by Doc – Owner, Founder, Clever At Finding Ways to Curb His TCG Addiction
The short answer: YES.
The long answer is that you have to consider a few logistics when you unlock grading.
- Can you afford it?
- Do you have cards worth grading?
- Is the gain of upside worth the cost of doing it plus the potential for downside?
- How much can your customers spend? (this is the most important)
Let’s think strategically for a second
The thing to understand about card grading is that it’s a method that has huge upside potential when you get to the higher ends (especially compared to traditional retail strats) but requires you to formulate your store around using basic retail to subsidize your pack-opening habit… and you’ll spend a lot of time opening packs unless you have either the pack-opening furniture or a QOL mod that does that for you.
I recommend investing in the pack opening furniture even over a fast pack open mod, because although they take up a lot of space and are quite expensive, they free you up to perform other tasks. Also, if you have enough of them, they can actually open packs faster than your fast pack open mod would (assuming it doesn’t instantly open packs, and none of the current ones do to my knowledge).
The big bottleneck for card grading is time, both in-game and IRL, because even the most expensive service still takes 2 full game days (about 26-30 minutes of game time) to get back to you. As you can have at most 32 cards being graded at once, and it’s generally best to consider grading any card worth over $100, you’ll eventually end up with a lot of cards worth grading. So you’ll find yourself triaging what needs grading first.
If you’re planning to go heavy in card grading, I recommend downloading a plugin that lets you increase the speed and number of cards your card opening machines can hold so that it can open about 200 cards every minute, and after you’ve hit level 50 or 60 in your store, increase with a plugin the number of cards you can send out to be graded. You take a lot of the fun out of it if you make those adjustments before the late game, though, so don’t install those plugins yet!
Can you afford it?
If you’ve just unlocked card grading and you don’t anticipate you’ll spend a lot of money on packs just yet, then you can afford to get the full 14-day dirt cheap grading service. If you play the game with any real intentionality, you’ll find that you are making more than enough to afford the better grading services long before those cards come back to you. Good! So long as your retail endeavors are subsidizing your card grading endeavors you should be fine.
I recommend never buying the most expensive, 2-day service until you’re pulling in about $5k/day of profit through your retail ends. Stick with the 4-day service, as that’s fast enough for you to not be having too many clogs. Besides, if you do 1 grade per day, then you’ll have a consistent stream of grades coming in and out daily, and that’s good for card sales revenue.
By the way, buying the machines that open cards for you is really, really expensive… but well worth it. They run in real-time, so even if your day is over you can hand it 64 packs and come back to it a few minutes later. They’re very useful for once you can afford to go through a thousand packs a night (which is really quite easy). I’d honestly encourage you to cordon off a section of your store just to plop down five of them, as you’ll have more space than you need even if you’re stocking every item in the phone.
Do you have cards worth grading?
The rule of thumb is that if you have a card worth over $100, you should put it on the list to grade. It doesn’t matter what kind of card it is, you should grade it. This is because of how the grading RNG tends to work: in my experience, you’ll get at least a 7 probably 80% of the time (that’s an estimate, not a statistic). I’d recommend, no matter the value of the card, that you try to grade it to pull that sweet, safe 80% chance.
Having said that, grade your cards starting with the most valuable cards and work down the list. Your most valuable pulls aren’t going to directly convert to high-value sales anymore (that’s what your lower-value cards are for), now they’re going to go through a second RNG pull to see if you can’t get even more moolah out of them. Oh, by the way – always grade your holo Ghost cards. Regular Ghost cards don’t net you that much money once you get into the “Destiny” half of the game (where you’ve unlocked Destiny packs) but if you pull a 10? …that’s good stuff.
Is the cost of the upside worth the cost of doing it and the potential for downside?
When you pull a 7, you’ll get a card back that’s worth the same value as the original card, so you’re only out the expenditure to have it graded. However, most of the time you’ll pull over a 7, I’d say about 2/3rds of the time, maybe more. When you pull over a 7, you’re making a profit in most cases.
- If you pull an 8, you’ll get probably around 150% of the card value back
- If you pull a 9, it’ll usually double
- If you pull a 10 it seems to be almost exactly four times the original value of the card
You can check the exact value of the grades before you grade by checking that card’s value in your cell phone.
So when deciding whether to grade your cards, you basically want to pack in the most valuable cards you can because all your 7-9 grades can subsidize the cost of all those grades, and the 10 will come back as solid profit. 10s come back as a SOLID profit. Turning $10,000 cards into Grade 10s means you suddenly have $50,000 cards.
Now make no mistake. There will be times where you put a $10,000 card into the grading service and come back with a $4,000 card, or worse, a $400 card. It’s RNG. You’ll wipe out, guaranteed. But there’s going to be many more times where you plug in a $10,000 card and come back with at least a $15,000 card… or a $50,000 card. In aggregate, the value gained far surpasses the value lost. It’s like gambling but the house tends to lose because the grading RNG is too generous.
How much can your customers spend?
Let’s say for a second you’ve gotten lucky twice in a row. Your store is level 12, and you’ve pulled a $1000 card from a pack. You sent it off to get graded and it’s a 9, so now it’s worth $2000. You stick it on your card table, hoping for someone to buy it, and nobody buys it for two weeks.
Smaller stores and lower levels mean your customers can’t spend as much money. As your store physically expands and your level goes up, your customers’ wallet sizes are allowed to be larger. So that $14,000 card that you pulled at level 20 isn’t going to sell until you’re level 40 because nobody can buy it!
In that time, you had some $50 cards that you could have sold. Frankly, you probably would have used that slot to sell four or five of them, so you’ve abandoned $200 of sales in the hopes of getting that $2000. That’s a bad deal! Here’s why.
It’s for that reason that this is the most important thing to consider: if your customers can’t afford your product, it doesn’t matter whether you pulled a 5 or a 10. Don’t grade cards that they won’t be able to afford the 10 of. If you happen to have a seriously expensive card, just hold on to it. It’ll pay off eventually.
Amiibo Doctor 