Recent Personal Observations from Vintage Card Grading Trends

[53toppscollector]

From my own grading experience with both companies, and from watching lots of grading reveal videos, the one constant is the inconsistency from both companies. SGC seems to be a bit better in terms of their consistency, but PSA is all over the place. Lack of consistency is a huge issue, and one that seems inherent when you are talking about subjectively grading hundreds of thousands of cards in a short period of time.

I know this is nothing new, but the big problem is the lack of transparency or understanding of why your card got the grade it did. You get a card back, you get a numeric grade, and you get nothing else. Did they dock the card for corners? For centering? Did they detect a wrinkle under magnification that I can't see with my 30x loupe?

TAG grading has introduced the detailed grading report for every card. I don't know if TAG is going to survive, if they will catch on at all, and I suspect they won't until they branch out into older cards. But their report for every card contains detailed scans that show where they find surface issues, it gives exact measurements for centering and corners to indicate why your card got the grade it did. Has TAG's measuring methods been verified? I don't know. But I've watched a few of their reveal videos (I haven't submitted myself, since I only bother with vintage) and the level of detail is impressive. If the card gets a 9, you know exactly why it got a 9 based on the 4 key factors.

PSA continues to do massive volume, so they have no incentive to actually try to improve the customer experience or do value adds like grading reports. Even if a grader is only taking 30 seconds per card to assess a grade, you'd think the grader would need to input "sub grades" on the corners, edges, surface and centering to indicate how they got to the grade they gave the card. That info alone would be invaluable to people submitting their cards.

One thing PSA doesn't understand is sizing on American Beauty backed T206 cards. So many of them are labeled as miscut, when they were cut specifically for the AB sized packs they were distributed in. That always annoyed me.