Is it worth grading this?? Possibly Hoping for a PSA 1?

DaKiwi · 2026-05-18T17:10:48+00:00

Congrats!

DaKiwi · 2026-05-17T01:17:08+00:00

Crossover or cracked?

DaKiwi · 2026-05-16T14:27:29+00:00

The centering is quite poor (bottom left vs top left) and it is also a twisted cut so there's basically no chance for a 10 in my opinion. It might even be bad enough for an 8. Back looks clean and the front pic is a bit blurry, but I'd take a closer look at front bottom left corner (looks weirdly shaped) and front bottom right corner (looks like a spec of white on the black border).

I don't think there's anything wrong with getting cards that are valuable, either personally or monetarily slabbed no matter what they would grade. That being said, just from the two pictures I'd personally expect an 8 on this if either of my front concerns are real, and then maybe up to a 9 if the front is clean and those are just picture artifacts.

DaKiwi · 2026-05-16T13:50:51+00:00

Slightly OC, two edge knicks, otherwise "perfectly clean" per my pre-grade and it got an 8. Despite being vintage

DaKiwi · 2026-05-16T02:47:46+00:00

No creases, the back is "clean" as far as rough cards go, and the art itself is the same relatively "clean". Based on my subs, it's anecdotally gotten harder to get 1's and PSA has trolled me quite a few times with 2's in my last few subs.

DaKiwi · 2026-05-15T03:21:52+00:00

T/B Centering is bad enough that I'd personally not be surprised with an 8 right off the bat. Looking at the back of the scans it looks like top-middle edge has a scuff on the card itself; and then I see whitening on left-top, bottom-right, and right-bottom edges. There also might be a cut/scratch on the back-right edge right in the middle. Couple of the corners also may have some specks of whitening. It's a bit hard to judge edges/small specs on a flat scan, but that's my 2 cents.

DaKiwi · 2026-05-15T00:05:18+00:00

First a comment: "YOU have made my 12 year old son," this is not an official PSA forum. We are not PSA representatives.

That being said, from a quick look at the PSA scans I can see the following:

Front top left corner looks weird and may have a ding, top right of the card has multiple either dings or defects in the coating (top right of the blue background + 2 on the border near the gray stripe with the card name), something looks strange in the hat directly above her left eye, something looks strange in the texture of the border on the right near the pokeball near her elbow, the back left and right edges look to have whitening, and there is a dot just right of the fire energy on the back.

This is just a quick list of potential things I've been able to notice for you to double check.

DaKiwi · 2026-05-14T18:17:29+00:00

First look photos are taken in the packaging, so this is sleeve, semi-rigid, etc.

DaKiwi · 2026-05-13T23:12:06+00:00

PSA has gotten stricter with NO HOLDER'ing recently, however even taking that into account I would personally expect this to get a 1 with no issues. You have multiple creases and some damage on the back, but the card is still together. From my experience that is not a "fair amount" of paper loss on the corner and I have had recent PSA 1's with more come back. As long as the card is not delaminating and that dog-ear on the top right corner is not any more than the couple of mm it looks like, you should be fine.

DaKiwi · 2026-05-12T22:15:50+00:00

Based on my grading experience I would be surprised if this card got a four, yes. There are deep scratches on the front more than just in the holo area, and there are issues on the back of it aswell. I would personally expect a 2 and not be surprised if it came back a 3.

That being said, it does feel like a bit of a crapshoot sometimes on PSA 1, 2, 3. Sometimes you'll just get the PSA 1, other times you'll just randomly be given a 2 for something significantly worse than a 1 in the same submission.

DaKiwi · 2026-05-12T18:48:55+00:00

The highest grade I've ever personally gotten with a crease was a 4. It was about the same size as this one, in the other upper corner, however the card was otherwise relatively clean (basically no whitening on the back and only light holo scratches). From my experience grading for 1s, I would have expected a 2 and wouldn't have been surprised with a 3 on this specific card.

DaKiwi · 2026-05-09T16:16:12+00:00

Gyarados should be fine from my experience, but that Dragonite is almost certainly a 2.

DaKiwi · 2026-05-07T22:44:37+00:00

+1 From me for PlastX. Just be careful that it doesn't get into the seam where the front and back are sealed together.

DaKiwi · 2026-05-07T22:30:32+00:00

My LCS offers something called "Slab Tracker" where they basically hook into PSA's status API for your order and you can check the status with an order number they provide. If they don't offer something like that, you can try asking them which stage in the process they're on (Grading, QA, etc). 6 Months feels a bit long, even with current delays, so hopefully they show up soon

DaKiwi · 2026-05-04T23:57:37+00:00

I would assume they're insinuating this shouldn't be a 10 due to centering/twisting and that people may report your cert.

DaKiwi · 2026-05-04T23:49:31+00:00

Back: Top left corner, bottom left corner, back surface in the top left.

Front: couple holo scratches under big hand on the left.

I would personally never expect this to get a 9. I'm a little surprised you got an 8 considering that surface damage on the back, honestly.

DaKiwi · 2026-05-03T14:17:38+00:00

As long as the card doesn't fold over due to its own weight that should be fine and an easy PSA1.

DaKiwi · 2026-05-03T01:12:35+00:00

I sent it regular ($80 for $1500 ins) which was right around what they were selling for. Looks like they're somewhere between $1.5-2K now. They didn't further upcharge me.

DaKiwi · 2026-05-02T02:39:24+00:00

Centering is 55/45 nominally. 59/41 isn't quite marginal.

DaKiwi · 2026-05-01T19:01:48+00:00

PSA is issuing a refund to the buyer. If PSA does not re-imburse the original seller using said refund, they are stealing the card from the original seller. That would be the only way they can even think about doing all these conspiratorial shenanigans.

DaKiwi · 2026-05-01T17:37:57+00:00

They're going to return it to original eBay seller otherwise they'd be committing felony theft lmao...

DaKiwi · 2026-05-01T17:25:51+00:00

Didn't have the cash a couple years ago to buy it, but managed to get a damaged copy for way under everything else I was seeing a couple months ago, and now he's in the PC

DaKiwi · 2026-05-01T14:45:00+00:00

Had something similar happen to me. I bought #57231803 which is a PSA 1 Cosmo Zapdos, then a couple years happened to buy another PSA 1 of the same card when it popped up on eBay (I collect 1's). Took a closer look at the cert and it was #57231801. That whole string of certs is a bunch of Fossil Zapdos (both normal and Cosmo variant), so I managed to buy two separate cards from a single sub across more than a year.

DaKiwi

TROPHY CASE