u/Stonkbear

I specifically deal with primarily vintage and there have been a few vendors / wealthy collectors buying all the CGC vintage cards. Has anyone else experienced this recently at shows?

CGC grew submissions 121% year over year in 2025, the fastest of any major grader, while the whole grading industry hit 26.8 million cards graded (up 32% YoY). CGC is solidly the #2 grader now, crossing around 700K cards a month back in April 2026, and they’re actually gaining real ground in sports cards through the Fanatics partnership, which used to be their weak spot. Card Ladder’s Pokémon Index, which is basically CGC’s bread and butter category, is up almost 92% YoY.

But here’s the thing that’s easy to miss: PSA still holds around 76% of sports card share, and sports submissions industry-wide actually fell about 12% in 2025 while TCG and non-sport grading rose almost 95%. So the demand story is real, but it’s lopsided.

I wanted to see if this combo of “grading gets stricter” plus “demand goes up” actually produces a measurable price bump, so I put together a pricing model the way you’d approach this academically. Quick honesty check before I get into it: there’s no clean public dataset of slab level sale prices with a grading strictness variable already attached to it, so this isn’t me running a regression on scraped sold comps. It’s a framework populated with real industry numbers, not a backtested result. If someone wants to make this fully rigorous I lay out exactly what data you’d need at the end.

The model itself is a pretty standard log-linear pricing setup, the kind used in resale/hedonic pricing studies:
ln(Price) = grade effect + population growth effect + grading strictness effect + demand index effect + sport vs TCG effect.

Breaking down what each piece does:
Grade level matters most, obviously. Each half point step up (like a 9.5 to a 10) tends to swing price by somewhere around 18 to 20%, which lines up with how convex pricing gets near gem grades.

Grading strictness, meaning how rare it is to actually pull a 10 from that grader, adds a real premium. A 10 point drop in gem rate associates with something like a 22% premium on the ones that do hit it. That’s the scarcity effect doing the work.

Demand index growth (using something like the Pokémon Index as the proxy) adds roughly 9% per 10 point move in the index, scaled off the ~92% YoY move mentioned above.
Sport vs TCG is where it gets interesting. Right now sports slabs actually trade at a discount inside the CGC ecosystem specifically, something like -31% relative to TCG, because CGC’s sports population and liquidity are still thin compared to PSA. This flips completely if you’re looking at PSA graded sports cards instead.
Population growth itself has a small negative pull, maybe -6%, because more cards getting graded at a tier suppresses price growth a bit, though rising demand partially offsets it.

Chaining all that together for CGC’s current trajectory, the model spits out a projected 12 month price move of roughly 15 to 35% for CGC slabs in high demand categories like modern Pokémon and key TCG chase cards. Wide range because the low end is categories where pop reports are growing fast enough to offset the scarcity, and the high end is true low pop, high demand intersections, like early modern era Pokémon in CGC 10 or Pristine.
For CGC sports slabs specifically though, the model says the near term lift is smaller, more like 5 to 12%, because PSA’s liquidity moat is still doing most of the heavy lifting on sports resale value. CGC’s sports growth right now is submission volume growth, not secondary market pricing power yet.

If anyone actually wants to turn this into a real study instead of a napkin model, here’s what you’d need: matched sold comps for identical card/grade pairs across CGC vs PSA over time (eBay, Fanatics, Goldin), GemRate’s monthly gem rate by grader as the strictness variable, Card Ladder’s category indices as the demand variable, and then run it as a panel regression with card level fixed effects so you can isolate the grader effect from just “this specific card is hyped.”

TL;DR: CGC’s growth and demand momentum are real and well documented. Plugging those numbers into a pricing model points to roughly 15-35% upside on CGC slabs in TCG/Pokémon categories over the next year, but only around 5-12% on CGC sports slabs since PSA still owns sports liquidity.

I know modern CGC Pristine 10s were hit or miss depending on the card whether or not they are valued more than a PSA 10. Recently I am starting to see that as a whole Pristine 10s are out pacing PSA 10s for modern English cards. At least for mid tier to high end modern cards. Maybe not so much low end. Any idea why? I have been tracking about 1000 cards and there has been a statistical significance as of the last three months in price increase.

Please and thanks. Still don’t have mg cards done from 4/1.

I see everyone who sent their cards in a few months ago stuck in image processing. I just submitted my first card. Will they prioritize the ones recently submitted or should I expect to wait 6 months?

What’s the word on this? Anyone hear anything?

I do see vintage getting closer to PSA 10 price. But there is still a difference. Also why has there been a steady price increase with all CGC cards recently. Even at card shows the vendors are ticking up prices. Getting harder to find certain cards at decent prices.

Well here is your opportunity. Make an app., continue quick turnaround times, and start marketing at card shows. You might have a chance to close ground on PSA. PSA has been in self destruct mode for about a year now. Between the unfair grading practices and scandals. Hope you all can figure it out. If not i don’t know if there will be an opportunity similar to this again.

PSA just announced some significant turn around times and price increases. Will this cause CGC to increase times again? Does CGC have any plans on increasing capacity?

Noticed that some modern Pristines are dipping below PSA 10s. Then the next week pristine will go above the PSA 10. It used to be Pristines held a premium. I also see a lot of PSA pumping in the past few months even with all there drama. I know this has been pretty common in vintage for a while. Even though PSA old carts typically
Look far worst than any CGC pristine cert.