while PSA 10 values rise faster than raw values. That combination creates a window where grading is unusually profitable. Raleigh was one of our biggest targets in the second half of 2025, and the numbers reflect that.

The remaining 15 cards were bought between late 2025 and early 2026. All 15 were sold in 2026 due to the typical 3-month lag between submission and sale.

As you probably know, Raleigh’s market has fallen sharply on the back of a slow start to the season. The results on these 15 cards reflect that, as they generated just $460 of profit on $5,570 of sales. That's well below our usual targets, but staying profitable in a sharply falling market is a good result.

This reflects the core logic of buying with strong Expected Value: in a rising or steady market you make strong profits, while your downside in a falling market is close to breakeven.

Subscribe now

Auctions vs. BIN

Auctions generally come with more risk than Buy It Now. Usually when we buy a card on Buy It Now, we buy it for a really good price because we get to the card before other graders find it. When it comes to auctions, clean gradable cards tend to get found. Experienced buyers are running the same searches we are, and a well-centered PSA 10 candidate rarely sells for cheap. Pre-screening 3 days out doesn’t lower what you end up paying, but it gives you more time to decide whether we really want to pay a premium for a card.

Getting Extra Pictures

Importantly, if you want to compete for these cards, you need to get the right pictures. We generally ask for this on auctions anytime the card is in a top loader, especially if the top loader is scratched (which makes it impossible to tell the condition of the card). Doing the prescreen days in advance, and sending your picture requests days in advance, gives the seller time to respond.

If I don’t get a response, I follow up with a seller about a picture request one time. At that point, if they don’t respond to either message, I usually don’t bid on the card. While some sellers understandably don’t want to send extra pictures, some sellers know the card isn't a PSA 10 candidate and choose not to respond.

Minimum Price Filters

To keep the search manageable, I always use a minimum price filter. Without one, the volume of listings is too large to work through. I usually set this somewhere between $70 and $100. The one adjustment I’m making now is to lower that floor when I’m looking at listings ending further out, since those cards will have fewer bids and the current price won’t reflect where they’ll settle. For auctions ending in 24 to 48 hours, I’ll usually lower this to about $50.

Added Flexibility

The last advantage is flexibility. If I don’t have time to look at auctions one day, I don’t fall behind since I’m already 3 days ahead. This makes it easier to place bids on auctions every single day.

While we'd love to take full credit, the rising card market played a big role — Pokémon, Ohtani, and Wembanyama all rose in value during this period. That said, our grading results were very strong and we have continued to improve in targeting cards in the $1,000 + range, which really moves the needle.

Here's the full breakdown.

Subscribe now

Average Sale Price Trends

Our average sale price was over $400 as we continue to be more aggressive buying and selling more expensive cards. Looking at April, our average purchase price for new inventory hit an all time high, so it seems like this trend is here to stay.

At the same time, we take what the market gives us. In other words, if we’re seeing tons of cards that are profitable for $75 a piece, we will buy these aggressively. Still, we are generally more comfortable than ever buying single cards for as much as $5k to grade and sell.

Most Bought & Most Sold Players

Most Bought: Shohei Ohtani

We bought 53 Ohtani cards, ranging from $70 to $1,500. Most of these will be sold in Q2, as our turnaround time from purchase date to sell date is about 3 months on average.

Specifically, we bought a lot of Topps paper rookie cards. The Expected Value math suggested that these were highly profitable, but that was assuming that we achieve a 40% average gem rate. Honestly, the condition on the ones we bought was generally not great, and we haven’t gotten any grading results back yet. I’m curious and a little anxious to see how these do.

Most Sold: Drake Maye

We bought so many Drake Maye cards during his breakout campaign and subsequent playoff run. His market fell quickly after he lost in the Super Bowl, but we’ve still done very well on his cards overall.

In total, we sold 17 Drake Maye cards from anywhere between $70 and $1,100. As alluded to above, these are mostly cards that were bought in winter 2025. The most sold card was his 2024 Prizm Silver rookie card, which we were buying seemingly on a daily basis late last year.

Grading Results

In total, 68.4% of cards graded as 10s. In our pregrade, we projected about a 48% Gem Rate. This implies that PSA gave generous grades, but we generally do outperform our pregrade estimates. We’re actually making specific efforts to increase our projected Gem Rate to make it more in line with our actual results.

Worst card to grade PSA 10: Shohei Ohtani Bowman Chrome

Main Defect:

Notes:

We actually have a full post about our decision making when we decided to submit this card. We thought it had just a 20% chance of grading as a PSA 10 given these scratches (or indents?) on the back. At the end of the day, we decided to submit it, and we were rewarded with one of our largest profits of the year so far.

Best card to not grade PSA 10: Mewtwo VSTAR

Notes:

Why did this grade as a PSA 9? Beats me. The only defect we noted was that the front centering wasn’t perfect, but at the same time, it was well within PSA’s guided range of 55/45. Grading is subjective, but these kinds of things usually balance out over time.

Biggest Gain & Loss

Biggest Gain: 2024 Topps Gilded Yamamoto Auto

Profitability:

Net Sale Price | $4,650
Purchase Price | $1,300
Grading Cost | $300
Net Profit | $3,050

Notes:

We actually bought this in November after the Dodgers had already won the World Series, but Yamamoto still got a nice bump in price during the offseason. This was a risky purchase — we bought this for over $1,000 without seeing pictures of the card outside of the top loader, which is not something we usually do. In this case, I’m glad we made an exception.

Biggest Loss: 2024 Downtown Duos Jayden Daniels / Terry McLaurin

Profitability:

Net Sale Price | $630
Purchase Price | $1,000
Grading Cost | $70
Net Loss | $440

Notes:

The Jayden Daniels market really tanked last year and early this year, as he dealt with an injury plagued season (but also wasn’t great even when healthy). We sold this card in January, but Daniels’s market actually has been rising lately as collectors look ahead to the 2026 season.

Takeaways:

In April, we continued buying a lot of Shohei Ohtani, but Pokémon Ascended Heroes has really emerged as our top grading target. As I write this in May, we don’t have one amazing target based on Expected Value that’s leading to a lot of purchases, but that’s sure to change as the month goes on.

The biggest question mark to repeating this result is whether or not the card market can continue increasing in value. I’m not counting on it. Our goal is to approach this business like the market is going to be neutral, meaning that it will stay steady. This means that when the market rises, we make unusually high profit, but when it falls, we make less than usual.

While I hope cards can just keep increasing in value, my best guess is that Q2 won’t quite be on the same level as Q1. With that said, it’s looking like a lot of our results will hinge on the strength of the Pokémon market, and of course on our PSA grading results.

In general, it’s key to have an idea of what defects are normal and predictable and which ones are unusual and thus not as easy to evaluate. You can read more about that in our Complete Guide to PSA Grading.

This post will look at 4 cards, two Shohei Ohtani’s and two Victor Wembanyama’s, each of which has a different defect. Even with some of the more unpredictable defects, we’re confident we made the right decisions on each of these.

Subscribe now

1. 2018 Shohei Ohtani Topps Gold Label Class 3 #17

I genuinely feel like edge issues are the biggest wildcard of PSA grading. Sometimes cards with chipped edges can get PSA 10s and sometimes they get PSA 6s. We tend to be conservative on these and generally avoid submitting.

Given that we bought this assuming an Expected Gem Rate of 70%, it made more sense to sell it raw. This card would have a very low chance of getting a 10.

2. 2018 Shohei Ohtani Topps #US285

It’s a bit hard to see, but this goes a bit beyond just a dinged corner. The surface by the corner is a bit pressed in or indented. I don’t think the chances of this card still getting a 10 are necessarily 0%, but I do think it’s more likely to get a PSA 6 than a 10. This was a pretty easy decision to just sell as is.

3. 2023 Victor Wembanyama Prizm Pink Ice #136

In a post characterized by weird flaws, this is the weirdest one. While the circled part looks like a scratch, really it’s more like a fold. These kinds of structural surface defects tend to be card killers, so much so that they are often PSA 8s or worse.

Overall this would be a very high risk submission, with a real chance at grading anywhere between a 6 and a 10. We decided the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. Arguably, this would have been a decent card to submit strictly for learning purposes.

4. 2023 Victor Wembanyama Prizm Silver #136

This was the easiest of the 3. The front surface of this card is pretty scratched up, and as a result we didn’t feel like this had any real chance of grading as a 10. As I say often, this shows the importance of having a good desk light when you’re evaluating cards to be sure you catch things like this. Without the right lighting it’s very hard to see.

Also worth noting, this was a card that we initially bought with minimal pictures, and it ended up coming in with defects. This is a risk we’re generally willing to take, as long as we’re getting good deals on the cards.

In our pregrade, we projected to get 11 PSA 10s, meaning that this was a big miss. Usually we’re pretty accurate on this and even when we miss, we usually get more 10s than we expect, not less.

I disagree with these grades overall, but we’ve certainly also gotten plenty of grades where we get more 10s than we expect, so it’s hard to be too frustrated because it generally balances out over time.

With that said, let’s see what we can learn from this submission. We’re going to mainly look at the cleanest cards in this submission to not receive PSA 10s, but I’ll end the post with one card that I could not believe got a PSA 10.

Let’s take a look.

2024 Select Drake Maye Tri-Color #218

Defects:

Pregrade:

• Notes: Print lines on both sides, back top edge has small issue.

• Expected Gem Probability: 65%

Thoughts:

I think most likely this card got dinged because of the edge issue, since in our experience print lines usually have pretty minimal impact. That’s not shocking, PSA tends to be very strict on edges at times, and often will give PSA 8s or worse for edge defects. With that said, we’ve certainly seen worse cards get PSA 10s.

2024 Optic Downtown Bronny James Jr. #26

Defects:

Pregrade:

• Notes: None.

• Expected Gem Probability: 80%

Thoughts:

We left no notes on this card, which doesn’t mean the card is perfect, but usually that it has no major or unusual defects. Overall it looks really nice, the defect shown above is the only thing I see on this card that could explain the PSA 9 grade, although I’m unsure if that’s a scratch on the card, a piece of lint, or a scratch on the slab. Either way, I think this is a really tough grade.

I’ll also note, it’s very unusual for a card we pregrade at 80% probability of gemming to not get a PSA 10 (as it should be).

2025 Mega Charizard X ex #125

Defects:

• Notes: Top bottom centering slightly is roughly 56/44. Print line on back.

• Expected Gem Probability: 60%

Thoughts:

We’ve been pushing the boundaries on centering more and more, and really before this submission, nearly every clean card we submitted with borderline centering had gemmed. I think this is a reasonable grade, but it’s disappointing because this card is worth nearly $3k as a PSA 10.

2025 Donruss Downtown Tyler Shough #19

Defects: None visible.

• Notes: Small marks on front and light print lines.

• Expected Gem Probability: 75%

Thoughts:

I don’t really see any issues here that justify a 9, although of course the grader can see more in person than we can through a slab. We only noted print lines and small marks as the main defects. Obviously cards with that profile will 9 from time to time, but this is a tough grade. We’re used to seeing stuff like this gem.

2019 Mewtwo & Mew GX #SM191

Defects:

Pregrade:

• Notes: Really nice except for massive ink mark on back and white dot on back border.

• Expected Gem Probability: 30%

Thoughts:

Given that everything else in this submissions was graded very harshly in my opinion, this is a pretty shocking grade. There is a pretty large, lipstick colored defect on the back, and honestly I think it’s questionable that we even submitted this card. The fact that this is one of our 7 PSA 10s given the quality of some of the other cards is wild. Again, this just shows the human side of grading.

Meanwhile, athletes young and old have seen their markets surge lately: LeBron James, Mason Miller, and George Lombard Jr. have each seen their markets rise more than 60% over the last week, while Kon Knueppel cards have completely tanked.

We’ll break it all down below.

Cards We’re Buying

• Pokémon Ascended Heroes: Just like last week, we continue to buy tons of Ascended Heroes cards. We’ve leaned into these cards at all price points, anywhere from $70 to $1,500, and in both Japanese and English. Well over 50% of our purchase volume this week came from these cards.

• Shohei Ohtani: We’ve slowed down our Ohtani buys the last couple weeks, but we certainly haven’t stopped. Ohtani remains the most relevant athlete in the hobby right now.

• Victor Wembanyama: Wemby is still one of the most profitable cards to grade based on Expected Value. But we’re finding that nearly every 2023 Prizm Wemby rookie card we’ve bought has been completely ungradeable (despite looking clean in the listings). Are all the good ones already graded? We’re continuing to buy these, so I guess we’ll find out soon.

• Konnor Griffin: The future of the Pirates (alongside Paul Skenes) has fallen in value over the last couple months, as he’s had a slow start since getting called up to the bigs. But, many of his cards are still profitable to grade right now, and he’s been warming up at the plate. We’re looking to buy more.

• 2025 Downtown Football: Downtown cards are down as well over the last 2 months, but many are still strong buys based on Expected Value. Expect a market update on these sometime next week.

BCG Auctions Tracker

The BCG Auction Tracker is an eBay search filter we use to find cards that are profitable to grade. We made some major changes this week.

The biggest update: we found a way to make searches with unlimited characters, which gives us even more flexibility to target exactly what we want. We’re now looking for all the top athletes — rookies and non-rookies — plus all Pokémon, and we’ve added sets like All Kings, All Aces, Downtown, Kaboom, and Color Blast to the search.

We also lowered the minimum price threshold to catch cheaper Ascended Heroes cards we’re targeting, including Dragonite, Gengar, and Psyduck cards.

2025 Bowman Chrome Basketball Releases

The new Bowman Chrome Basketball product released on April 22nd, and given that it’s Topps’s first year of regaining basketball licensing, it will be interesting to keep an eye on this. So far I’m seeing lots of auto cards and high value case hits like Anime and Spotlight, which is great for grading.

The biggest variable will be the Gem Rate of the set, as the higher the Gem Rate is, the better the product is for profitable grading (usually). We’ll continue to monitor this, but it will be at least another 2 months before we start buying these cards.

PSA Vault Wants Your Cards

PSA Vault has been making some aggressive Partner Offers lately. Generally speaking, these offers tend to be very inconsistent. For months at a time, we’ll sell thousands of dollars of cards to PSA each month. And then in other months, we’ll sell them absolutely nothing. Our strategy never changes, it just depends on how close to market comps they’re willing to pay. And lately, they’ve made a lot of strong offers.

As another side note, PSA offers seem to be algorithmic, and they also tend to change. If you have offers from PSA, I recommend checking them every 6 hours or so to see if you get anything good.

eBay Outages Shake Card World

eBay suffered outages through the week. This actually caused a lot of problems for us. We missed purchases because we couldn’t get through checkout, and even had points in time where we couldn’t access the webpage at all.

It got so bad that eBay even let sellers cancel auction sales that occurred during the impacted period (you can read their announcement here).

In all honesty, my biggest takeaway here is that it’s amazing that this is the first major eBay outage I’ve seen in a decade of selling there. Hopefully we won’t see another one for a long time.

Risers & Fallers

2003 LeBron James Topps #221 PSA 10

Notes: With all the young talent currently in the NBA playoffs, it’s shocking that LeBron James is one of the biggest risers so far. LeBron’s cards are surging after his dominant series against the Rockets, although they’ve been rising for a few months now. This is still a pretty stunning move for a player who is already established as (at worst) a top 3 player of all time.

2018 Topps Chrome Shohei Ohtani #150

Notes: Shohei Ohtani’s rapid ascent has finally slowed (at least for now). His Topps Chrome Pitching rookie card is actually down over the last 14 days, in spite of his strong start to the season, where he’s been especially dominant on the mound. This is a huge change, as for pretty much the entire offseason and early regular season, Ohtani cards had been rising rapidly.

2025 Topps Chrome Kon Knueppel Refractor #254

Notes: Kon Knueppel’s market has completely collapsed over the last 2 months, falling by about 65%. This makes some sense, this is a fairly new product, and as new products get graded and sold, they often fall in value. However, this fall feels particularly extreme. I can’t help but think this is more of a market correction, as the hobby assesses how high Knueppel’s upside truly is, and whether or not he has the potential to become an All NBA level player.

2022 Topps Chrome Cal Raleigh Rookie Auto #RA-CR

Note: While this graph is based on just a handful of sales, I can confirm through having quite a few Cal Raleigh cards for sale over the last few months that his market fall is real. Raleigh has had a slow start to the season, hitting just .186 over his first 33 games. We will see if he can regain the MVP-caliber form he had last year, but another 60 home run season is highly unlikely at this point.

2021 Bowman Chrome Mason Miller 1st Auto #CA-MMIL

Notes: Mason Miller’s scoreless streak is over, but don’t tell the market that. Jokes aside, Miller has been absolutely dominant this season, pitching to a 1.17 ERA while striking out 53.7% of batters he’s faced. Still, this pricing seems astronomical for a relief pitcher who’s thrown just 175 career innings at 27 years old (but that won’t stop us from buying to grade if the price is right).

2024 Bowman Chrome George Lombard 1st Auto #CPA-GLO

Notes: The Yankees top prospect recently got the call to AAA, after slashing .312/.400/.571 with the AA squad. His market is seeing a nice bump in response, as the hobby anticipates his call to the majors.

But this also comes with a cost. Right now, there are more fake Pokémon cards than I’ve seen at any point in the last 2 years, which means buyers need to be cautious.

With that said, here is a short list of red flags to look out for when buying cards.

Subscribe now

7 Tricks To Avoid Fake Pokémon Cards:

1. Avoid Rare Cards With High Quantity

This is one of the easiest red flags to spot. If you’re looking at a rare or expensive card, if the seller has 5, 6, or 10 cards available, this is a clear red flag. Now of course, there are some genuine power sellers out there who do have high supply of rare cards, which brings me to the second tip.

2. Check the Seller’s Feedback

If the seller has no reviews, this is a red flag. If the seller’s account is brand new, this is also a red flag. I’m fine with taking risks on newer or unproven sellers, but you need to think critically about it, especially if the seller triggers multiple red flags.

3. Be Cautious of Low Prices

Look, I’m fine with taking risks. If a card is listed by a decent seller at $400, but the market value is closer to $700, take a shot on it. But if a $1,000 card is listed for $80, it’s probably fake. Critical thinking goes a long way for this kind of issue, especially if a seller is triggering multiple red flags.

Here’s a good example of a listing that triggers each of the first 3 red flags:

4. Understand eBay’s Authenticity Guarantee Program

Ebay currently authenticates any card over $250. This can give you peace of mind because for these cards, even if you buy something fake, eBay will handle it for you. This brings about an important red flag. Did the seller price a $400 card at $249.99 to avoid authentication? Or did the seller list a $500 trading card into a different eBay category to avoid the authenticity program (i.e. listing a trading card as a kitchen appliance to avoid the program). Sellers trying to avoid the eBay AG program is a common red flag.

5. Unusual Descriptions Or Long Shipping Times

Sometimes I read a product description and it just looks like a scammer. The seller will mention that they have to sell urgently, or they have an exclusive supplier, yada yada yada... This is pretty much always a sign that there is some sort of scam.

Additionally, if the seller needs 2 weeks to process the card and another 2 weeks to deliver it, it’s probably a fake card that’s being dropshipped.

6. The Card Just Looks Off

Sometimes a card just doesn’t look right. Trust your gut. Two common things I’ve seen in fake listings is that the front surface looks too shiny or the back surface looks too dull.

I’ll also note that we’ve had a few fake cards sold to us, but so far they’ve been very obvious once the card was in hand. This is good news, but this is also bound to change as fake cards continue to improve.

7. Be Extra Wary of Chinese and Japanese Cards

So far, I’m seeing more fake Japanese and Chinese cards, which is unfortunate because lots of these are profitable to buy right now. This is bound to change over time as English cards are faked more often, but for now, be extra cautious with these cards.

Subscribe now

Cards We’ve Been Buying

Ascended Heroes: Both the Japanese and English versions. The challenge with the English cards is that despite high Gem Rates, the vast majority are way off center. That said, the Expected Value on both sets is strong right now.

Pokémon is King: Last week, we bought more Pokémon than sports for the first time in a few months. Outside of the recent Ascended Heroes cards, Japanese Pokémon and 2025 Scarlet & Violet cards are quite profitable right now. You’ll see more of these targets later in this post.

Victor Wembanyama: We’ve been buying Wemby for months and that hasn’t changed. We’ll be rooting hard for the Spurs this playoffs.

Phoenix Color Blast: We’re grabbing lots of these. The math isn’t outstanding, but the Expected ROI is within our target range. Targets so far include Emeka Egbuka, Jaxson Dart, and Ashton Jeanty.

Mike Trout: Trout is rising like we talked about in last week’s post. We’re snagging his Topps Update rookie cards whenever we can find them in gradable condition for under $400.

Interesting Sales & PSA Offers

1998 Bowman Roy Halladay Blue Auto: Declined a $490 offer from PSA, only to sell months later for $400 ($348 payout). That one stings.

2011 Topps Red Helmet Bryce Harper: Declined a $3,000 offer a few months ago. There’s still a chance we sell it for more, our BIN is currently at $3,150.

2023 Topps Chrome Lamine Yamal Ultimate Stage Auto: The most recent PSA 10 / Auto 10 sale was over $4,000, and with Yamal trending up we were planning to list ours at $5,000. Then a season-ending hamstring injury threw that plan into doubt. Fortunately, PSA stepped in with a generous $4,400 offer, which we accepted. This is one of the most profitable cards we’ve ever sold.

Tyler Shough Downtown PSA 9: PSA offered $571 with no fees, which again was a very generous offer. Market value is around $550, which would have netted $484 after fees. Moral of the story, PSA is making aggressive offers for certain players. Keep an eye on this if you use PSA Vault.

Subscribe now

Pushing the Envelope on Centering

PSA guidelines call for cards to be within 55/45 centering, but we’ve recently been submitting cards that are slightly outside that threshold if they’re otherwise clean.

So far, nearly every card we’ve submitted at 56/44 or 57/43 has graded as a 10. We’re going to keep pushing further. You’ll hear more about this in future posts.

PSA Turnaround Times

PSA appears to be slowing down again. Multiple recent submissions have spent a couple of weeks in Order Arrived before moving to Research & ID — something we haven’t seen in quite a while.

That said, this isn’t unusual. PSA turnaround times tend to slow when the market is hot and submission volumes rise.

Profitable Pokémon Cards To Grade Now

Analysis based on Expected Value (EV). Read the full EV tutorial here.

Expected Value = PSA 10 Value x Gem Rate + PSA 9 Value x (100% - Gem Rate) - Grading Costs - Selling Fees

*We may receive commission for any purchases completed from links in this post, at no cost to you. Thanks for supporting BCG Cards.

2026 Pokémon Ascended Heroes

2026 Team Rocket’s Mewtwo ex #281

Values & Gem Rate

Raw Value | $480
PSA 10 Value | $1,400
PSA 9 Value | $550
Gem Rate | 75.1%

Profitability

PSA Submission Tier | Value Plus
Expected Value | $825.23*
Expected Profit | $345.23
Expected ROI | 71.9%

2026 Psyduck #226

Values & Gem Rate

Raw Value | $100
PSA 10 Value | $735
PSA 9 Value | $165
Gem Rate | 68.3%

Profitability

PSA Submission Tier | Value Plus
Expected Value | $348.61*
Expected Profit | $248.61
Expected ROI | 248.6%

Notes:

These are the cards I missed in our previous Pokémon Ascended Heroes post. This is another great target with high profitability, but the main challenge is to find well-centered copies.

The Psyduck card in particular is pretty much as high an Expected Profit as we ever see in the market. I think it’s a safe bet to assume that the PSA graded values of this card will fall in the coming months, but these things don’t always happen the way you would think.

*One final note, we applied a 15% Market Adjustment to both of these cards. To put this in simple terms, if a PSA 10 is worth $1,000, we will treat it as an $850 card in our calculation. You can read about our framework for doing this here.

2025 Pokémon Black Bolt & White Flare

2025 Zekrom ex #172

Values & Gem Rate

Raw Value | $420
PSA 10 Value | $1,500
PSA 9 Value | $475
Gem Rate | 51.1%

Profitability

PSA Submission Tier | Value Plus
Expected Value | $823.52
Expected Profit | $403.52
Expected ROI | 96.1%

2025 Reshiram ex #173

Values & Gem Rate

Raw Value | $380
PSA 10 Value | $1,225
PSA 9 Value | $385
Gem Rate | 60.0%

Profitability

PSA Submission Tier | Value Plus
Expected Value | $722.43
Expected Profit | $342.43
Expected ROI | 90.1%

Notes: Each of these cards has risen rapidly over the past 3 months, which has led to Expected Profitability rising (this often goes hand in hand as you can read here). These aren’t quite as abundant as the Ascended Heroes cards, but they’re definitely out there. Again, pay close attention to centering on these.

Japanese Pokémon Cards

2023 Mew ex #205 (Japanese)

Values & Gem Rate

Raw Value | $215
PSA 10 Value | $710
PSA 9 Value | $230
Gem Rate | 82.2%

Profitability

PSA Submission Tier | Value Plus
Expected Value | $480.05
Expected Profit | $265.05
Expected ROI | 123.3%

2023 Gengar Master Ball Reverse Holo #094

Values & Gem Rate

Raw Value | $415
PSA 10 Value | $1100
PSA 9 Value | $400**
Gem Rate | 84.3%

Profitability

PSA Submission Tier | Value Plus
Expected Value | $804.16
Expected Profit | $389.16
Expected ROI | 93.8%

Notes: You won’t see a ton of either of these cards on the market, but the profitability is solid when you do. Note that these (and most Japanese Pokémon) tend to be well-centered and grade well. Additionally, Gengar in particular is one of our most bought Pokémon, and is one of the most important characters to stay up to date on if you want to buy Pokémon profitably.

**Note that there are no recent PSA 9 sales. The $400 figure is an estimate based on the PSA 10 value and raw value.

It’s a fun one too: the first Jordan Walker card we’ve bought. Walker is in the midst of a breakout season, meaning he’s exactly the type of player we like to target.

Let’s dive into it.

Step 1: Identify the Target

Card Name: 2023 Topps Chrome Jordan Walker Auto Orange Wave /25

First of all, Jordan Walker is a guy that we flagged in our market research as a profitable target, and added to our BCG Auctions Tracker tool. This means that when we saw this card, we knew to investigate it further.

Second, the condition on this card looks very good. The card is centered, corners are sharp, and there are no obvious defects.

Lastly, I took a quick glance at sales to make sure that the price was reasonable. When I looked, the auction was at $200, and the most recent PSA 10 sale was over $800.

Step 2: Ask The Seller Questions

For these Topps Chrome cards, the front material is very sturdy, but the back corners tend to be soft at times. We decided to ask the seller for closeup pictures of the back corners to get a better feel for the condition, but we could have bid without them.

Sometimes getting these extra pictures gives you the confidence to assume that a card has a 50% chance of gemming, instead of 40%. This often can be the difference between winning and losing an auction. In other cases, additional pictures prevent you from buying a card that has a defect that you didn’t catch from the original listing.

In other words, it’s smart to ask questions within reason, as long as you’re respectful of the seller’s time.

Step 3: Assess The Market

Jordan Walker is an interesting player to evaluate. Given that his market has increased dramatically over the last few months, really any sale that’s more than a few weeks old isn’t helpful.

We went looking for this card on eBay Product Research to see what comps we could find. Sometimes there’s an art to creating the right search terms here to show the cards you want to see. In our case, we used the search term: “2023 Jordan Walker Topps Chrome Auto /25”. I would have been happy to get results for similar TC Autos also numbered /25, even if it wasn’t our exact card.

The top card on the list was the only relevant result, with our exact card selling for $823 as a PSA 10 just a day before this auction was set to end. Normally bidding on a card with just one comp to go off of can be dangerous, but I felt like I had a good feel for this market from doing market research in weeks prior.

Step 4: How To Handle Limited Comps

As mentioned above, this card did not have many recent sales, which brings about a key problem. How do you determine the PSA 9 Value?

If you remember from our Complete Guide to Expected Value, there are 3 numbers you need to calculate the value of a card: PSA 10 Value, PSA 9 Value, and Gem Rate.

Expected Value = PSA 10 Value x Gem Rate + PSA 9 Value x (100% - Gem Rate) - Grading Costs - Selling Fees

But in this case, there was nothing available to determine the PSA 9 value, so we used a shortcut. To do this, we estimate a multiple and use this to calculate the PSA 9 value based on recent PSA 10 sales. You can read a bit more about Gem Rates & Multiples here.

In this case, we decided to use a 2.35x multiple, meaning that we assumed that a PSA 10 is worth 2.35x more than a PSA 9 of this card. That number is more of a feel thing than an exact science, but we’ve found this number tends to be roughly accurate for Topps Chrome Rookie Autos and Bowman Chrome First Autos. But at the end of the day, this is a rough estimate meaning that there is a bit of additional risk with bidding based on these numbers.

In total, to calculate our PSA 10 and PSA 9 values based on just our one recent sale shown above, we estimated the PSA 10 value at $800, and the PSA 9 value as $800 / 2.35 = $340. Note that we went a bit below the recent PSA 10 sale of $823 to be conservative.

Step 5: Find the Gem Rate

This is one of the easy parts. For this we go to gemrate.com and searched for “Jordan Walker Orange Wave Auto”. You can see the exact results of this search at this link.

We found that the Gem Rate was 57.1%. Normally we look at the card’s condition and adjust our Expected Gem Rate for our specific card a bit above or below the average, but in this case, we felt that 57.1% was a good estimate based on the condition of our card.

Step 6: Calculate Max Bid

At this point we have all the numbers we need to calculate our maximum bid.

PSA 10 Value: $800
PSA 9 Value: $340
Gem Rate: 57.1%

Following the formula from Step 4, we find that the Expected Value of this card is about $466. From here, we divide by our desired return on investment to find our Max Bid.

Target ROI: 25%
Max Bid: $466 / 1.25 = $373

Following this process, we placed a bid for $373.

Step 7: Sometimes You Win

In this case, we got lucky, winning this auction for $296.52. This means that our Expected Profit is equal to the Expected Value less our purchase price.

Expected Profit: $466 - $296 = $170

The process here isn't complicated, but it does take repetition since you'll lose more auctions than you win. We win roughly one in every five to ten bids, and some of the cards you do win won't gem. That’s the nature of it, although the EV approach means that the cards that do gem should make enough money to pay for the ones that don’t.

And before we start, I recommend you check out our grading resources:

• The Complete Guide to PSA Grading: How To Get More PSA 10s

• How to Find PSA 10 Contenders on eBay

Subscribe now

2017 Pokémon Sun & Moon Mewtwo GX #78

This is a fun one because my business partner and I had a real debate about this one. And the debate was mainly centered around these white dots on the back of the card, which spanned around all 4 borders on the back.

Part of what made this an interesting debate was that the card is worth about $8,000 as a PSA 10, while we paid only $450 for it. In other words, if we think there is even a small chance of this card grading as a 10, it would be well worth the risk. Looking at PSA 10s on the market, you can see some of them have issues like this.

For example, this is a PSA 10 that was recently sold on eBay:

With that said, the cards with the defects most similar to ours tended to have lower certification numbers, meaning they were graded by PSA years ago. This means that these grades were assessed when PSA grading standards were less strict. It also means that these defects may have emerged after the initial grading, while the cards were in the PSA slabs.

Overall, I’m okay with this decision to sell the card as is, especially since we still made a profit, but if it were solely my decision I still would have submitted it.

2018 Topps Shohei Ohtani #700

This one was a pretty easy decision. There was just too much scratching on the front to consider submitting this card. With that said, we’ve bought a lot of these Topps Paper Shohei Ohtani rookie cards, and in general we haven’t been super happy with the condition. Lots of them are coming scratched like this, so as a result we’ve mostly stopped buying them.

One final note, these are actually not as obvious as you might think without having proper lighting. Investing in a good desk light to see these flaws is key if you’re grading.

2025 Zekrom ex Black Bolt #172

This was one that we decided not to submit primarily due to centering. I’ve marked in red exactly how we measured the top and bottom borders of this card. Remeasuring this now for this post, I measured the centering at about 56/44, which is technically outside of PSA’s required 55/45 range.

Interestingly, PSA has this note on their website regarding PSA 10 grading standards:

*Centering Note: At the grader's sole discretion, a small variance may be permitted on occasion based on the card’s overall eye appeal.

In the case of our card, I felt that eye appeal was not great, meaning that the card actually looks more off center than it really is. This was a key reason we decided to flip it, but I still think there’s actually a solid argument that we should have submitted this card.

2018 Shohei Ohtani Topps Chrome #HMT1

This corner was badly damaged making this an easy decision to not submit. Anytime a card gets delivered with this kind of defect it’s a bit disappointing, but we actually made a small gain selling the ungraded due to the rising Ohtani market.

We continue to buy lots of these, but in this post, I want to highlight some of the more unique cards we’re buying, including some rare numbered cards that you don’t see on the market everyday.

These cards are often interesting, because it’s not always easy to determine the exact market price of them. Additionally, you have less competing listings on the market. This gives you the flexibility to price these cards higher, but you also run the risk of going weeks or months without selling them.

Regardless, let’s take a look at some of these cards.

Subscribe now

1. 2025 Phoenix Color Blast Jaxson Dart

The Expected Value math on the 2025 Phoenix Color Blast Football cards is generally solid, but not amazing. We bought this at about 40% Expected Profitability, which isn’t bad but it’s not quite as high as Downtown Football was a few months back.

This is also interesting because the Gem Rate on Phoenix Color Blast was very high last year, but overall it’s below 50% this year (this card in particular is at 50.7%). I haven’t had enough of these in hand yet to know exactly what’s driving this, although from looking at listings I can tell the centering is less consistent in 2025 than it was in 2024.

Another interesting variable here is that 2025 Topps Chrome Football just recently released. We’ll see what kind of impact this has on Panini pricing. From what I’ve seen on the market, it seems that Phoenix inserts and case hits in general were very sparsely produced this year, which should help it retain value.

On Jaxson Dart specifically, I find him to be the most interesting quarterback from the 2025 class. The Giants are trending up and hopefully star receiver Malik Nabers will be healthy soon, Dart has shown flashes of being great (but has had some really bad games as well), and John Harbaugh is coming in next season as his new coach. I think the sky is the limit, but the downside is high too. A little high risk, high reward can be fun.

2. 2023 Phoenix White Lazer Victor Wembanyama /150

I’ve never actually seen this card before, but basically anything Wembanyama is worth looking at these days. There’s not a lot of historical sales, but I was able to estimate a PSA 10 Value of $700 and a Gem Rate of 74.3%. This was a pretty easy decision to buy for $245. The card looks clean too.

There’s only one of these currently on the market, and it’s a PSA 10 listed at $1,250. That’s a good sign for us as Wembanyama starts to dominate in NBA playoff games.

3. 2024 Panini Revolution Kaboom! Stephon Castle

Stephon Castle has been on my radar as a potential target, but we just hadn’t pulled the trigger until now. Mainly because there’s only a handful of his cards that are expensive enough raw for us to consider (we generally target raw cards worth $100 or more).

With that said, this market is interesting, because based on my estimates we’ll actually make solid money on this card if it grades a 9. We estimated the PSA 10 Value/PSA 9 Value/Gem Rate of this card at $3,900/$2,200/32%, but bought it for just $1,500. This is a real needle mover for us, as we only buy a few cards in this price range per month.

4. 2019 Bowman Chrome Gunnar Henderson Blue Wave Auto /150

Honestly, this is the kind of purchase that gets me fired up. I think Gunnar is an underrated player, and Bowman Chrome Draft is one of my favorite products. Add in that this card design looks amazing and it’s numbered 1/150, and I’m all in.

Of course, this is still a business decision, and the numbers supported this one. We estimated the market at $2,500/$1,250/52%, and bought the card for about $1,150.

From 2012 to 2019, he accumulated a total of 71.7 bWAR, while slashing .308/.422/.587 with 280 home runs and 196 stolen bases. He won 3 MVPs, while being robbed of at least 2 more.

Without going into all the details, we know what happened from here. Trout’s prime was cut short with all sorts of injuries: meniscus, UCL, back, calf, and more. From 2020-2025, Trout played just 449 games, an average of 75 per year, and accumulated a total of 15.3 bWAR. When he was on the field, Trout was still a good player, but not the same MVP-caliber guy that we all took for granted the decade prior.

Subscribe now

But is this changing in 2026?

Mike Trout has started the season on a tear, with a .971 OPS and 1.3 bWAR in his first 21 games. Impressively, he’s manned the outfield in 19 of those games, after primarily serving as a DH in 2025.

Additionally, his early season hot streak seems to be backed up by quality of contact metrics, although these have been good for pretty much the entirety of Trout’s career.

The one thing that stands out so far though is that Trout’s strikeout rate is down to 19.4% so far this season, after being well above 30% in 2025. While players can be productive even with high K%, putting the ball in play more often means that strong quality of contact has more opportunity to turn into production.

Trout’s Topps Update Rookie Card Is Up 33%

As you might have guessed, all this has led to a surge in Mike Trout’s card market so far in 2026. Below is a chart of the 2011 Topps Update Mike Trout Rookie Card, which is his most popular card on the market.

In total, Trout’s PSA 10 card is up 32.8% to $1,175 since mid February, although it’s important to note that this has occurred while the entirety of the baseball card market has been increasing. With that said, this begs the question, has Trout done enough so far in 2026 to warrant this kind of price increase?

The Outlook: ZiPS 3-Year Projections

To evaluate this question, we’re going to look at Fangraphs’ 3-year ZiPS projections. This is convenient for 2 reasons. The first is that they’re readily available and considered amongst the most accurate projections. And second, we can look at a 3 year outlook, which is an important window for the 34 year old as he approaches career milestones like 500 homeruns and 100 WAR.

With that said, the projections paint a bit of a bleak picture.

In total, between now and the end of 2028, they project Trout to play just 303 games with fairly pedestrian numbers. His OPS is never projected to surpass .800, and he’s projected just 2.8 WAR in total. If this is really all Trout has left in the tank, I’m not sure why his prices would be increasing now.

But of course, projections aren’t everything, and I think it’s safe to assume that if Trout can stay healthy, he at least has a chance to play at an All Star (or at least above average) level. In spite of the aforementioned injury-riddled seasons from 2020-2025, Trout still had a .913 OPS in that timeframe, and a per-162 game pace of 5.5 bWAR per season.

I’m not a projections expert, but I do think ZiPS is overweighting the down season Trout had in 2025. I think there’s a lot of reason to believe that Trout will at least continue to be a great hitter when healthy, even if overall he’s not the same player he was in his prime.

Final Outlook: Putting the Pieces Together

I don’t think we’re going to see another MVP season out of Mike Trout, and that’s not exactly a hot take. However, I do think he can be a borderline All Star caliber player for a few more seasons.

If Trout can stay healthy, we could see him reach some key milestones: 2000 hits, 500 home runs, and 100 bWAR en route to one of the easiest first ballot Hall of Fame selections of our lifetimes. Further milestones like 600 home runs are not completely out of the question, although they would require him to be on the field more often than not over the next 5 to 6 seasons. A World Series ring with the Halos would also help his collectability in the long term, but that seems highly unlikely at best.

With all that said, I’m fine with the bump in value we’re seeing in Trout cards now. I think last season he proved he still has it in him to stay on the field, as he was able to play 130 games in 2025. Now in 2026, Trout’s reminding us that he can still hit at an elite level. Let’s just hope he can keep it up.

Top Mike Trout Cards To Invest In

While the market context is interesting, our approach is always the same. We look to buy cards that are profitable to grade based on Expected Value, without trying to predict the ups and downs of the market. With that said, here are a few Trout cards that are worth looking into for either an investment or grading approach.

2011 Topps Update Mike Trout

Notes: This is the Trout card we’ve bought the most of, and a great choice for grading. Raw cards go for around $350, while PSA 10s are now over $1,100. Average gem rate is about 45%. We’ve also graded quite well on these.

2026 Topps Mike Trout All Kings

Notes: All Kings cards are on fire right now, so I felt that this was worth putting in here. It’s too early to consider grading this card (I haven’t seen a single PSA sale yet), but if you’re looking to invest in Trout in general, this is one of his most liquid cards right now. These are worth just under $700.

2011 Topps Update Mike Trout Diamond Anniversary

Notes: This is similar to the above Trout card in terms of grading profit, but it’s a much higher ticket card. Raw cards are selling for nearly $1,500, while PSA 10s are approaching $5,000. These have an average Gem Rate of 47.7%.

2010 Bowman Platinum Mike Trout Prospect Auto

Notes: Admittedly, Bowman Platinum isn’t exactly a top tier brand, but at the same time this feels incredibly low for a rookie auto of an all time legend. With that said, don’t buy this card to grade, as it has just a 3.9% Gem Rate. This would be more of an investment play.

2011 Mike Trout Bowman Chrome Draft

Notes: I don’t recommend buying this to grade, as it has a Gem Rate of just 19.2%. But given the popularity of Bowman Chrome (and that this is not a paper card), this could be a good choice to hold longer term.

With a few weeks of the season under our belts, we’re going to take a look at some of the biggest risers in card value so far, as well as assess which ones we’re targeting to buy and grade right now.

One more note, we're only looking at cards with at least 5 PSA 10 sales in the last 60 days. The logic is simple: we try to only research cards that are abundant enough to easily purchase.

Subscribe now

We receive commission from affiliate links in this post, at no additional cost to you. Thanks for supporting BCG Cards!

2022 Sal Stewart Bowman Chrome Auto Refractor

As a prospect, Sal Stewart checks a lot of boxes I like. He was a top 35 overall prospect going into 2026, plus he cracked the big leagues at just 22 years old. And he hasn’t disappointed since he got there, as he currently leads the league in slugging percentage while slashing .323/.434/.726.

Accordingly, Stewart’s cards are rising with his Bowman First Refractor PSA 10 Auto now reaching nearly $1,000. We are actively targeting Stewart cards to buy and grade now, although we haven’t bought any yet.

2025 Kevin McGonigle Bowman Chrome Auto

This one is a bit different than the others, as Kevin McGonigle is a top 5 prospect in baseball and a guy we’ve been buying all offseason. Still, he’s started the season with a .313/.421/.484 slash line and a 1.2 bWAR in his first 18 games.

Tack on McGonigle’s recent 8 year $150M contract, and you can imagine why his market continues to surge, with his PSA 10 Bowman First Auto now over $1,000. I could see McGonigle being one of the top players to target if you’re buying and grading baseball cards this season, so keep an eye on his performance through the year.

2022 Chase DeLauter Bowman Chrome Auto

Chase DeLauter, the Cleveland Guardians’ former #2 overall prospect, started his rookie season red hot, hitting 4 home runs in just three games, leading to the big spike you see in his chart above. He’s cooled off a bit since then, but he still boasts a .929 OPS in his first 17 career big league games, leading to his Bowman First Auto increasing 125% since mid-February.

DeLauter is definitely on our radar after his solid start, and we’ll look to buy both his base Bowman Chrome Auto and some of his refractors as well.

2020 Jordan Walker Bowman Chrome Auto

Former bust turned superstar? Time will tell if this is the best way to describe Jordan Walker.

After slashing just a combined .240/.302/.378 in his first 3 big league seasons, Walker has started 2026 hot with a league-leading 8 home runs and a 1.083 OPS in his first 18 games.

That’s led to Walker’s PSA 10 Bowman First Auto rising to about $500, and firmly entering our radar as a card to look out for this season, especially if Walker’s hot start continues.

2020 Andy Pages Bowman Chrome Auto Refractor

Andy Pages was already flirting with star status in 2025, as he accumulated 3.8 bWAR while manning all three outfield positions for the World Series-winning Dodgers. Notably though, Pages started the year hot to the tune of a .804 OPS in the first half of the season compared to a .727 OPS in the second half.

Now in 2026, Pages is again off to a hot start, with a league-leading .409 batting average and a 1.148 OPS. Pages has shown he can be a very solid player, and playing for the Dodgers is always good for card values. This is another guy who could emerge as a solid grading target if he can continue his hot start.

2024 James Tibbs III Bowman Chrome Auto

This one is interesting to me, because Tibbs is not a top 100 prospect in baseball, although he is the Dodgers #10 overall prospect. With that said, he does have 8 home runs in his first 17 AAA games this season, and could find himself a part of the top team in baseball shortly.

With his Bowman Chrome First Auto just now reaching about $300 as a PSA 10, we’re not buying Tibbs yet, but that could change quickly when he gets called up this season.

1. Create the Right Filter

There’s no one right way to create a good auctions filter, but the key is to take the hundreds of thousands of cards that are available for sale and consolidate them to about 1,000 listings that you actually are interested in. From there, you’ll find a handful of cards to bid on every day. You can read our Complete Guide to Ebay Filters here.

The first step to doing this is to set a minimum price threshold to clear out all the cards that are too low. For us, we only buy cards for about $75 or more. This alone will remove about 80% of cards.

The next step is to sort your results by “Ending Soonest + with bids”. The “with bids” is the key. For every card that gets bought on auction, there are 10 cards priced well above their market value that don’t get any bids. By only looking at cards with bids, you filter all of these out.

Finally, and this is optional, but if you’re doing market research and you know which players and Pokémon you’re looking for, you can search just for these cards. This is exactly what we do with the BCG Auction Tracker. By only selecting the cards we’re most interested in buying, we remove thousands of listings that we would have been unlikely to consider.

2. Prescreening for Interesting Cards

In the morning, I like to go through and glance through all the cards that are ending later in the day. I will look through the listings and look for cards with PSA 10 values and Gem Rates that are sufficiently high to be profitable (you can find our Complete Guide to Gem Rates and Multiples here).

I’ll also make sure that the condition of these cards is at least decent. This means just checking that all 4 corners are sharp and that the card is centered.

This is also a great time to ask the seller questions if you need to. In other words, if you need a closeup of a corner, or pictures of the card outside of the case, now is the time to ask.

Each of these cards goes onto my eBay watchlist before moving on to steps 3 and 4.

3. Determine Your Expected Gem Rate

In order to figure out what to pay for a card, you’ll first need to decide how likely it is to grade as a PSA 10 (we call this the Expected Gem Rate). This means after you’ve completed your prescreen, you’ll need to inspect each card more closely.

One of the keys here is to use the average Gem Rate of the card as an anchor. For example, if I’m looking at a card that has an average Gem Rate of 30%, I’m probably not going to assume the card I’m buying has a 70% chance of grading as a PSA 10.

I tend to keep my Expected Gem Rate estimate fairly close to the average, meaning that I usually won’t go more than 5-10% above or below the average. You can find the average Gem Rate at gemrate.com.

If you’re not sure how to evaluate the likelihood that a card will grade as a PSA 10, you can read our Complete Guide to PSA Grading here.

4. Calculating Your Maximum Bids

Once you have the Expected Gem Rate of your card, you can calculate your Maximum Bids. This is based on an Expected Value approach, so I highly recommend reading our Complete Guide to Expected Value now if you haven’t already.

Basically, at this point we input the following numbers into our spreadsheet: PSA 10 Value, PSA 9 Value, average Gem Rate, and Expected Gem Rate. From here we calculate the Expected Value After Fees of the card.

EV After Fees = PSA 10 Value x Expected Gem Rate + PSA 9 Value x (1 - Expected Gem Rate) - Selling Fees - Grading Costs

In other words, this is your average selling price net of fees of the card, based on how likely you think it is to grade as a PSA 10.

From here, we take this number and build in our margin. In other words, if we want to earn a $50 profit margin, our Maximum Bid is equal to the EV After Fees minus $50.

Maximum Bid = EV After Fees - Target Profit Margin

You can also try to earn a certain return on investment, instead of a specific dollar amount. In this case, the math looks like this.

Maximum Bid = EV After Fees / (1 + Target ROI)

In our case, we generally target about a $50 margin for cards under $200, and a 25% ROI for cards above $200. What you choose to target is totally up to you.

5. Place Your Bids

This is the easy part. Now that you have a list of cards you want to buy, and you know what you’re willing to pay, you need to place your bids.

There are two options for this. The first is to set it and forget it. Once you know your Maximum Bid, you can bid the card right then and there, and you’ll find out later if you won or lost.

The other option is to bid each card at the last second. You can set a timer on your phone and go back and make bids right as the auctions are expiring. Many people recommend doing this to have a stronger chance of winning, but for me I prefer the first option. It’s hard to say how much bidding at the last second actually helps you, but I do know that it takes a lot more time and planning, and as a result I don’t feel like the additional time is worth the benefit.

With this approach, you should be able to find profitable cards to buy on a daily basis.