OMG SHOULD I GRADE THIS?
Grading is when you send your item off to a company and they put it in a nice little plastic case and assign a grade to it. It lets everyone know that a trusted 3rd party authenticated the item and validated its condition. No bad surprises for buyers.
When it comes to Magic: The Gathering, BGS is the most popular and trusted option for doing this. They also conveniently keep population reports of how many of each card they have graded.
https://www.beckett.com/grading/pop-report
Setting aside that some people open and regrade cards, leading to inflated pop reports, we can use this database to try and make some conclusions about the graded market and to guess whether or not one is sitting on some amazing rare gem or something so common nobody even bothered to grade theirs.
First of all: If you’re buying 10s, you’re getting scammed.
The highest score ( 10 ) a card can get is handed to about 1% of minty cards. BGS doesn’t show on each card where it lost points, you just take their word for it.
This ratio seems to hold for just about any era of card as well. I suspect it holds across other games too. Somehow none of these companies, over many decades, ever figured out how to print actual mint cards.
That’s the story you’ll hear people tell themselves when you tell them you send a stack of cards right off the factory floor and only 1 of them was deemed a 10.
Sorry Timmy, you’re just getting scammed by a company who sells really rare labels as part of a gimmick to get you to send more cards for grading. Any premium people pay above 9.5. is just for the case/label from the grading company, not the actual card.
So anyway, how rare is my graded card??
So here we have data for A/B/U, the first 3 sets released in 1993.
The first very interesting thing is that almost 30% of all Alpha Black Lotuses ( the holy grail of MTG ) that were printed were sent to grading at BGS. Now I don’t know how many of these were regrades. If there’s any card in the world you’re attempt to grade again to inflate the score, it’s that one.
Still, there’s just roughly 50 of this card in 9.5. grade in the entire world and because so much of the print run has been graded already, you know that’s basically all there will ever be.
Then you go down the list. Deathlace is just as rare but it’s one of those cards that nobody ever wanted. It’s total garbage, no one plays with it, it’s not iconic etc. But it’s still worth 3-4 figures at the time of this writing. Notice almost 11% of the print run graded. That tells you that basically the second people get a hold of any good condition Alpha rare, they get it graded.
Once you’re down to even the iconic common card “Lightning Bolt” the total sent to grading is just 3%. There’s under 70 of this card in 9.5. or above but with such a small % of the run graded, it’s easy to imagine dozens more could appear.
“How many more of this card could exist out there?” is the number one thing you should keep in mind if you intent to invest in MTG. So let’s try to guess how many copies of these cards could exist in high grades if we just use the Black Lotus ratio of about 5% of the print run being 9.5.
First off, the number of 9.5 Lotuses seems suspiciously inflated, so you could cut these estimates in half to err on the side of caution ( let’s say ). But now you see quite an interesting picture emerge as you leave the “Alpha Rares” category.
Should you be paying a premium on a 9.5 unlimited Serra Angel? Well the pop report makes it as “rare” as a 9.5. Beta Black Lotus after all!
But there could be thousands of this card in a similar condition if people ever bothered to send them for grading.
That tells me: This is not an investible thing. It’s conceivable that 20 rich people on earth desperately want a 9.5. graded Alpha Taiga. They’ll fight hard to buy yours and it’s not likely anybody else would have one for sale.
Not the same thing when you’re now talking about an item with hundreds or thousands of copies. The potential premium shrinks a whole lot.
Gem Mint Mtg on youtube talks about multipliers for grades. Like a 9.5 is a 150% multiplier. That doesn’t make sense as a buyer as the print run of a card increases.
The value should be set against the print run, not the currently graded population. For that reason it’s not hard to predict that in the future the price multiplier for minty truly rare cards will far outweigh the price multiplier for modern/ more common cards. A 9.5 Alpha rare could have a 5x multiplier and a 9.5. unlimited common, nothing.
The exact same trend happens just in MTG in general, as Alpha prices have always outpaced the rest simply due to how rare it is. Why wouldn’t this apply to graded cards? Of course it should. Don’t overpay for this stuff.
The picture gets more bleak as you get to the “4 Horsemen” sets and print runs start increasing. Library of Alexandria, the most iconic card of Arabian Nights from 1993…. only 2% of the copies ever sent to get graded?
If we use the Lotus Multiplier math, we get almost 1500 potential pristine copies of this card out there. We see a similar story for Legends and Antiquities; Just around 2% graded for the most expensive iconic cards.
Then it’s just a nosedive. If you’re one of the 2 people who own a pristine 10 “Glyph of Doom”, congrats, there’s probably only 10 000 more in existence that no one will even waste their time grading.
You just paid probably 100$+ for a little plastic case with a label, congrats. That card’s been about 25 cents ever since 1994, you just got played.
A question that often comes up on Reddit: “Should I grade my Revised Dual Lands”. By 1994 the print runs are not exactly known so these are just estimated but you see that with under 1% of the print run graded there’s already hundreds of 9.5 dual lands out there. You think there’s hundreds/thousands of graded revised set collectors out there to desperately pry these from you?
This isn’t rare. Don’t pay good money to grade this, please. Also note the popularity of grading Lightning Bolts. It’s an iconic card but there’s possibly tens of thousands of mint copies still out there.
Then we get to the “Silver Age” ( whatever ) where print runs are not known. The reserved list still applies to many of these cards, which drove people to massively park money in a lot of this in 2016-2017, but there’s hundreds of thousands of copies of each of these cards out there, at least.
You can see from the pop reports that very few are getting graded relative to the print run. By this era people started to be more careful with their cards and more sealed product still exists to be opened, probably in the 3 figures range for boxes. That’s still a good amount of pack fresh new copies that could enter the market just from that.
Look at “Force of Will” with 318 pristine copies already. There’s probably over 1 million of this card printed. Given the Lotus Rule that would mean 50k minty copies to be graded. Why would you pay any sort of huge premium for this other than you just have to have it right now?
So the last thing I checked were various fancy foils. The print runs are once again not known but I suspect they are in the 5-10k range. A lot of these older foils are notoriously cloudy as well so it’s tough to know what these numbers really mean. Are there that many actual pristine Birds of Paradise sitting out there ready to be sent to grading? I don’t think so. For this one category I wouldn’t try to apply “The Lotus Rule”. This just sort of gives me a clue that these are… as stupidly rare as I suspected they were.
However in the modern era, these fancy foils are all pretty much NM/M. Most cards after 2010 are either printed to oblivion or people knew they were rare and instantly put them in a little plastic case. If there’s 6000 of each invention cards printed, it’s a good bet 95% of them are still NM, as compared to maybe 10% for Alpha.
So there you have it, a look into the world of graded MTG that hopefully gives you a better idea about what is and isn’t worth paying a premium for or what is and isn’t worth sending to grading. Next time you hear questions about this on reddit or youtube, just link them here.
And I leave everyone with the knowledge that this worth as much as a nice condo in no small part because someone put it in a little plastic box:
