u/Lodog23

I've built a tool that screens cards across PSA, CGC, BGS, SGC, TAG, and ACE to find where the biggest price differences are and where opportunities lie with cracking slabs and resubmitting to a different grading company (shocker, most of the gains are to PSA).

The dominant pattern is pretty clear: CGC 10 → PSA 10 is where almost all the edge is. PSA just commands a significant premium.

The most eye opening one to me is the Umbreon ex CGC 10 sitting around $2.3k, PSA 10 at $6.9k. There are serious gains to be had if you can find good looking CGC 10s to cross grade. The tool is also accounting for the $80 base PSA grading fee so the edge numbers you see are already net of that cost. Gem rate on the resubmit is obviously still the wildcard.

I've been looking at SV Base IRs lately and something feels off about where PSA 10 prices are sitting. The set is out of print, gem rates are 10–15% and the PSA 10 population for each of these cards is extremely low, with most under 1,000 PSA 10s in existence! Yet the slab prices don't seem to reflect any of that scarcity. Curious if others are seeing the same thing.

None of these IRs are top tier pokemon like Charizard, Umbreon, etc, but I don't think they are bottom of the barrel either and the ones I highlighted have some real charm to them

Drowzee — An iconic artwork, but attached to a subpar pokemon. I actually think this one IS fairly priced already, but actually has the highest gem rate and PSA 10 pop of all of these cards

Ralts + Kirlia — These two are part of a bigger story with story artwork that leads into the Gardevoir ex SIR. This would be the first story artwork of the SV era and I feel collectors would want the whole story in a PSA 10, but with so few PSA 10s in existence only so many would be able to

Slowpoke — I absolutely love the artwork on this one and I know there is a dedicated slowpoke collector base

Riolu — popular Pokémon, cute artwork

Wiglett — This one is a wildcard. Only 111 PSA 10s exist. The artwork has a ton of cameos including Psyduck hiding in there. The model on HyperPotion can't even get a confident read on it because sales are so thin. Could be nothing, could be interesting.

These cards were ran through a fair value model on HyperPotion and most of the PSA 10s are coming back well below where the fundamentals say they should be priced at.

Curious what others think. Is there something the model and I is missing on these or is this a buying opportunity?

I've been looking at SV Base IRs lately and something feels off about where PSA 10 prices are sitting. The set is out of print, gem rates are 10–15% and the PSA 10 population for each of these cards is extremely low, with most under 1,000 PSA 10s in existence! Yet the slab prices don't seem to reflect any of that scarcity. Curious if others are seeing the same thing.

None of these IRs are top tier pokemon like Charizard, Umbreon, etc, but I don't think they are bottom of the barrel either and the ones I highlighted have some real charm to them

Drowzee — An iconic artwork, but attached to a subpar pokemon. I actually think this one IS fairly priced already, but actually has the highest gem rate and PSA 10 pop of all of these cards

Ralts + Kirlia — These two are part of a bigger story with story artwork that leads into the Gardevoir ex SIR. This would be the first story artwork of the SV era and I feel collectors would want the whole story in a PSA 10, but with so few PSA 10s in existence only so many would be able to

Slowpoke — I absolutely love the artwork on this one and I know there is a dedicated slowpoke collector base

Riolu — popular Pokémon, cute artwork

Wiglett — This one is a wildcard. Only 111 PSA 10s exist. The artwork has a ton of cameos including Psyduck hiding in there. The model on HyperPotion can't even get a confident read on it because sales are so thin. Could be nothing, could be interesting.

These cards were ran through a fair value model on HyperPotion and most of the PSA 10s are coming back well below where the fundamentals say they should be priced at.

Curious what others think. Is there something the model and I is missing on these or is this a buying opportunity?

I've been chasing grading arbitrage for a while. Buying a card raw, sending it to grade, selling the PSA 10 for more than raw + grading fees, then rolling the profit into more raw cards to do it again. To make finding these easier I built a tool that runs a model across every Scarlet & Violet set through Mega Evolution. Figured I'd share it in case others want to do the same.

It ranks cards by the largest spread using a probability-weighted return, not the best case, and there are some genuinely strong plays right now even at PSA's $80 base fee. A few of the top ones:

• Mega Zygarde ex (Perfect Order) — raw $69 → PSA 10 $488 · 83% gem · ~+$184
• Mega Starmie ex (Perfect Order) — raw $63 → PSA 10 $455 · 81% gem · ~+$162
• Meowth ex (Perfect Order) — raw $180 → PSA 10 $713 · 85% gem · ~+$249
• Psyduck (Ascended Heroes) — raw $106 → PSA 10 $651 · 63% gem · ~+$215
• Mega Gengar ex (MAR) (Ascended Heroes) — raw $77 → PSA 10 $428 · 70% gem · ~+$129

I personally filter for the highest spread with the highest gem rate, since that gives me the best shot at actually hitting the 10 and claiming the spread. The Psyduck from Ascended Heroes feels like a great play to me currently being a popular Pokemon, nice artwork, and coming from ascended heroes, which is very popular. It's obviously not a guarantee the card gems, but the model factors the gem rate into the return, so you're seeing a probability-weighted number, not a best case. Genuinely curious what you all think of the approach, anything you'd say it's missing, or not capturing the full picture?

A little context, I thought it'd be a fun project to build a model that estimates which cards are under/overvalued based on their fundamentals: popularity, print scarcity, PSA pop, gem rates, how fast they actually sell, etc. It's turned into a surprisingly useful lens for "is this price even sane?"

Poking around Surging Sparks singles, I found a cluster the model flagged as trading well below fair value and these were its high confidence calls:

 - Slakoth #212 — ~$13 → ~$29 (−53%)

 - Skarmory #209 — ~$11 → ~$22 (−48%)

 - Feebas #198 — ~$12 → ~$21 (−46%)

 - Mesprit #204 — ~$14 → ~$25 (−45%)

A few it was less sure about but still flagged:

- Latios #203 (−36%) 

- Ceruledge #197 (−35%) 

- Spheal #199 (−28%) 

 - Latias ex #239 (~$195 vs ~$237, −18%)

Here's where I actually want other people's read, because I don't know. Besides Latias ex, these aren't headliner cards, and "underpriced by the model" could mean two very different things:

 1. the market's genuinely sleeping on these cards, or

 2. my model is overrating scarcity and fundamentals and missing the demand side for these secondary cards.

I lean skeptical, honestly, I checked whether the model's "undervalued" calls actually outperform later and there's no reliable edge yet, so I treat it as a fair value sanity check, not a buy signal. But I'd love a gut check from people who know this set. Are any of these real sleepers, or is the model just wrong on them?