Grading in 2026: When PSA 9 Beats a Raw Near Mint
We priced 400 slabs against their raw twins across four games. The premium is real, but only above a threshold.
The grading question has a lazy answer (grade everything valuable) and a real answer, which depends on the card, the game, and a threshold that moved twice this year. We compared 400 graded sales against raw near-mint copies of the same printing to find it.
Below roughly $150 raw, a PSA 9 is a fee-shaped hole in your margin. Above it, the slab premium clears grading costs in every game we tracked, and for vintage it clears them threefold. The surprise was condition-sensitive modern: full-art surfaces chip so easily that a 9 now functions as proof of preservation rather than a discount grade.
Kiri tracks per-condition prices nightly, which makes the math checkable for your own binder instead of ours.