The Cards We're Not Grading: When To Cut Your Losses
We don't submit roughly 15% of the cards we buy. Let's take a look at some of these.
When it comes to PSA grading, I always stress that imperfect cards can grade as PSA 10s. However, that doesn’t mean you should just submit anything. This post will break down some cards we’ve bought recently that we decided not to submit.
Any card that we decide not to submit, we sell as is on eBay. We generally take small losses on these cards, roughly equal to the cost of eBay fees and shipping. The important thing though, is that we take larger losses if we pay to grade these cards and get a PSA 9 or worse. So while we think that it’s very important to take risks on imperfect cards, it’s also important to avoid submitting cards with extremely low chances of grading as 10s.
And if you haven’t already, I highly recommend you read our PSA grading resources:
With that said, let’s take a look at some of the cards we decided not to submit.
2017 Patrick Mahomes Panini Rookies & Stars
As you can see, this card has two issues: a damaged corner on the front and a dimple on the back.
The corner alone is enough to basically guarantee this card won’t gem. The damage is too large, extending into the surface of the card. I think the impact of the dimple is more debatable. If it’s a factory defect, it’s possible that this alone wouldn’t kill the card’s chances of gemming. But if it’s an indent that damaged the card after production, it certainly would kill its chances. Regardless, this is a card that we are not submitting.
2024 Caitlin Clark Select Silver Prizm
This one is interesting because we’ve actually had cards with larger scratches than this grade as PSA 10s. There are two problems though with this one:
The scratch runs fairly deep into the card.
This scratch is visible even without direct lighting on the spot of the defect.
If the scratch were a bit harder to see, meaning that without direct lighting it were completely invisible, we might take our chances on this card. Even as is, I think this may have a small chance of grading as a PSA 10 (around 5-10%). With that said, this defect is significant enough that the smarter decision is not to submit it.
2022 Brock Purdy Contenders Rookie Ticket Auto
Like the first card, it’s hard to say if these dimples are a factory defect or represent damage applied to the card by the previous owner. With that said, I find that back dimples are less common than front dimples, and I rarely see dimples on Panini Contenders cards. In general, I think that weird issues are worse than common issues, because they are more unpredictable. Given that this is an unusual issue, and that there is not just one dimple but a cluster of 4, we decided not to submit this card.
2018 Shohei Ohtani Topps Chrome
While this may look like a small defect, edge issues are tricky, and this one in particular extends deep into the surface of the card. This card is closer to a PSA 8 than a 10.
I think it’s becoming increasingly important for collectors to be able to self-grade, at least to a certain degree. And that goes for both slabbed and raw cards. This article is really helpful in this regard.