A Sports Card Grader's Guide to Pokémon
Why the transition from sports to Pokémon is easier than you think, and how we generated a 55% ROI in our first year.
If you’re grading for profit, at any given time there are certain cards that will deliver higher average profits than others. Right now, Pokémon is leading the way, which makes learning about Pokémon cards more important than ever.
Now, I understand a lot of my audience is primarily interested in sports cards, so this post will aim to give sports card graders basic tools to successfully start grading Pokémon. We actually started buying and grading Pokémon just last year, and we’ve had very strong results doing it.
In total, our gem rate has been exactly 72.5% on over 250 cards, and we’ve generated over a 55% ROI. All that is to say: if you have the skillset to grade sports cards well, the transition is not as hard as you might think.
Subscribe to get our most profitable Pokémon card picks, sent straight to your inbox.
The Fundamentals Are The Same
Our sports card grading business is built on Expected Value. I’ve included the EV formula below, but anyone unfamiliar can read the full guide here.
Expected Value = PSA 10 Value x Gem Rate + PSA 9 Value x (100% - Gem Rate) - Grading Costs - Selling Fees
The good news is that the math doesn’t change for Pokémon. A sports card with $400 / $150 / 55% (PSA 10 Value / PSA 9 Value / Gem Rate) will have the exact same Expected Value as a Pokémon card worth $400 / $150 / 55%.
This means that fundamentally, nothing changes. If you submit good condition cards with positive Expected Profit, there’s no reason that Pokémon cards can’t be just as profitable as sports cards (if not more).
“Star Power” Is Still King
Our approach to sports cards is always to buy the most popular players in the league, as this is what usually leads to strong Expected Profit. For instance, our most bought players in each sport this year are Shohei Ohtani, Drake Maye, and Victor Wembanyama.
Pokémon is more or less the same. We target the most popular Pokémon, probably some of the same Pokémon you have heard of even if you’ve never collected the cards.
What this means is you don’t have to learn the entire market overnight. If you start with Pikachu, Charizard, Gengar, Umbreon, and Mewtwo, you will have more than enough targets to generate solid grading profits. You’ll also find more targets gradually through your own market research and by reading this newsletter.
Pay Attention to New Releases
Just like with sports cards, new releases tend to be profitable because a new release leads to hundreds of thousands of ungraded, pack fresh cards hitting the market. So it’s helpful to be aware of what cards are new on the market.
To do this, you don’t even need to follow a release calendar: just by actively buying in the market you will see listings for cards from the current year (i.e., seeing 2026 cards on the market today). This is your signal to investigate further.
But remember, buying new releases can be risky without a plan. We use a Market Adjustment framework, meaning that we assume anything that we buy will decrease in value while it’s being graded. You can read more about this approach here.
Set Knowledge Is Optional
You don’t need to know about specific sets or card variants to grade profitably. As long as you can find individual cards that are profitable, you can do just fine buying those.
At the same time, knowing different sets well can be helpful. In general, having more knowledge of each product will help you to make fewer mistakes, identify trends in price movements that lead you to profitable cards, or to understand common grading defects across different products.
While you don’t absolutely need this yet, I highly recommend the Sleeve No Card Behind YouTube channel (to which I have no affiliation) to get you started. It explains many of the fundamentals in a beginner friendly way. You can find this linked here.
Pokémon Cards Are Printed In Many Languages
Pokémon cards are printed in many languages, including English, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, German, Indonesian, and more.
We’ll keep it simple for this section. English cards are the most relevant for profitable grading, Japanese cards are on the rise (and a real target of ours), and Simplified Chinese cards are worth buying as well. We don’t buy any other languages at the moment, but that could always change as markets evolve.
More Supply = More Opportunity
Pokémon is great for reselling because a popular card may have tens or hundreds of thousands of copies in circulation. What this means is that researching one card can lead to 5 or 10 profitable purchases of that card. In other words, when it comes to Pokémon, a little bit of market research can go a long way in terms of increasing profit.
Volatility
We see bigger price swings on Pokémon cards than sports cards. But having some of your inventory in Pokémon can provide diversity (and huge profits at times). I’ve said this before, but we are fine with risk. In my view, it’s how you balance risk that’s important. You can read our guide on how and why to diversify your card inventory here.
Grading Pokémon Cards
This section will build on our Complete Guide to PSA grading. If you haven’t read it yet, you can find it here.
With that said, there are a few things that are useful to know specifically when grading Pokémon cards. At the end of the day, Pokémon cards are still evaluated based on centering, corners, surface, and edges, but there are a few nuances that are different from sports cards.
Centering:
Pokémon cards have small borders: This makes it really hard to see if a card is centered just by the eye test. As a beginner, I recommend always measuring the borders to make sure they’re within 55/45 (or at least close).
Pokémon cards are often printed on a slant: This means that centering may be better on some parts of the card than others. I recommend picking the worst point and measuring from there. I have an example attached below. Note how the left border is larger towards the bottom of the card than the top.
Back Whitening:
Whitening on the back of Pokémon cards is extremely common due to the dark color of the surface. I’ll attach an example below.
Here are some simple rules to follow:
Surface dots: Cards with small white dots on the back surface can still grade as 10s. We submit these regularly.
Back corners: We only submit cards with back corner whitening if it is extremely minor. In most cases, it’s best to just avoid these.
Whitening on edges: Don’t submit if you see whitening on edges. This can easily bring a card to an 8 or lower.
Takeaways
The opportunity in Pokémon is real. We’re finding more Pokémon cards that are highly profitable right now based on Expected Value than any other category, and all the fundamentals behind grading sports cards profitably apply to Pokémon cards.
If you already understand EV and know how to grade cards well, you have everything you need. The easiest way to start is to pick 3 Pokémon, make a search filter for them, get familiar with just these markets, and make your first purchase. The rest comes with reps.