With the recent news of SGC’s precipitous drop in volume, it’s a fair question: Can CGC make inroads into vintage sports cards? Regardless of the future of SGC, it is obvious that less volume is the plan. That means there is available vintage market share to be scooped up by PSA, Beckett, or CGC.
The Rise of CGC
The question was unthinkable just a year ago. But the combination of SGC’s orchestrated shrinkage, and CGC’s unprecedented rise in grading volume, has many vintage collectors asking some hard questions. One of them is this: “So, if SGC folds, who will you use for vintage grading?”
CGC’s volume, while impressive, needs a more nuanced analysis before we can jump to any conclusions about sports cards. For starters, 400k of those cards graded last month were TCG. But still, they outperformed SGC for sports volume as well. And in fact, they grew more in sports than any other category–likely due to some grading specials. But volume is volume:
But what about vintage?
Vintage is yet another tale. Even with all of that sports volume, not much is vintage (which I will define here as 1960’s and earlier to fit with Gemrate categories). Of the 97k sports cards CGC graded, only 1.7% of cards graded were vintage. That’s just 1,600 vintage cards, compared to around 16k for SGC and 32k for PSA. So, even if CGC eventually makes meaningful inroads into vintage, nothing is imminent.
CGCxJSA
I have seen more CGCxJSA dual-graded vintage autographed cards lately, and I even tried the service myself at the National. It’s good, and the slabs look great in my opinion:
The CGC platform is robust and trusted. Andy Broome, CGC’s lead grader and VP, is the best-known name in the profession. They have a great registry / forum reputation in the comic world. They have the resources to scale. There’s a good case for CGC, but ultimately it is the market that decides, and vintage collectors aren’t known for their willingness to try new things. This is a trend Cardhound will watch in the coming months. Stay tuned!
