I miss when the card mattered more than the grade. There is nothing wrong with protecting a card you care about or wanting proof that something is authentic. My problem is what grading has become. Somewhere along the way, collecting stopped being as much about the cards, the games, the trades, and the people around the table and started becoming about chasing a number on a plastic slab.
I’ve been collecting cards since I was probably ten years old. I started with Marvel cards. Back then, they were basically cards with artwork on them, which I may show off someday because I still own them.
I collected the 1993 Marvel Masterpieces collection and Spider-Man cards. There were some really cool collections back then with different artwork, and I was completely taken aback by it. Looking back, I think those cards helped push my interest in art at that age.
When I got into high school, I ended up taking Drawing and Drafting classes. Heck, at one point I even wanted to become an artist and work for Disney.
How dreams come and go when you’re a kid.
Funny enough, I did eventually become the artist I wanted to be, just in a completely different sense of the word.
But this is where dreams die and reality takes center stage, because I think grading trading cards has slowly hurt the hobby. Not just monetarily, either. I think it has also eroded some of the community and social interactions that once made collecting fun.
I miss those days when sharing stories, opening cards, building decks, and making trades created a sense of belonging between collectors.
Now, I have no issue with anyone who chooses to get their cards graded, whether we’re talking baseball cards, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Magic: The Gathering, Dragon Ball, or anything else. I see nothing wrong with wanting to take something you care about and protect it, especially if you want some form of authentication or condition verification.
What I don’t like is when the grade becomes more important than the collectible itself.
Scalping Cards
Before getting deeper into why I think grading has hurt the hobby, I want to talk about scalping and how it connects to the supply problem.
Look, I know a lot of collectors, especially people in the Pokémon community, are probably going to hate this part, but someone going into a store, buying the available supply, and then selling it online or even in their own store at a higher price is not automatically 100% in the wrong.
I know that isn’t going to be a popular statement.
At the same time, a store is completely within its rights to limit how much of something it chooses to sell to one person.
Oddly enough, at the end of the day, Target, Walmart, Amazon, and every other retailer are businesses. As harsh as it sounds, they aren’t stocking Pokémon cards because they want to make sure your kid completes their collection. They bought that inventory for a certain amount of money, they need to make that money back, and of course they need to make more than they paid for it.
Selling products costs money. Employees cost money. Buildings cost money. Shipping costs money. If businesses consistently sold everything at or below what it cost them, eventually they wouldn’t be businesses anymore.
Do I think it’s messed up when you go to a store day after day and never find any cards?
Sure.
Do I think it sucks when something goes online and seemingly sells out instantly?
Absolutely.
But we also don’t live in a fair world.
When it comes to people buying up Pokémon, Magic, sports cards, or whatever the hot collectible happens to be and reselling them, I think there are a couple of major reasons people get pulled into it.
- They aren’t making enough money from whatever job they’re currently doing, for any number of reasons.
- They saw somebody online selling the dream that you can make huge money buying and reselling whatever product happens to be hot.
I can tell you this much: the moment you see somebody selling a course, video, or guide telling you that you can make a ton of money doing X, there’s a good chance the easiest money has already been made.
Now the money isn’t necessarily in doing the thing.
It’s in selling you on doing the thing.
Let that sit for a moment.
When Collecting Became Chasing Hits
People see the craze and jump in.
Buy up Pokémon cards. Open everything. Find that BIG hitter. Get it graded. Hopefully get that magical high grade. Then sell it for way more than you originally paid.
Even honest collectors get pulled into it because somebody, somewhere, said there was big money to be made.
Some people do it simply to keep funding their hobby, and I understand that because I used to do something similar.
Back in my early 20s, I’d take my last $100 and buy a box of Magic cards. Somehow, I’d pull some good stuff. I’d sell those cards back to the store for credit or make some big trades.
Why?
So I could buy another box.
Then repeat the process.
It works great as long as you keep pulling good cards.
Sooner or later, though, you get stuck. Now you’ve got hundreds or thousands of cards sitting around that you don’t know what to do with.
That’s eventually why I switched to buying the cards I actually want.
Today, with deck-building sites, online databases, LLMs, and all the other tools we have available, I can figure out the deck I want to build and buy those cards instead of opening box after box and pack after pack hoping I magically find everything.
Is opening packs fun?
Of course it is.
That’s part of the hobby.
But over time, it can also become more wasteful than it needs to be.
What Happened to Trading?
This all comes back around to grading.
Buy the supply. Pull the epic card. Get it graded. Hopefully get the highest grade possible. Sell it.
Now, even when I look at local shows and events, it feels like actual trading has died off compared to what I remember.
When I think back to my day, trading was fun. We honestly didn’t spend nearly as much time worrying about the cash value of every single card. A lot of the value came from what that card could actually do for you in the game.
Was money involved?
Sure.
If you were talking about some rare, hard-to-get, out-of-print card, obviously cash value mattered.
But when something was from the newest release, we weren’t standing around worried because somebody online said the new Spell Counter was worth $200 if you put it in plastic and somebody gave it the right number.
That’s one of the things I miss about the earlier web and collecting culture.
What Is a Card Actually Worth?
You also have to ask yourself something.
You’re holding that Charizard, and some website says it’s worth $500.
Is it really?
A card is only worth that much if somebody is actually willing to give you that much money for it.
If I say my card is worth $400 but nobody will buy it for $400, is it really a $400 card?
That’s where card values can get weird. You can have asking prices, price guides, recent sales, graded prices, raw prices, and everything else, but at the end of the transaction there still has to be another human being willing to hand over the money.
This is where I believe grading has killed a lot of the collecting hobby, and even more so for me.
I own a decent little collection of Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokémon, Dragon Ball, and Magic: The Gathering cards.
I own zero graded cards.
And honestly, I have no real drive to send anything in.
Where Grading Loses Me
I don’t think it’s worth the cash or the risk of mailing something I care about somewhere simply so it can come back sealed behind plastic with a number attached to it.
Then suddenly it’s supposedly worth significantly more because some company using its grading system says this particular copy is a 9 or a 10.
Think about that for a second.
Here’s a completely hypothetical example.
Tomorrow, PSA could introduce a new grading standard. Maybe there’s suddenly an 11. Maybe there’s some kind of Gold Grade or Black Grade above what we currently consider a 10.
What happens to your old PSA 10?
Does it suddenly become less desirable because there’s now something better?
Do collectors start cracking those cards open and submitting them again?
Would you pay to have yours graded again?
I’m not saying PSA is going to do that. I’m saying the entire system depends on collectors continuing to put value into the grading scale.
And grading isn’t cheap.
That’s part of where it loses me. I’m paying money to send something I already own somewhere else so another company can tell me what condition they believe it’s in, put that number on it, and seal it inside plastic.
If that’s how you want to protect something important to you, that’s completely fine.
For me personally, I just don’t see enough value in doing it.
The Hobby Feels Different Now
I don’t think grading is an evil idea.
If you have an old, out-of-print card you want authenticated and protected, I completely understand that.
If you have something incredibly rare and want an outside company to verify its condition before you buy or sell it, I understand that too.
Where I think things have gone sideways is when grading becomes less about preservation and more about manufacturing additional value.
Grading something that’s readily available right now and immediately asking some ridiculous premium because you happened to get a high grade is crazy to me.
That mentality spreads through the entire hobby.
It goes from parents simply trying to find cards for their kids all the way to grown adults stalking vendors so they can be the first ones to grab every pack that hits the shelf.
I got a small taste of what this collecting environment has become myself.
One day, I was at Target at 8 in the morning when they opened.
The only reason I was there that early was because I was looking for a figure for my collection. I had just gotten off work, and it seemed pointless to drive home for 30 minutes just to turn around and come right back, so I waited.
Did I stop and look at the cards?
Yeah.
I collect cards. Why wouldn’t I?
I didn’t even buy anything.
Yet some lady who was trying to grab whatever cards she could looked at me and called me a damn scalper.
Think about how ridiculous that is.
We’ve reached a point where somebody can simply be standing there looking at trading cards in a store and another collector immediately assumes they’re the enemy.
That’s not the collecting community I remember.
Final Thoughts
If you feel grading your cards is the best way to protect your collection, who am I to tell you otherwise?
They’re your cards.
Collect how you want to collect.
But if you’re grading cards primarily so you can turn around and sell them for a profit, let’s also call that what it is.
That’s business.
Can someone be both a collector and a reseller? Sure. There is a middle ground. I know people who genuinely get a thrill out of collecting, buying, selling, and trading. To each their own.
My problem isn’t that those people exist.
My problem is when that mentality becomes the hobby.
When every pack becomes an investment.
When every rare card becomes a potential payday.
When every card has to be graded before somebody thinks it’s worth owning.
When seeing another collector standing near the card aisle makes you immediately think they’re there to take something away from you.
That’s the part I don’t think is healthy.
I look forward to the day when grading something simply to increase its value loses some of its grip on card collecting.
Maybe then the number on the plastic won’t matter quite as much as the card inside it.
