Cards We're Not Grading #2: Grail Mewtwo Doesn't Make The Cut
We may have been too conservative on these...
Usually, I write these posts to show you which cards are smart to grade, and what cards have defects that make it not worth the time and money. But as I reviewed our pictures and notes, we may have been a bit too conservative on these cards. This post will explain the rationale behind why we didn’t submit each of these 4 cards, and why some of these decisions were debateable.
And before we start, I recommend you check out our grading resources:
BCG Auctions Tracker
The BCG Auctions Tracker is a tool that allows you to find auctions ending soonest on eBay for all the players and Pokémon that are most profitable to grade. Note that we may receive compensation for any completed purchases.
The most recent update adds 2025 Phoenix Color Blast Football rookie cards. I’ve flagged a couple of these as profitable and am actively looking into buying more. We update this regularly, so you can always find the latest version here.
Try it out at the link below!
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.