If PSA makes the grade, will CGC 9.8s pay the price?
- Mark Potash
- Apr 30
- 1 min read
PSA’s scheduled entry into the graded magazine market later this year has created a lot of excitement and anticipation, but also a little trepidation that centers around one key question: What will PSA 10.0 grades do to CGC 9.8s?
It’s unlikely PSA will be handing out 10.0s like candy, but they figure to give more than CGC, which took the interesting tack of essentially making 9.8 the top end of the scale and 10.0s all but unattainable.
If you have any experience with CGC-graded magazines, you know that many 9.8s could be graded 10.0. The subjectivity of magazine grading is a little more problematic than with baseball card grading. Not only does pressing literally iron out many issues that might distinguish one magazine from another, but baseball cards have border centering that often allows collectors to “buy the slab and not the grade.” Magazines generally don’t have anything like that.
So if graded magazines are more about the grade than the slab, those PSA 10.0s could be trouble for CGC 9.8s. Then again, that arguably will only happen if PSA’s entry into magazine grading is a success. And if PSA’s entry into magazine grading is a success, it presumably will lead to an expansion of the entire market that will lift all boats — even those CGC 9.8s that pale in comparison to PSA 10s. That's why everyone in the hobby should be rooting for PSA — warts and all — to be a big hit whenever it enters the magazine grading market. This hobby needs growth more than anything else.
I have many thoughts on this. CGC has had many controversies lately from bananagate, label swapping, insider stealing etc that if PSA is smart enough they can come out of the gates and steal market share from CGC. They have already shown better quality slabs and even included UV protection to start with. Also, it’s my personal belief that sports magazine genre naturally fits better with PSA branding plus PSA has the advantage of way more advertising money and vertical marketing integration with cards at their shows which dwarfs the comic/magazine hobby. Unless PSA decides to grade inconsistently or has its own controversies my guess is that slowly but surely people will want to get 10’s instead of 9.8’s. Just…
I agree this hobby needs way more collectors, especially high-end buyers. There are about 10,000 magazine collectors compared to 20 million card collectors. The limiting factor for magazines is their size. Keep up the good work.