The $25 Question: Which of These 40 Cards Deserve a Slab?
Forty raw cards, one afternoon, and the math on which six earned a holder.
A grid of forty raw trading cards with six of them highlighted in gold
Every collector has the stack. Forty cards, maybe more, pulled aside over a few months because they might be worth grading. The question is always the same: which of these deserve a $25 to $80 submission fee and a two month wait?
Here is that question answered on a real stack, with the math.
The math on grading all forty
Submitting all forty to a mail-away grader on a mid-tier service, at a conservative $25 per card, is $1,000 in fees before shipping and insurance. At the tiers that are actually open this summer, it is closer to $3,000. Either way, the cards are gone for weeks to months, and most of them will come back as 8s and 9s that are worth about what they were worth raw.
The problem is not that grading is expensive. It is that grading everything is expensive, and you do not know which cards are the good ones until after you have paid.
Grading all forty at home first
So grade all forty first, at home, and then decide. Front photo, back photo, about a minute each. Forty cards took a little under an hour, including finding them.
What comes back for each card is the four subgrades and the final grade, plus the reason for any deduction. That is the sorting tool.
The sort
Here is the rule that fell out of the stack, and it is the one we would use again.
Slab it if all three of these are true:
- The final grade is a 9 or a 10
- The lowest subgrade is not centering (a centering 9 is permanent; a corner 9 with a C confidence might improve on a retake)
- The card has a real market. A 10 on a card nobody is searching for is still a card nobody is searching for
Keep it raw, with the grade on file, if any of those is false. The grade still helps: it goes on the card page, it goes in your collection, and it goes in an eBay listing whether or not the card is in a holder.
Retake the photos if the confidence letter is a C or D before deciding anything. Five of the forty came back with a C, and two of those moved after a retake.
What the stack looked like
| Result | Cards | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| 10 with a real market | 4 | Slabbed |
| 9 on corners or surface, market card | 2 | Slabbed |
| 9 on centering | 9 | Kept raw, grade on file |
| 8 | 14 | Kept raw, grade on file, two listed |
| 7 or below | 11 | Kept raw |
Six slabs out of forty. The other thirty-four are worth more raw with a grade on file than they would be in a holder with an 8 on it, and about $850 of fees stayed in my pocket.
The rule, in one sentence
Grade everything, slab the ones that earn it, and never pay a submission fee to find out a card is an 8.
Doing this with your own stack
Two free grades will get you started, and a pack of credits is priced so that grading a whole binder costs less than one express submission. The pop report post has the real 10 rates by category if you want to know the odds before you start, and the centering post explains why that one subgrade is the permanent one.
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