Why I Would Never Grade My Cards with CGC!

What's up everybody? Welcome back to my channel, Clemente Collector. And on today's episode, why I will not be grading my cards with CGC and why I think you shouldn't either. Coming up next, >> third, playing right field, number 21, Roberto Clemente. >> All right, so welcome back. Uh, thanks for being here for this episode. And I know people are probably tired of hearing about grading. Let's just talk about the cards. But I can't count how many people came up to me at the national and said, you know, especially since they know I grade with uh SGC and I've been very vocal about recent things that have happened with SGC. They've they came up to me and said, "Hey, I was using SGC and I'm going to go to CGC now." And each and every one of them, I tried to tell them why I felt CGC was not a good option. And I thought, why don't I make a video to show my thoughts on why I would never use CGC, at least for right now. And um you can agree, you can disagree. I'd love to hear your thoughts, but uh hear me out and uh then uh we can have a discussion about it. So this is and once again, I'm a vintage uh card collector, so this is for vintage. Okay, so let me show you kind of what my thoughts are here. So this is the gem rate uh grading data for July of this year. So this is the most recent data. I understand it's only for for a month. You know, we could look at June, we could look at year-to- date. The thing about it is is you'll see the trend is pretty much the same. So this isn't an outlier month or anything like that. So, the main thing that people kept telling me at the show is, "Did you see how many cards CGC is grading per per month? They're the second biggest grading company. That's why I'm going to start grading my cards with CGC. They're the second biggest." I said, "That logic makes sense, right? Look, look at the screen. They did over 400,000 cards. Um, SGC was a merely 153, right? And Beckett, you know, they're not even in the game essentially. But what I told everybody was, did you look at the number of sports cards CGC graded last month? And like I said, this is just an example of one month. This is July. They graded 39,000 sports cards. So, let me go back here. We had 400,000 and they only graded 40,000. So, you're talking about 10% of all the cards they're grading are sports cards, right? Now, we can even dig a little bit deeper here. So, let me show you this. So, let's just look at vintage cards, right? So, as you can see here, I did vintage um the 70s, the 60s, and anything earlier than the 50s. And I highlighted on the screen there and you could see that um SGC is is getting big percentages of vintage cards in which rightfully so. Uh but then you could see the percentages there for CGC. Now based on percentages you could say well that's not that's not too bad. You know CGC's definitely grading vintage cards right? Well when you break down the numbers here's the numbers broken down. SGC graded in July over 36,000 vintage cards. CGC graded 2,652. So, I mean, if you put the numbers in perspective, okay, just just off the top, and we're going to go into pricing and resale value and all that kind of stuff. Just off the top, guys, you want to send your vintage cards to CGC to get them graded, yet they grade about 2,600 vintage cards a month. Now, I'd have to talk to somebody at CGC, but does a grader that grades TCG also grade vintage cards? Um, you know, are the sports cards graders separate than the than the TCG graders? I I really don't know the layout there to be honest with you. I would hope that they would at least maybe have one person that specializes in vintage and they do all the vintage cuz that's scary to me that uh a grader that is very strong at TCG grading every once in a while gets a vintage baseball card and he has to grade it. So, let's go to my next point though. This was my first point. My first point is is I don't want to send my cards to a grading company that grades very little vintage cards. Right? So, my second point is resale value. And to be fair, I honestly had no idea. I said I said, "What is a fair way for me to look at resale value of of my cards that, you know, I'm I'm not going to pick and choose, you know, sales and and and and try to be unfair to CGC. I want to be as fair as possible." So, what I did was I went on eBay, which obviously is the optimal marketplace. You have the most eyeballs there. And I literally typed in an eBay I said recent sales Clemente CGC and then and then I started looking at the auctions and not the buy it now. Okay. So, I picked out Clemente cards that recently sold on eBay on auctions and then and then once I had I think it was six or seven cards, then I looked at the counterparts in PSA and SGC because if I didn't start with CGC cards, then it would be impossible because there's not that many vintage cards being graded. So, I had to start with like six or seven recent ones for Clemente. And then I just had to see what the PSA and SGC recent auctions were for those cards. And let me go into it here. All right. So, first up, 1960s Topps Clemente. Once again, I tried to pick the most recent auction sale. I didn't look at the eye appeal. I just literally picked the most recent auction sale. Granted, I understand it's not the biggest sample size, but it gives us an idea at least. So, right here at the top there, we had a CGC 5.5 Clemente sold for 120 bucks. The SGC sold for 177 and the PSA sold for 223. So, it's a $100 difference. $100 difference. Now, I know what you're thinking. And you're thinking maybe CGC grades vintage higher. Um, we buy the card, we don't buy the we don't buy the slab. So maybe that PSA card there because it's such a small image, maybe that PSA card is actually a lot better, right? And the 223 is based on eye appeal, right? So that's I actually did that exercise here for you. So I I'm not going to tell you what grading company graded each. Uh, they're mixed around. So, if you were buying a Clemente card, just based on buying the card and not the slab, you know, kind of rank these for me. Which ones which one would you buy first? Which one would you buy second? Which one would you buy third? And um as you look at it, I'll kind of tell you my thought process here. I personally like the one in the middle the best because of the um the color of the card to me really pops. Now, I grabbed these cards from the the websites. I went to CGC, did cert lookups, PSA did cert lookups, so I took them right off the sites, right? So, I can only go off of what I can see here. But, I think the middle the middle one to me would be the card that I would want the most. And then the third one is the one that I would want the second most. It's pretty close though between the second and the third. And the first one to me has the worst eye appeal. Um, and the corners in my opinion are the roughest, right? So, let's let's these cards were all graded the same grade. So, let me show you uh which which which grading company graded each. All right. So, the first card was actually CGC. Uh, and it $64 for that first one. Okay. And then the second card was actually SGC, $140. I had to do a buy now on that because there were no recent auction sales. So, but to be fair, that card in in SGC4 has recently sold a couple times for $140. Okay. And then there's the PSA counterpoint at the bottom, and it was the far right card at $128. So, now I guess my point to you is is so we're talking about over double is is the one in the middle over double the value of the one on the left? Uh that's that's up to that's up to the person buying the card essentially, but I thought only to be fair to do kind of a blind uh a blind reveal this way and see what people's thoughts were. All right, so I got more different cards here. So we got the uh one of my favorites, the 1963 Flare. Okay, so the 1963 Flare, we got the CGC did 1401 150 and then PS uh SGC did 150 and and the PSA was actually the lowest selling card here. So like I said, maybe maybe I'm wrong. Maybe maybe CGC does sell for a decent price in some situations. So here's an example where it was middle of the pack. Uh next up, another kind of blind reveal situation. Once again, the cards are mixed around. Which of these Clementes does your eye say is the best of the three? And which one is probably the worst of the three in your opinion? Now, me personally, I felt the one on the far right, um, the third one was the best by far. I like the centering on the on the third one the best, and the color really pops on the third one the best in my opinion. Now, as far as the number one and number two, that's a little bit trickier for me. For whatever reason, number one looks a lot more faded than number two. So, I would probably lean towards number two and then number one would be the worst one in my opinion. Um, I don't know if you agree, disagree, but let me show you actually what these cards are. So, number one sold for the most and it was a PSA 8. Okay, 345. The one in the middle was a CGC at 237. And the last and the one on the far right that I preferred was 241 and it was at SGC. So PSA1, CGC2, and SGC3. So what's your opinion on this exercise here? My my thoughts are that because of the registry, a PSA8 is going to hold a lot of weight on the registry. So, I feel like it might have got the registry bump. Um, but I don't know that that's just my opinion based on the images. All right, here's the next card. One of my favorites. 1966. This is Clemente's uh this Clemente's MVP season. So, we got CGC at the top at 168, then SGC at 178, and then it was an old PSA label down there as far as I can tell from here. And it actually PSA sold for the least amount of money. And you could see the centering on that PSA card is not great. Um I think that that one right there kind of goes back to some people's points of PSA might not grade that as high a grade right now. You know, they were a little bit more lenient in a lot of people's opinions in the past. All right, the next one, the 1958 Clemente. And as you could see, the SGC card actually sold for the most. and then CGC. So once again, my my my hypothesis of CGC cards not selling for enough money on this on this particular card isn't true. All right. And then I think this is the last one here, 1957. So the SGC card actually blew out the other two cards, right? And that was coming out of the PSA vault. So um you could see actually the SGC card is very well centered but the CGC card also has good centering in my opinion and that was sold on com C. So and then here is a final total here as you could see is it eight examples seven examples. The uh the SGC card in five of the seven was a top selling card and the PSA in two of the seven. So, I personally feel just from this small sample size, it's not a good thing that CGC didn't have one card that was the highest sale. In my opinion, it's not a good thing, right? And then if you look at the totals on the bottom, SGC and PSA were pretty much the same. It's kind of crazy how close they were. and CGC was a full 200 like close to $250 away from uh the other two companies. So, let me uh let me close this out here. All right. So, hopefully I explain why I am not going to use CGC for for vintage cards and and grading my Clemente cards moving forward. I do understand some of the debates though out there. Uh, one debate is I like how the CGC slabs look. You know, I me personally, I think they I think CGC has the clearest slab in the business. I I think they have a great looking um whatever plastic they use is very clear. And I also I like their label. I I think I think CGC and SGC's label in and in and full package is is very close in my opinion as far as eye pill goes. So, I could see why people want to use CGC because of that. And I get the other point. If I give SGC my money, it's essentially giving money to PSA. So, I get that point, too. Um, so I guess people are going to say, "All right, you're not going to use CGC because of, you know, they don't have the best graders. They don't have consistency. You know, they um they only grade 2,000 vintage cards, you know, a month. How can you trust them? And the resale value isn't there yet, right? But you're saying bad things about SGC. Uh, where do you go from here? And I'm kind of in wait and see mode right now. I took a fivecard order to the national with me and I wanted to get them graded by SGC and I went to the I went over where the SGC booth was at and saw like how empty it was and how depressing it was and I brought my cards back with me and I didn't grade them and they're sitting here on my desk still. So, I'm kind of in wait and see mode right now. Personally, I would love to go to um I would love to go to MagPros like Dylan and and and Manini have gone to and Adam. The problem with Mag Pros for me is I have a lot of unique sized um cards that I I buy. Like for example, one of the cards I want to get graded is the Collins card. And you know that's that's not a normalsized card. So you know now what do I do? So, so I would consider the Mag Pros, but I'm still on the fence about that, too, because the unique sizes and things like that, and then I'd have to get I'd have to design a label, which could be kind of fun. But that's where I'm at right now. Let me know what your thoughts are on CGC. Are you going to start using them? I'm also not opposed to buying cards um graded by them like Mike has um and other people that are uh slabnostic now. I buy I I agree. Buy the card. So, I I don't have a problem buying their cards. I'm just saying I'm not gonna give them any cards for submission personally. So, that's where I stand. Let me know what you think. Thanks for watching. I'll see you guys on the next one.

At the National Sports Card Convention, I had a lot of collectors tell me that they are going to start grading with CGC (Certified Guaranty Company Grading). I was not surprised to hear it, after the recent SGC new. But I have a strong opinion that I won't ever grade my vintage sports card with CGC. So, I wanted to make a video, showing my view and hear from the community on what their view is. #cgc #card #grading #never #using #sgc #psa #comparison #reselling #national #nscc #nscc2025 #baseball #sportscard #vintage #thehobby