I know this is about trading card games and not board games, but I would say they’re very close in principle, considering the complexity of games like Magic. I recently discovered the mysterious world of “grading”, in which services like PSA will grade your card as to add some felt value to the card itself, because of its rarity and how near to mint it is.
We’re talking about services that will grade the same card differently three times if you send it back, because of course they have no practical way of having an absolute meter for every possible imperfection.
In theory, a service like PSA should be useful as a neutral third party that makes an unbiased appraisal of a card that both a buyer and seller can agree on. In reality, they are absolutely a scam and provide almost nothing of value. You could determine the condition of a card yourself using just a magnifying glass and five minutes of your time. For whatever reason, they’ve convinced enough people that a professional grade is necessary for buying/selling cards.
You are correct that their grades are subjective. I’ve heard of people who will send the same card back multiple times to try to get a better grade, which can be worth it for very high-value cards.
It is a scam. Just not in the legal sense. You get the product and service you paid for, you just fell for the marketing that sold you a story that your hobby is an investment.
Ironically I think anime/weeb YouTuber Geoff Thew actually put together a pretty telling case when he was talking about how these parasites are trying to turn manga slabs into a thing the same way they did to MTG and American comics.
Youtube user Baseball Card Stories also expressed so much of how wrong the whole system is in a very concise video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8t9XHnIp9w , content warning for goofy AI pictures sometimes during the video lol), and he expressed how for him cards are first and foremost a tactile experience that has to do with paper, embossing, even the smell (he shows cards from the late 1800s which were sold with tobacco, still smelling of it).
I can see why some would ignore tactility for a card, since you can at least see it whole no matter how you spin it inside a plastic slab. But to suffocate a whole volume of a book inside of it is genuinely dumbfounding. I cannot wait for this fad to die, but I’m afraid there’s a good chance it’ll just ramp up in volume, in the near future.
edit: forgive me for the triple comment, for some reason my message would get sent as soon as I tried to change tab on my phone.
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But what about grading unsealed videogames? The whole grading system sounds like the most uselessly capitalistic thing ever.
It is. Because it’s all a scam
They are.
The service of grading and protecting a card is not inherently a scam, but yeah PSA specifically spent a few decades cornering that market so they could operate the business as a scam. Remember the main goal of business in a free market system is to stop making the market free.
It is as much a scam as the cards themselves. Artificial scarcity designed to addict our brains to gambling.
The grading feeds on/into the main scam of the cards themselves. The whole cycle requires that we place “value” on their slabs of paper and grading helps make that value more concrete in your brain. The more value you see in the cards the more of them that you want to buy. More cards sold means more grading, so the cycle goes round.
Have fun playing the game, just be aware the whole thing is no different than going to the casino. They just hope the psychological effect of not gambling with money addicts extra people who wouldn’t normally gamble with money (i.e. children or those morally opposed to gambling)… and the house always wins.
Playing a card game is not the same as going to a casino lmfao. Just because the only card games you chose to play were setup like gatcha doesn’t mean every card game is a scam. Why are you choosing to participate in a scam if you know it’s a scam? Just print proxies if you’re that butthurt about a particular company’s business strategy, or play a different card game that isn’t actively hostile to the player.
“Scam” was certainly hyperbole, I just exaggerated it to drive home the point. The casino bit could have been worded better too. Playing the game or collecting cards when you know what you are buying is not gambling, it is opening packs that’s like going to the casino.
Paying for a pack that you have no idea what the contents are hoping for a big card is no different than putting money down on a hand of blackjack and hoping for a payout. The game or the collecting is just what we use to justify the gambling as buying something with real world utility.
I don’t exactly have a problem with the business strategy (other than targeting kids), go ahead and gamble, and I can’t claim to be above participating. It’s just that the players need to be aware of what is happening and that our brains are a lot more easily manipulated than we think we are. Entertainment value with a drip feed of dopamine hits is pretty powerful.
Gruhn Guitars started this trend with vintage instruments, too. It inflated the market value of old instruments.
Mint, excellent, very good, good, fair… Fuck off. It’s worth what someone will pay.
Kelly Blue Book, etc.
And don’t get me wrong, a price guide isn’t all bad.
Even your complaint doesn’t meet the definition of a scam. They can be wrong or imprecise without being deceptive.
But, I would go further and say you’ve misunderstood the activity of grading, which is signing that a given item aligns with a given rubric. In trading cards these rubrics are standardized (see TCGplayer.com grading system).
You’re free to disagree with a grading, free to not trust grades by given vendors. But it’s kinda silly to suggest grading as a concept is meaningless (especially if “meaning” can only exist with infinitely precision and accuracy).
I understand your point and while it might not follow the definition of a scam, it surely threads dangerously closes to it when the biggest and most used company by TCG players has been recently known for buying cards from customers only to re-grade them up and sell it themselves on the market, creating a vortex of conflict of interest.
And I do understand the activity of rating, but I still fail to see how truly meaningful it is if all the companies have such wide margins of error that they’ll give wildly different ratings to the same card if sent back again. It would make more sense if the company would limit itself to a) certifying that the card is not fake, and b) to note its main defects on the tag.
Grading from 1 to 10 is obviously a tactic to continuosly play with the market, creating scarcity when it is most convenient, and to enable the gambling addiction of customers who think that this time it’ll surely get a grade 10; and so the customer has to pay for: shipping, fees (which are crazy expensive, and they get higher if your card is more expensive for some reason), the card holder made for shipping sold by the company, and a box also usually sold by the company.
People can do what they want with their money, if this is how one wants to collect, shall they do so. But when the whole market and felt value revolves around grading from a handful of companies, something is fishy. There are countless kids in the world convinced that the rare card they just got from their Pokémon booster is worthless if they don’t spend a hundred bucks grading it.
