You're not an idiot, right?
already saw it on reddit
>>58274175Yes, I'm an Unovafag
>>58274175The fuck is a PSA slab?
>>58274201This
>>58274201Pokemon cards graded with a random number in a big plastic case that are somehow worth 20x the value.
>>58274201>>58274233Pretend you're a moron for one second. You collect pokémon cards like everyone used to, then you send your rare pokémon card to a company that will look at it and say "hey that's pretty good print, I give it a 9 so now its price is 80% up because idiocracy isn't a movie but a premonition" so they send you back in a little acrlylic case with the name of the card and its gradethe fatso traded a lot of those for garbage
>>58274175I wonder how people can so easily enjoy being scammed by gamestop. They never give more than a fraction of the thing's value.>>58274201PSA is a grading company for collectibles. Their business model is slop, but in they're the company whose grades mean the most for pokemon card investing in terms of value. A graded card is returned to you in a display slab showcasing the card, its grade, and a unique code that you can use to locate on their spreadsheets of existing grades for that particular card. Shows the number of cards with the same grade, and having a low population grade on an already rare card can significantly boost its value.It's really just scammers scamming scammers who hope to scam scammers, though, since the company holds your items hostage if you don't pay their fees. Fees which are directly connected to, and increased by, the street price of that item and grade. So you pay the base rate + increased hostage fee for the final item which get increased by it having a higher grade, which you then resell to someone else hoping to sell it at a higher price later on. It's the shitshow endgame of speculative investors for card collecting. The best part? None of the grades even matter. They're literally fake. There's no consistency with any grading company, even the ones that use AI and high tech computer scans, since people crack open their graded slabs and resubmit the cards in hopes of getting a higher score all the time. And it works. It's fucking insane. Everyone in the hobby knows they're meaningless, but they also know it doesn't matter since they can still sell them to each other.
>>58274278he asked a stupid question but this was a good explanation
>>58274240>>58274245>>58274278Damn, thanks, the world of card bullshit is a deep and predatory one. I just like keeping them in binders
>>58274201The most reputable grading service!
>>58274175On which?>buying graded slabs of cards>grading cards>trading the slabs for GameStop credit>piss-colored Artazon>buying a Switch 2>buying an official Nintendo Switch 2 pro controller, let alone two>pre-ordering Z-A after the Mega Dimension trailer
>>58274297Same. Just have cards of my favorites and that's it.
>>58274326Surprised you didn't go for the low blow options like>being fat>going to GameStop at all>having your picture taken at a GameStop for them to post on social mediaLevels to this shit.
>>58274175He's kind of cute, would
>>58274175NGL, averaging $25-ish a card when most of those cards probably aren't worth anything is probably fine, especially when it comes to Gamestop buying like-new games off people for like $10 store credit.( Disclaimer: I don't know how much it costs to get cards graded. )Buying a Switch 2 with some of the money is braindead as fuck though, and so is selling to Gamestop instead of someone who might pay more.That said, it makes me wonder if maybe the guy's secretly a mastermind and those cards are all worth jack diddly shit (or the employees there were just enamored by the fancy cases and paid extra) and he turned a profit on it.
>>58274425>Disclaimer: I don't know how much it costs to get cards graded.Pretty obvious from your post. Dude lost money in that exchange.
>>58274432>google it>$10 minimum on the low-tier bulk option with all the stars aligned in your favor and waiting like 4 months to get your card back>most people seem to do the $20-30 range of optionsI guess there's a chance he might've turned a profit on them still if the graded cards are all garbage, but also trying to ship them off anywhere to sell them normally would eat into the profits too......so I guess the TL;DR here is just to not PSA grade something unless it's something you know is worth a lot.
>>58274452Exactly. That’s the whole fuckery of it. And it sucks because I actually have an extremely rare Charizard, in addition to several other very expensive old cards, but as >>58274278 explained, sending them in to get them graded would just cost me a nightmare carnival of hostage fees once those scamming fucks realize what they’re holding. So I just sit on like $20k of Pokémon cards I’ve had since I was 11 because hopefully maybe someday the world won’t be ruled by grifting cunts? Sometimes it seems like the honest, smartest, realist move is to suck the dick like this guy and just cash in before we all get exploded by the Icarus-level greed rocket that we’ve all been lumped aboard
>>58274301my sidesburgers live in a social and biological experimental laboratoryfirst they get scammed by the dna 23&me alike services now by the speculative consoomer grading services and pokemon merch scalping giving everyone a delusion of becoming a gorillionaire like that youtuber reminds me of the retards who were investing their shekels into the oreo x pokemon rare mew cookie biohazard
>>58274577Just sell them ungraded, the real fans will appreciate it
>>58274601>the real fans will appreciate itThe scalpers will appreciate it*
>>58274595Not even really an American thing, it's just a product of the internet-raised generations where everyone sees Shiny Thing online and buys it, then hears Shiny Thing can be improved 10000x (subjectively) just by buying Other Thing, and now they're in deep debt with an entire room of their house just dedicated to holding Shiny Thing, which then they load up with Shiny Thing Accessories and Shiny Thing Insurance, and then either A: their whole collection burns to ash because it's made of some kind of flammable Chinesium, and the STI just gives them the runaround on the phone, or B: everyone moves on to the latest TikTok fad and Shiny Thing is now worthless because the whole thing was just some Chinese company's scheme to get people to buy a ton of cheap junk.At least with shit like Beanie Babies and Pogs, they were still functional things you could give kids to play with, shit like Funko Pops and Labubus just sit on a shelf somewhere until the trend dies and the lot ends up in some pawn shop, sold for 1% of the original price.Even baseball cards had the benefit of having real people on them and their real stats, so they still had informational use when the internet didn't exist / wasn't fleshed out.
>>58274301so they can just retroactively rescind your rating?
>>58274175I don’t know much about PSA, but are we meant to think this was a good deal or a bad one? Couldn’t he have traded in a bunch of really common low value cards that he’d had graded? How are we meant to know the value of his PSAs?
>>58274833Are you retarded or do you just hop into threads without reading them?
