PSA Submission Profitability Breakdown: Drake Maye’s Rise Leads the Way
Overall ROI of around 55%
In this post I’m going to break down the profitability of a recent Value Max submission with PSA. This was an interesting submission for us: it was a smaller sub with just 6 cards, but also fairly high value since each card cost $600 or more raw.
It was a mixed bag too in terms of market movement. The submission was football heavy, containing Drake Maye, Joe Burrow, Jayden Daniels, and JJ McCarthy cards. Drake Maye is the only player up in value (a lot) since we bought these cards in September, while the other 3 are down.
Overview: Our General Strategy
For raw cards worth $200 or higher, we aim to earn a 25% return on investment from our initial purchase price. Generally, we target a gem rate of 50% or higher.
This submission was with the Value Max service level. Here’s a quick refresher on how that works:
Maximum Value Threshold: This tier is for cards with a “declared value” of $1000 or less.
Upcharges: Any card with a market value of $1,000 or more after grading will be upcharged, although PSA tends to be a bit lenient with this.
The Submission by the Numbers
This submission consisted of 6 cards (4 football, 1 baseball, 1 Pokémon) with a total raw value of $4,870 (before submission costs).
For this submission, we projected a gem rate (the percentage of cards that grade as PSA 10s) of exactly 50%. We overperformed by a bit on this one, with 4/6 cards receiving PSA 10s.
Individual Card Breakdown
To assess the estimated profitability, we’ll go through each card one by one. Let’s start by looking at everything in the submission.
We will go through each of these cards in order. A couple of notes before we start:
We consign our cards with PSA. Selling fees for cards from $500 - $999 are 12%. Selling fees for cards over $1,000 are 10%. Cards sold via PSA Partner Offers are not subject to selling fees.
The total grading cost before upcharges was about $67 per card.
2 cards have sold so far and 4 are listed for sale. I’ll note which sales actually happened and which sales are estimates.
1. 2024 Phoenix Color Blast Drake Maye PSA 10
Total Investment: $942 ($786 purchase price + $67 grading cost + 89 upcharge)
Sale Price: $2,995 (actual)
Net Payout: $2,695 (sale price minus 10% fee)
Net Profit: $1,753
This was the big winner of the sub, as Drake Maye’s market has absolutely exploded this NFL season. We bought this hoping to sell a PSA 10 for about $1,500, so this market roughly doubled since the time we bought it. You can see CardLadder’s Drake Maye index is up 294% over the last 3 months.
2. 2020 Joe Burrow Draft Picks Color Blast PSA 10
Total Investment: $680 ($613 purchase price + $67 grading cost)
Sale Price: $1,200 (estimated)
Net Payout: $1,080 (sale price minus 10% fee)
Net Profit: $400
We bought this card at a (very) unlucky time, as we actually won this card on auction back in September just hours before Burrow suffered a near season ending foot injury. Overall it’s been a rough year for Joe, as he missed more than half the season and the Bengals missed the playoffs again.
Note that this is a really hard market to estimate. CardLadder’s value of $1,400 is probably a bit too high, so I’m adjusting the value down to $1,200.
3. 2024 JJ McCarthy Phoenix Color Blast PSA 10
Total Investment: $931 ($864 purchase + $67 grading)
Sale Price: $640 (estimated via CardLadder)
Net Payout: $563 (sale price minus 12% fee)
Net Profit: -$368
It’s never great to lose over $300 even while getting a PSA 10, but that’s probably what will happen here. McCarthy had a rough season, battling through multiple injuries and failing to breakout in his first season as a starter in Kevin O’Connell’s offense. When we bought this card, we were expecting to sell a PSA 10 for about $1,700, so this is a large decline in just 3 months.
4. Jayden Daniels / Terry McLaurin Optic Downtown PSA 9
Total Investment: $1,071 ($1,004 purchase + $67 grading)
Sale Price: $776 (estimated via CardLadder)
Net Payout: $683 (value minus 12% fee)
Net Profit: -$388
This is another rough one. Jayden Daniels is one of the biggest fallers of 2025, after having one of the best rookie seasons ever for a quarterback the prior year. In 2025, Daniels battled injuries and mediocre performance all season long and saw his market steadily decline. I’m actually a bit surprised we won’t be taking a bigger loss on this one.
Here’s a look at CardLadder’s Jayden Daniels index, which is down about 33% over the past 3 months.
5. 2024 Topps Chrome Wyatt Langford Orange Logofractor Auto PSA 9
Total Investment: $718 ($651 purchase + $67 grading)
Sale Price: $508 (estimated via CardLadder)
Net Payout: $447 (Value minus 13% fee)
Net Profit: -$271
This is another one that is pretty tough to value, so we just stuck to CardLadder’s estimate here. This isn’t a player that I buy often but it seems like his market has been fairly stable since we bought it. It’s pretty common to lose money on PSA 9s, but this is still a higher than our usual losses.
6. 2025 Umbreon Prismatic Evolutions 161 PSA 10
Total Investment: $1,256 ($950 purchase + $67 grading + $239 upcharge)
Sale Price: $2,835 (actual – PSA partner offer accepted)
Net Profit: $1,579
There’s not too much to say on this one, other than that we bought this for a great price and made a great return. This card and the Drake Maye Color Blast was responsible for basically all the profit in this submission.
Also note that we accepted a PSA offer on this one, so there was no selling fee.
Results
Overall this was a very strong submission, mainly due to huge profits on the Drake Maye and Umbreon cards.
Looking at the ROI of the submission, we project to generate $2,705 of profit on $4,870 of upfront investment, good for a 55.5% return on investment. This is well above our target of 25%.
Takeaways
Market Fluctuation Produced Weird Results: We’re losing over $300 on the JJ McCarthy PSA 10, but the submission was still very strong overall. Drake Maye’s rise was a big reason for that. I think it’s likely we would have had similar results if all markets had just stayed steady.
Big Losses, Bigger Gains: The name of the game is to maximize gains and minimize losses. You can afford to lose on PSA 9s as long as you win big on PSA 10s.
The High End of the Pokémon Market Stays Strong: While Pokémon cards in the sub $500 range have fallen over the past few months, higher end cards have performed a lot better. The Umbreon Prismatic Evolutions card held its value nicely during this time span.