With the recent news of SGC’s precipitous drop in volume, it’s a fair question: Can CGC make inroads into grading vintage sports cards? Regardless of the future of SGC, it is obvious that less volume is the plan for the brand. That means there is available vintage market share to be scooped up by PSA, Beckett, or CGC.

The most recent Gemrate data shows huge growth for CGC in sports cards–though they are still primarily a TCG grader. (By the way, PSA is now also a majority TCG grader). Granted, very little of that new sports volume is in vintage. But CGC making inroads into sports cards market share at all might be a first step.

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?”

Let’s not put the cart before the horse regarding SGC’s future–but I have heard from many collectors who are now holding back from SGC to see how everything shakes out before submitting to them. And admittedly, I’m doing the same.

CGC’s total volume increase, while impressive, needs a more nuanced analysis before we can jump to any conclusions about sports cards or especially vintage. 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. But SGC lost half of its vintage volume in a month’s time, and PSA’s numbers were steady, meaning that there might be some pent up demand somewhere.

Broome on Vintage

Andy Broome, Vice President of CGC Cards and head sports card grader, was a recent guest in a Cardhound Guest Expert forum, and he was asked specifically about vintage. Does CGC care to grow vintage market share? After all, there is an infinite supply of new ultramodern cards to grade. Vintage population, on the other hand, is fixed and finite.

Broome responded, “I think there is upside in gaining market share in vintage. Sports as a whole is a priority for CGC and vintage sports is one aspect of that.

TCG may be the flavor of the day, but TCG is not the entire card market. One of the reasons why we want to grow vintage and sports in general is that we want to be able to offer a complete service, meaning we have expertise in all areas of cards. We do not want to specialize in just one area.

Many collectors and dealers are involved with a range of material. We want to be the trusted expert that can authenticate and grade all of your cards, whether your sub box has all TCG, or a mix of TCG, non-sports and sport and vintage. It is frustrating when you have cards returned to you because that grading company cannot do that type of material.” If CGC wants to position its brand as a premier grader–one brand that can do it all–growing its vintage share is important.

How Much Raw Vintage Remains?

Regarding the fixed supply of remaining raw vintage at this point, Broome responded “while I can’t argue that there is a finite number of vintage cards left to grade, that finite number is still quite large. Think about just T206 cards. There’s no doubt that there were millions printed. A large number have survived. We see T206 cards on a near daily basis today. I saw T-cards on a daily basis going back to early 2000s and we are still grading raw T-cards!”

Point taken. Cardhound has written about the “Boomer Bust,” or the idea that Baby Boomers are still holding massive amounts of vintage cards, many of which are raw. Eventually, these cards will be willed or sold and many of them will be graded. There is no good estimate of remaining supply, but for sure, it is vast.

CGCxJSA

I have seen more CGCxJSA dual-graded vintage autographed cards lately, and I even tried the service myself at the National. It’s a good product, and the slabs look great in my opinion:

Final Word

The CGC platform is robust and trusted. Andy Broome is the best-known name in the profession. He has a vast knowledge of vintage cards specifically (and, from what I hear, a world class Victor Starffin collection). CGC has a great registry and forum reputation in the comic world. They have the resources to scale (a weakness of SGC according to PSA).

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!