I know this is about trading card games and not board games, but I would say they’re very close in principle, considering the complexity of games like Magic. I recently discovered the mysterious world of “grading”, in which services like PSA will grade your card as to add some felt value to the card itself, because of its rarity and how near to mint it is.
We’re talking about services that will grade the same card differently three times if you send it back, because of course they have no practical way of having an absolute meter for every possible imperfection.
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But what about grading sealed videogames? The whole grading system sounds like the most uselessly capitalistic thing ever.
It is a scam. Just not in the legal sense. You get the product and service you paid for, you just fell for the marketing that sold you a story that your hobby is an investment.
Ironically I think anime/weeb YouTuber Geoff Thew actually put together a pretty telling case when he was talking about how these parasites are trying to turn manga slabs into a thing the same way they did to MTG and American comics.
Youtube user Baseball Card Stories also expressed so much of how wrong the whole system is in a very concise video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8t9XHnIp9w , content warning for goofy AI pictures sometimes during the video lol), and he expressed how for him cards are first and foremost a tactile experience that has to do with paper, embossing, even the smell (he shows cards from the late 1800s which were sold with tobacco, still smelling of it).
I can see why some would ignore tactility for a card, since you can at least see it whole no matter how you spin it inside a plastic slab. But to suffocate a whole volume of a book inside of it is genuinely dumbfounding. I cannot wait for this fad to die, but I’m afraid there’s a good chance it’ll just ramp up in volume, in the near future.
edit: forgive me for the triple comment, for some reason my message would get sent as soon as I tried to change tab on my phone.
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Even your complaint doesn’t meet the definition of a scam. They can be wrong or imprecise without being deceptive.
But, I would go further and say you’ve misunderstood the activity of grading, which is signing that a given item aligns with a given rubric. In trading cards these rubrics are standardized (see TCGplayer.com grading system).
You’re free to disagree with a grading, free to not trust grades by given vendors. But it’s kinda silly to suggest grading as a concept is meaningless (especially if “meaning” can only exist with infinitely precision and accuracy).
I understand your point and while it might not follow the definition of a scam, it surely threads dangerously closes to it when the biggest and most used company by TCG players has been recently known for buying cards from customers only to re-grade them up and sell it themselves on the market, creating a vortex of conflict of interest.
And I do understand the activity of rating, but I still fail to see how truly meaningful it is if all the companies have such wide margins of error that they’ll give wildly different ratings to the same card if sent back again. It would make more sense if the company would limit itself to a) certifying that the card is not fake, and b) to note its main defects on the tag.
Grading from 1 to 10 is obviously a tactic to continuosly play with the market, creating scarcity when it is most convenient, and to enable the gambling addiction of customers who think that this time it’ll surely get a grade 10; and so the customer has to pay for: shipping, fees (which are crazy expensive, and they get higher if your card is more expensive for some reason), the card holder made for shipping sold by the company, and a box also usually sold by the company.
People can do what they want with their money, if this is how one wants to collect, shall they do so. But when the whole market and felt value revolves around grading from a handful of companies, something is fishy. There are countless kids in the world convinced that the rare card they just got from their Pokémon booster is worthless if they don’t spend a hundred bucks grading it.
Gruhn Guitars started this trend with vintage instruments, too. It inflated the market value of old instruments.
Mint, excellent, very good, good, fair… Fuck off. It’s worth what someone will pay.
