PSA Grading Review #4: Is this Yamal Card Really Worth $5K??
Looking at results from our recent Value Max submission, with cards ranging from $500 to $5,000 in value.
It’s been about a month since I got grading results back from PSA, and this submission in particular is a great one to break down for a couple of reasons.
For one, it’s a Value Max Submission, meaning that these are all high value cards ($500+ raw). Also, none of these cards are perfect! All have noticeable issues that impact the grading. The trick is to know exactly how impactful these issues are.
In total, this was a 7 card submission, but we’re going to just break down 5 of the cards. The reason is that for the last two, the PSA scans are oversaturated and you can’t really see the card surfaces. In case you’re curious, both cards were 2025 Donruss Downtown! Tyler Shoughs. We got one PSA 10 and one PSA 9.
One final note before we start. Picture quality is better on our website, so I highly recommend you read this post on a computer at businessofcardgrading.com to see everything as clearly as possible.
As a reminder, you can find our Complete Guide to PSA Grading here.
1. 2022 Cal Raleigh Topps Chrome Auto Aqua Wave
Defects:
Pregrade:
Notes: Tiny ink marks on back. Near flawless otherwise.
Expected Gem Probability*: 80%
Thoughts:
We’ve given only 23 cards an 80% chance or higher of grading as a PSA 10, and this is just the 3rd one to grade as a PSA 9 (while the other 20 were 10s). It’s possible that we missed something on this card, but at the same time, there’s a reason we think about grading expectations in terms of probabilities. At the end of the day, grading is subjective.
As for the dots on the back, based on previous cards we’ve submitted, we’ve found these generally don’t have a big impact. I’m not sure if that’s what caused the 9 on this one.
*Expected Gem Probability is our estimate of how likely a card is to receive a PSA 10.
2. 2024 Drake Maye Kaboom! Horizontal
Defects:
Pregrade:
Notes: Front has some marks. These are mostly print marks which are very common on this card.
Expected Gem Probability: 60%
Thoughts:
While the pregrade notes mention multiple marks, some of these marks are pretty hard to see, so I decided to just show the most obvious one.
I think this is a fair grade, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if we got a PSA 10 (I know we’ve had worse cards get 10s). In general, Kabooms can be a tough grade because the material on the front is very susceptible to manufacturer defects.
With that said, this one hurts a bit because we bought it at the very peak, right before Drake Maye was set to play in the Super Bowl. We’ll take a sizeable loss here, but this was a risk we were willing to take. Sometimes buying guys shortly before deciding games in the championship can lead to losses and sometimes it can lead to massive profits (cough cough Shohei Ohtani).
3. 2023 Lamine Yamal Topps Ultimate Stage Auto
Defects:
Pregrade:
Notes: Back top edge has a bit of an indent/dimple. Bit of white on top back corners.
Expected Gem Probability: 50%
Thoughts:
It’s funny to see cards like this gem because if I had seen those corners in the eBay listing, I probably wouldn’t have even bought this card. With that said, this card could have gone either way, as it had just a couple minor defects on an otherwise clean card.
I’m not the biggest soccer fan, but it looks like FC Barcelona is having a rough year, but Yamal is playing well. It’s hard to say what this card is worth exactly since it doesn’t sell too often, but I’m estimating it’s somewhere between $2.5K and $5K. That sets this card up to be our biggest gain in this submission.
4. 2024 Konnor Griffin Bowman Chrome Auto
Defects:
Pregrade:
Notes: Front has a small handful of tiny marks. Back surface has some dimples and marks but not too bad. Nice otherwise.
Expected Gem Probability: 60%
Thoughts:
I decided to just show a couple marks on the front since you can’t really see the back defects on the PSA scans. Overall this is another card that I felt could go either way. It’s clean overall with a handful of very minor defects.
We got a good deal on this Konnor Griffin card back in January, so this is set to be another one of the most profitable cards for this submission.
5. 2025 Mega Charizard X EX #125
Defects:
Pregrade:
Notes: Top/Bottom and Left/Right centering are both borderline (on the front). Very faint vertical print line on back border.
Expected Gem Probability: 55%
Thoughts:
I bought this card a couple months back knowing that the centering wasn’t perfect (I estimated that Left/Right centering was slightly worse than 55/45). And that’s the thing about this card is while it has an average Gem Rate of around 60%, it’s so rare to actually find copies that are well centered.
If you’re not sure what I mean when I discuss centering measurements, I recommend getting on a laptop and zooming in and measuring the borders yourself. You’ll see the bottom border is a bit large, and the right border is a bit large.
As for the print line, this is going to be hard to see unless you are on your laptop on the BCG website where picture quality is higher. If you’re reading via email or mobile, you’ll just have to trust that it’s there.
Overall this Charizard card remains one of my favorite targets when I can get my hands on gradable copies. You can find these for around $900 while PSA 10s go for about $2,700.
I’ll add a link to these here, but fair warning, the tricky part is finding the ones that can actually gem.
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The most recent updates to this add Chase DeLauter and Sal Steward to the search filter, as both have had hot starts to the MLB seasons and have seen their Bowman First Autos rise significantly.
Try it out at the link below!
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