Sports card enthusiasts don’t go through the effort of collecting solely in the hopes of an eventual payday: They are often driven by a genuine love of sports history, the cards, and the hunt.
That said, valuation is still a vital part of the process. Without a firm grasp of what their collection is worth, enthusiasts won’t know if they should take out an insurance policy or sell off some of their cards.From getting your card graded to picking a sports cards price guide, this is your ultimate walkthrough for the trading card valuation process.
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Determining the value of your sports cards usually involves two steps: grading and valuation.
Fortunately for enthusiasts, there are many high-quality sport card price guides out there to help them understand the value of their collectibles. To help you save time, we’ve included only the very best, most reliable sports card value guides: PSA Price Guide, Beckett OPG, and eBay Price Guide.
PSA’s online sports card price guide is the first stop for many sports card collectors for several reasons.
But there are some caveats, with perhaps the most important one being that the guide only contains pricing information on PSA graded cards. The PSA name has such cachet that even identical cards with the same grade could be valued differently if one was graded by PSA and the other was evaluated by a different service.
The number two player in the trading card industry, Beckett is a well-known and well-respected organization that’s built a devoted customer base with its uniquely granular grades and aesthetically pleasing card slabs. Like its rival PSA, Beckett also offers a pricing guide that enthusiasts look to as a reliable source of connectible valuation data.
Huge dataset: Beckett Online Pricing Guide (OPG) covers nine million cards, over 300,000 sets, and 150,000 players — representing almost $200M in total value.
The main drawback of Beckett’s pricing guide offerings is cost. Unlike eBay or PSA, you will have to cough up a few bucks to access the information. It costs around $15 a month to use the online guide and $5 or more to pick up the magazine version.
eBay has always been an excellent source of pricing information, and its data often fuels the estimations provided by other pricing guides. But the recent explosion in the popularity of the trading card industry pushed the ecommerce giant to launch its own sports card price guide app: eBay Price Guide. While currently in beta, this tool nonetheless has a lot to offer:
If the online guides aren’t your cup of tea, you can always use in-person methods of getting your collectibles assessed. Two of the most reliable methods are consulting experts at local stores and going to trade shows.