u/JayyMei

Let me get this out of the way first so nobody thinks this is a CGC shill post. About 80% of my collection is PSA slabs. The rest is a mix of CGC, BGS, TAG and raw. I’ve been grading cards for over 10 years, and I’ve sent 800+ cards through PSA. I’m generally happy with the service. If I had to put a number on it, I’d say 95-98% of my PSA cards came back with grades I felt were accurate. They’re the market leader for a reason and I’m not here to pretend otherwise.

But here’s the thing. PSA needs real competition, and right now they don’t have it.

Monopolies get comfortable. That’s not a knock on PSA specifically, it’s just how businesses work. When one company controls the market, there’s no pressure to lower prices, speed up turnaround times, improve grading consistency, or invest in new tech. Every price hike, every turnaround delay, every questionable policy change gets absorbed by the hobby because we have nowhere else to go that carries the same market weight. Competition is what forces companies to actually earn our business instead of just collecting it. We’ve all seen what happens to turnaround times and pricing when demand spikes and there’s no alternative pulling customers away.

Look at the numbers. Last month PSA graded over 2 million cards. CGC did 857k. TAG did 57k. (I’m leaving BGS and SGC out of this since they’re under the Collectors umbrella.)

I actually like TAG a lot and I hope they keep growing. But at 57k cards a month, they’re not threatening PSA’s position anytime soon. CGC is different. They have the corporate backing and the funding (for better or worse), decades of grading infrastructure from the comic side, and they’re already operating at serious volume. They’re the only company positioned to actually push PSA. If CGC got from 857k to 1m-1.5m cards a month, PSA would have to respond. That’s the whole point.

But that only happens if collectors make it happen. That means sending submissions to CGC. That means buying CGC slabs on the secondary market instead of automatically passing on them. Secondary market demand is what makes a grading company viable long term, so every time we treat CGC slabs as second-class, we’re reinforcing the monopoly we all complain about.

A real competitor to PSA would be good for everyone in this hobby, including PSA collectors. Better turnaround times because they’re fighting for your submission. Pricing that has to stay honest. Faster innovation in grading tech and authentication. Better customer service because losing you actually costs them something. Even PSA slabs benefit, because PSA at its best is PSA with someone breathing down its neck.

Nobody’s asking you to abandon PSA. I’m not abandoning them either. But if you’ve got a stack of cards waiting to be submitted, maybe send some of them to CGC. The hobby will be better for it.

PSA, CGC and TAG all stretching out their turnaround times is going to do more good than harm in the long run. PSA pushing bulk to 140-160 business days and slapping a 50 card minimum means a $1,250 floor before shipping, and that alone will hopefully kill the junk submissions clogging the pipes. Last month PSA was receiving over 200,000 cards a day which works out to 29,000 packages hitting their facilities daily, and even with six new sites coming online that volume is straight up unmanageable at their current scale. CGC stretching their windows and TAG flat out shutting down their bulk service entirely shows you the discipline is getting enforced across the whole market, not just one company, and the fact that TAG pulled their cheapest tier off the menu should tell you how serious the supply problem actually is. It also forces a healthier raw market because people will have to value cards on condition before they ship them off instead of treating grading like a lottery ticket. We’ve seen this movie before. When PSA paused bulk for six months back in 2021 to dig out of their backlog, everyone panicked, but two years later turnaround times were back to reasonable and pricing had settled. This feels like that same inflection point where everyone hates it for a few quarters and then quietly benefits for years. What people are missing is that these companies actually want you to submit less, so if your reaction is “I’m done with grading for a while,” congrats, that’s exactly the outcome they’re after. Be selective with what you submit and stop sending in stuff that books for $20 raw. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be sending in PC Cards, but there are people submitting hundreds of $5 cards at a time.