Who's Cracking $250 Slabs?

[FrankWakefield]

I followed along with the original post through about the first half of it. Until the logic of suggesting that the folks who crack cards out of slabs are less likely to crack a card out when the cost to slab a card got to $250 a pop... For me, that's not much of a factor at all. When I break a card out it's because I don't want it in the slab. I'm not about to reslab it.

I have no intention to get a card graded at a cost of $250. But then I don't have any cards I'd get graded for $25... nor any I'd get graded for 25 cents. And not for 25 cents even if they'd come to my home or meet me at the bank with the ability to accept a card, grade it, and hand it back to me in 2 minutes or less.

For me, I'd rather spend that $250 on a few more cards. For folks who want everything graded, seems to me you'll have smaller collections and you'll be subject to the future whims of PSA and the like. Don't ya reckon?

[Republicaninmass]

Single mist purposeful loss of value a collector can do.


Your future family will thank you for it, when your cards are sold at a yard sale to Mr Mints great grand son for pennies on the dollar since they are not "authenticated" .

Selfish vile act!

All kidding aside, pretty silly, but one is free to do with ones own collection as they wish.


I recent bought a near signed set of 1952 topps at over 300 cards offered as raw with authentication. Come to find out, the owner had cracked almost every single one out of their slabs. They likely would have received 4x the amount had it been know, or had they still been graded. Fwiw PSA refused to reslab only 4 cards, saying they were ?authn

[frankbmd]

Originally Posted by FrankWakefield

I followed along with the original post through about the first half of it. Until the logic of suggesting that the folks who crack cards out of slabs are less likely to crack a card out when the cost to slab a card got to $250 a pop... For me, that's not much of a factor at all. When I break a card out it's because I don't want it in the slab. I'm not about to reslab it.

I have no intention to get a card graded at a cost of $250. But then I don't have any cards I'd get graded for $25... nor any I'd get graded for 25 cents. And not for 25 cents even if they'd come to my home or meet me at the bank with the ability to accept a card, grade it, and hand it back to me in 2 minutes or less.

For me, I'd rather spend that $250 on a few more cards. For folks who want everything graded, seems to me you'll have smaller collections and you'll be subject to the future whims of PSA and the like. Don't ya reckon?

My point was missed here. I'm looking for people who submit cards for $250 a pop. Under what conditions if any would they crack the slab. Granted slabbing is a sales tool, but the cost of playing the slabbing game has gotten too expensive for the majority of the TPG's customer base. There are a lot of crazy prices out there now, but the total number of 5, 6 and 7 figure cards is finite.

Yeah if you're selling cards for $80,000 a pop, $250 or more for a slab is chump change. And if the buyer plans to resell it for $120,000, by all means crack it out and enjoy it for a few months and resubmit it before you sell. With any luck you will get it back in less than a year.

[G1911]

I regularly crack out cards worth over $250. I don't alter them or resubmit them.

I own a handful of graded cards, I think 5-6 right now, all of which are trade bait or opportunistic buys I haven't yet decided are going into the trade bait box or into my collection. Every single other graded card that gets into my hands gets cracked out, regardless of it's value.

I've cracked well over a thousand graded cards by now, many over this value threshold. I place $0 of value on the opinion of a grader I do not know and of unknown expertise, if any whatsoever, in the sets I am collecting. Indeed, many of the cards I crack seem grossly overgraded (I just recently cracked a respected companies 3.5 with no less than 6 creases on close examination), or are simply not even what the label says (how many T219's are slabbed as T218's and vice versa for example? Quite a few), not to mention the numerous altered ones (some of them comically blatant). In fact, I actually bid slightly less on a graded card than the same raw card, since there is a small chance I will screw up on the cracking out and have found zero correlation to cards acquired in a slab being more likely to be unaltered or in any way superior.

Many cards I win graded are because they are not common cards, and one cannot be picky about their copy. I only have gotten a handful of 1950's Topps cards graded, for example, but many of my rare tobacco or candy cards came in a holder, because they appear rarely and I can't just go get a raw one for less money. For other cards, it's because they are tougher sets I'm building multiple copies of or even hoarding. Some cards and sets have greater than 50% of their 'slabbed population' actually sitting in my shoeboxes, cracked out, because I buy most copies that come up for sale.

I know this is blasphemous to the money and label collectors. To me, I collect cards I like and so I don't care about this, but even from a $ perspective I don't see how I'm actually losing out in the end. I have no intent to sell, if my collection is sold it will probably be after my death (or if I really screw up my life and need to turn my throw-away hobby spending into cash). I'm young, I can't reasonably expect to die or screw up life that badly in the foreseeable future. In 40+ years when they're chucking my body into a grave, slabbed cards I have now would need to be cracked and submitted to whatever grader is the big grader then, or at least put into a more modern slab. No real value is being lost unless one intends to flip in the foreseeable future. The auction house or whoever can deal with grading them when I'm dead, during my life I'll spend the grading money on actual cards. I'll sell stacks of flips to people collecting those at a major discount.