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What will happen to PSA if/when the TCG bubble bursts?
craig44
Posts: 13,285 ✭✭✭✭✭
I just checked out the new gemrate numbers for october. PSA graded 2.79 MM cards for the month. of those, 912k were sports and 1.88 MM were TCG.
now I know that TCG/Pokemon are all the rage right now. but...
there were 10 Billion Pokemon cards produced from March2025-March2026. I would guess that with the 30th anniversary this year that number will increase. That is a LOT of cards. 85 Billion in 29 years.
when collectors/flippers look closer at those production numbers, do you think the craze will continue?
if not, where does that leave PSA? 2/3rds of their business is pokemon/tcg.
George Brett, Roger Clemens and Tommy Brady.
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it is the cycle of life & business that all things go up AND down. Sooner or later there will be a correction. No way to tell when though...
I agree. Based on making quarterly records I'd guess they're thinking if/when that happens that'll be someone else's problem to solve. They'd better hope it's years into the future.
2014 220,000 TCG graded cards
2025 7,500,000 TCG graded cards.
Yea that pokemon bubble is huge.
I got a card graded for fun, PSA 10 2026 POKEMON POR EN-PERFECT ORDER 104 MEGA ZYGARDE EX ULTRA RARE
It's hardly worth grading.
When I got it graded there were 350 PSA 10's. Now it's over 1,000 PSA 10's for a card not worth grading.
The market is nuts right now because everyone thinks they missed out.
Llamas and alpacas are camels. They aren't like camels, or related. They are camels. When was anyone going to tell me this?! How long had Bill Nye been holding out on us?
Will not burst. Those people will be billionaires in about 3 years. Mark this post calling it now.
Grading monopolies will be owned by collectors as Pokemon will be currency then.
Wait that did happen I think
Sorry what? This bubble will pop, they all do, the foolish part is trying to call the ‘when’.
If the bubble bursts, PSA will crystalize itself and vanish into the stratosphere. Sparkly bursts of color will fill the sky creating a rainbow of happiness above the faltering planet. People will dance in the streets or just aimlessly walk around mumbling in mixed languages to themselves. It could be Armageddon or the first day of spring training, but we won't know until it happens. All of the unused holders will be contracted out to build shelters for the less fortunate. They shall remain unlabeled.
A gembryo is the early developmental stage of a perfect card.
While it sucks we can't get our cards graded, I think the TCG?Pokemon think is great for cards in general. It makes people aware. Probably brings back many who thought hey had out grown it. ANd makes it kind of a "cool" thing to do versus maybe a nerdy thing to do.
The more the merrier. Definitely puts a big circle around the pre 1992 cards (cardboard), especially 1975 and back. Look for those in PSA 8 and up just to keep trucking fast. Not many around and the centered ones will bring a haul.
TCG still means topps chewing gum to me.
PSA will have to lay off billions of employees and the entire economy of the solar system will crumble.... IF/WHEN the TCG bubble bursts.
If the bubble bursts Japan will have a short recession.
PSA may have to lose some staff.
And suddenly there will be a wave of collector who are underwater.
Might rebound on natural momentum.
Llamas and alpacas are camels. They aren't like camels, or related. They are camels. When was anyone going to tell me this?! How long had Bill Nye been holding out on us?
With all the TCG cards out there and being graded it feels more like that entire thing is a bubble similar to the junk wax era than PSA and grading.
Sooner or later those numbers become unsustainable like any pyramid scheme. It just gets too big for folks at the bottom to keep thinking they're worth buying.
You know that it's just Pokemon being graded in stupid numbers.
Where a pokemon single card not worth grading has 1000 PSA 10 examples, an entire set of Magic the Gathering cards might have 400-1000 cards. And a YuGiOh set may have 8-10 graded examples across the whole set.
It's pretty clear to me that Pokemon is the bubble.
The spike in the photo I post is the Pokemon 20th anniversary set. So even when a pokemon event happens it leaves a huge mark on the TCG side of the hobby
Llamas and alpacas are camels. They aren't like camels, or related. They are camels. When was anyone going to tell me this?! How long had Bill Nye been holding out on us?
Just by comparing 2020's 1.5million against 2025 8 million it makes the market look pretty bubble shaped.
Especially when 2014 was the first year to break 200k cards graded and 11 years later its 8,000,000
Llamas and alpacas are camels. They aren't like camels, or related. They are camels. When was anyone going to tell me this?! How long had Bill Nye been holding out on us?
"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." - John Maynard Keynes
It's the singer not the song - Peter Townshend (1972)
Not even a minute do I buy the whole buh buh buh I'm a man-child japery - Me (2025)
it certainly has a junk wax feel to it
George Brett, Roger Clemens and Tommy Brady.
Same here
I think there are some differences today than in the JWE too which are not insignificant. There is a modern speculative market in Pokémon too but there’s also a growing collector base and much more liquidity today which makes it less of a speculative bubble than it may be in segments.
There are a lot of complaints about PSA grading prices but the value for most cards is better than it was in 1990 even if it’s not cost effective to grade all your commons.
Yea but they have refractors..etc... how u been ... im back Colecting Rod Carews ...!!
H
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Major_League_Baseball_players_from_Panama
Exactly. I remember all the dads in my neighbourhood “investing” in sportscards and how scarce 90 UD Hockey felt because the demand was huge. Dads scrapping for boxes at Costco. This is just that, these easily accessible huge print run Pokemon cards will suffer the same fate. Greater fool theory, at some point you run out of fools willing to buy and grade this stuff.
10,000,000,000 pokemon cards in the last year.
is it possible that there were more pokemon printed this year than there were 88 Donruss?
when i do the math, i am pretty sure there are. 10 billion divided by 660 means 15MM of each card. while there were a TON of 88 Donruss, i dont think they made 15MM of each.
George Brett, Roger Clemens and Tommy Brady.
I think so. I read somewhere that during the 1988-1991 peak of the junk wax boom that Topps and Donruss were printing 4 million of each card, way less than the 15 million of each Pokemon card.
collecting O-Pee-Chee (OPC) baseball cards
full-time poster on the Trading Cards forum, part-time lurker on the U.S. Coin Forum
Thats a lot of cards..! but most of them ar3base cards.. they are only sending to grade those shiny refractors.. I hope
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Major_League_Baseball_players_from_Panama
That PSA order that was stolen was full of relatively low-value cards. Once enough people rip 2k in wax, spend 1k on grading, to get 500 dollars in cards the tide will turn. Grading is now all about gambling and once submitters realize the risk doesn’t match the reward this whole thing falls apart.
To some degree the long turn times help the TPG’s. It takes 8 months to realize you spent 2k to get 1k in cards back, and delays what will be a massive influx of dealer inventory. Important to note most of the 10M cards submitted this year have yet to make it to market.
the economy will be another factor in all of this. I know that in New England where I live, energy costs and especially heating oil are at all time highs.
Heating oil hit all time highs at $6.00/gallon last week. Most people here heat with oil. I have no earthly idea how most people will heat this winter. I have a feeling that luxury items like pokemon/sports cards will be taking a back seat.
Last year, for instance, prices were a little over $3.00/gallon.
and they are cranking out 10 Billion cards/year...
George Brett, Roger Clemens and Tommy Brady.
Would you rather have cheaper grading or cheaper gas?
It's going to be really interesting when all these graded cards start hitting the market to be sold. Lots of people are going to learn in real time their entire 'investment' in these things wasn't really that at all.
I have 100s of cards that I would send in to grade if it was still 2016, but since grading standards have changed so much I won't touch it. They'll just continue to sit in sleeves. I also don't buy to crack/resub or even open old stuff for grading anymore. There's just too much friction and cost to make it interesting anymore.
Maybe just revert back to the oldest, old style. Do it for fun.
A gembryo is the early developmental stage of a perfect card.
I see a lot of angles here from the angle of Pokemon cards and a bubble:
-First, what makes a bubble a bubble. People keep talking about the AI bubble popping when you have a lot of stocks in the AI space that seem to have not gone up in a year. But still that bubble must pop, even though we aren't sure which stocks contribute to the bubble. Sell it all, even the bubbles that really have not been blown or already popped.
-Maybe a bubble is stuff selling at an inflated irrational price that does not seem to be justified. I feel like sometimes anything that goes up in value is considered a bubble. We can look at vintage sports cards here and how over the years their value has ascended but on these boards most people would not see Mantle Aaron Mays Williams Ruth Gehrig T206 HOFers in high grade that went up in value a lot as a bubble. Some guy who trades dividend stocks but does not collect cards or know much about sports could call collecting those vintage cards in high grade a bubble. Because they do not follow a logical value increase pattern that his Dow stocks he has held for 40 years have.
-I think there are similarities here where someone who may call Pokemon a bubble gets cards but does not get how Pokemon cards work in general. You cant compare 1988 Donruss to modern Pokemon. Because if you opened 40 boxes of 1988 Donruss you knew you were getting a certain amount of Mark Grace Gregg Jefferies Tom Glavine. One guy who opens 40 boxes is not getting 150 of one of those guys and another who does the same, 3 of those guys. That was the problem with what got labeled junk wax, no hits. So junk. Later okay Donruss signatures, Finest refractors, maybe 1 a box maybe 1 every 5 boxes. Eventually they got the junk wax problem and dont think it gets repeated in sports or TCG or the product will fail. You can open 40 boxes of Pokemon today and not get the card you want. The chase, the hits, similar to sports /499 /5 cards is what makes people want it. Then hey, they just like the way they look. They like a character like you may like a player. They used it in a video game. They watched it in a cartoon when they were a kid.
-So can see some potential bubblish angles with high POPs but the hard to pull angle complicates some of the cards. With each pack you have variations of scarcity, common, uncommon, rare, ultra rare and then these Special Illustration rares which may show up one every 900 packs. But then you have the old stuff, much much lower print runs, same scarcity rules for the most part. Then you know just like 1950s sports packs you cant just bust a lot and get the the POPs to soar. So super high demand low supply. I think the COVID and later stuff with high print runs is more vulnerable to a bubble scenario. But I still see the demand and while a card may have a 10,000 POP, 5 million people may want it and its real hard to pull from a pack. 10,000 POP after millions of packs, maybe boxes opened.
-As far as how PSA would handle it if there was a bubble, I'm not sure they were really prepared for a bubble or anything more than a modest increase in demand so I imagine it would not impact them dramatically. Maybe just get to 20 30 day turnaround. I think if submissions were cut in half PSA would not feel as if they had too many people and I dont see submissions getting cut in half anytime soon. If that happened I dont think it would be a bubble popping, more of an incident, like fear of stuff getting stolen off a truck or feeling that your cards get undergraded then bought and sold at a higher grade by the company that graded them. But these two things probably had close to no impact on submissions.
that's why I keep my beanie babies at the bank. Can the card market be both bubbly and not at the same time?