Hard-to-Grade Cards Cost More, Until 2020

The belief is that a card which grades badly is worth more, because the survivors are scarce. It is testable. Start with the selection, because it decides the answer: this study looks only at English cards whose PSA registry holds 50 or more slabs, 7,957 of them, which is a population of cards people already thought were worth grading. Inside it, the rank correlation between a card's gem rate and its raw ask is -0.3493, and the cards that gem under 10% of the time ask a median $44.43 against $3.84 for the cards that gem between 25% and 40%. The myth survives. Then split by the age of the set and it survives in exactly one half of the catalog.

A gem rate computed on a four-slab registry is arithmetic, not evidence: it can only be 0%, 25%, 50%, 75% or 100%. Pool those with everything else and the relationship vanishes, which is exactly what happens. At no registry floor at all the rank correlation across 18,337 English priced cards is +0.0186, indistinguishable from nothing. Raise the floor and the relationship appears and then stabilises. That is not a reason to distrust the finding, but it is the single most important thing to know about it, so it is here rather than in a footnote.

The 50-slab floor is the one used throughout this study. It keeps 7,957 cards, and the correlation it produces is the weakest of the three real floors, so the choice is the conservative one rather than the flattering one.

Read the chart carefully and the myth is only half right. The relationship is not a slope. It is a cliff at one end and a flat line across the rest: from the 25% to 40% band up to the 70%-and-over band the median ask RISES slightly, from $3.84 to $5.27. Everything the correlation is measuring happens in the first two bands. A card that gems 60% of the time is not worth less than one that gems 30% of the time; it is worth marginally more.

The PSA 10 column does fall monotonically, from $2,752.53 to $59.00, and it falls much harder than the ask. That is a different claim and a much safer one: hard-to-gem cards have expensive TENS. Whether the ungraded card is dearer is the question this study is about, and the answer is that it is dearer only at the extreme.

First objection, and it is the good one: this is age wearing a disguise. Old cards are hard to grade and old cards are expensive, and nothing here separates the two. So run the test inside individual sets, where every card shares a print year, a stock and a production run. Across the 126 English sets holding 25 or more qualifying cards, 7,343 cards in total, the median within-set rank correlation is -0.2902 and 86 of the 126 run negative. The myth survives the control. Then date the sets.

Twenty-six sets printed before 2011 and twenty-six of them run negative. Fourteen sets printed between 2020 and 2022 and not one of them does. In the Sword and Shield block the relationship is not merely absent, it is reversed at +0.5527: inside those sets the cards that gem EASILY are the expensive ones. The 45 sets whose release date we do not hold are a mix of promo runs, older expansions and a handful of recent sets our set feed has not dated, and tested the same way they behave like the old half, 36 of 45 negative at a median of -0.3248, so excluding them is not hiding a contrary result.

Skyridge is the old shape at full strength: its harder-to-gem half asks a median $149.99 against $18.63 for its easier half. Brilliant Stars is the new shape at full strength, running the other way at +0.7171, if anything harder than Skyridge runs the old way. A single rule cannot describe both, and anyone repeating the myth about a 2022 set is repeating a fact about 2003.

Second objection: the gem rates are contaminated by shared registry lines, where one PSA line is served against two products. They are handled rather than assumed away. 879 registry keys that two products both claim were dropped before any figure here, and 1,558 more were withheld because the line's identity had just changed and the new line had a single reading behind it. What remains is 21,928 usable registries, of which 7,957 belong to an English card that also carries a raw ask and clears the 50-slab floor.

Third objection: a raw ask is not a price. Correct, and it is the reason the headline is about relative ordering rather than about cash. Every price in this study is an ASK from the daily marketplace sync, the same figure the card page prints, and none of them is a sale. The PSA 10 column is the only sold median here and it is labelled as such. The rank correlation is unaffected by a level bias in asks, because a bias that scales all asks alike cannot change their order.

We can say what the data shows without pretending to know the cause. In a set from 2003, the expensive cards are the holos, the holos have the worst edges and surfaces, and scarcity of clean copies is the whole reason the market pays. In a set from 2021, the expensive cards are full-art and textured chase cards printed under modern quality control, and the cheap cards are commons that spent a year in a binder. The condition premium moved from the top of the checklist to the bottom of it. Related reading on the rate itself rather than its price: the gem rate curve and what percentage of cards get a PSA 10.

Three tests would break it. A recompute at the 50-slab floor returning a correlation weaker than -0.15 across the 7,957 would break the headline. A within-set recompute finding fewer than half of the pre-2011 sets negative would break the age control, which is the load-bearing part. And a finding that the 2020 to 2022 sets run negative would break the inversion, which is the part worth arguing about. The registry floor is the one number to attack first, and the value with no floor at all, +0.0186 on 18,337 cards, is printed above so the attack can start from our own figures. See also does a big PSA population lower the price, which tests registry SIZE against the premium rather than the rate against the ask.

Sources: `population_snapshots` (product key, UTC day, gem count, PSA 9 count, total) for the gem rate, and `price_history` (product, UTC day, price) read as the latest row on or before day 20718 (September 22, 2026 UTC) for the raw ask. A gem rate is the gem count divided by the total on the latest PUBLISHABLE reading of that registry, where publishable means the house continuity rule has not cut the series: `sharedRegistryKeys` drops 879 keys whose readings ever coincided with another key's on both total and gem rate, because one registry line served against two products cannot be attributed to either, and `publishableRegistry` withholds 1,558 keys whose line changed identity and has only one reading on the new line. 21,928 registries survive. A card with no gem count is NOT RECORDED, never a 0% gem rate, and is excluded. Absolute per-card registry counts are not printed for any card in this study. THE POPULATION IS A SELECTION and the article says so before the number: English cards, carrying a raw ask on the evaluation day, on a surviving registry holding 50 or more slabs. That floor is a gate that changes the headline, so the same correlation is printed at four floors including none, where it is +0.0186 across 18,337 cards. Prices are ASKS from our daily TCGplayer sync, equal to the figure the card page prints; the PSA 10 column is a SOLD median from `graded_snapshots` under the same latest-row rule and is the only sold figure here. EVERY COUNT IS DEDUPED ON THE TCGPLAYER PRODUCT ID: 1,212 ids are claimed by two catalog rows each. Correlations are Spearman rank correlations with average ranks on ties, quoted to four decimal places. Medians use the upper-middle nearest-rank convention, the value at index floor(p x n) of the ascending sample. Gem-rate bands partition the 7,957 exactly once and the six band counts sum to it. The within-set test keeps the 126 English sets holding 25 or more qualifying cards, 7,343 cards; 81 of those sets carry a release date from our `setinfo:v4:` rows and 45 do not, and the 45 are tested and reported rather than dropped silently. The halves in the four-set table are cut at each set's own median gem rate with ties broken on the product id, and on an odd count the middle card falls in neither half, which is why both halves report the same size. Not financial advice.