2023 All Aces Pregrade Review
The Shohei Ohtani All Aces is a major buy, but we're still waiting to see how they grade.
If you’ve followed this newsletter for a while, you know we’ve been buying the 2023 Topps All Aces Shohei Ohtani card pretty aggressively. We’ve put around $4,000 into raw copies of this card and are still actively buying.
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.