Usually, when you buy cards on eBay you're forced to judge the condition of the card from crappy camera phone pictures or crap scans of the card through a super-scratched up toploader. The condition of the card is often a guessing gaming, and always a significant gamble. Sometimes the eBay sellers don't even provide a picture or scan of the back of the card so it's impossible to know the condition of the card's back! It's basically like trying to view a card through a dirty and scratched up window, and only looking at the front. That is hard. I've been burned many times because of this, having received cards which had damage and flaws which were not visible in the crap pictures and scans.
COMC tries to avoid this dilemma by providing the highest quality scans possible so you can see every print spot, see every dinged corner, and see every chipped edge. Honestly, the only thing which I do find hard to see on COMC's scans are any gouges or scratches on the surface of the card itself, but these would be hard to see anyways on most any camera pictures or scans.
Thanks to the high quality scans on COMC, it's very possible to find raw cards for sale which are likely BGS 9.5 cards once graded.
I was lucky enough to find one when viewing Aaron Rodgers rookie cards. Below are the actual COMC scans which I saw when viewing the card.
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| Aaron Rodgers Bowman Rookie Card |
By carefully looking at all the scans of these cards, I was able to pick out which ones were in the best shape. I carefully examined the front of the card to see which ones had the best centering. If the centering was perfect, or at least what I would deem to be an acceptable 9.0 centering subgrade, then I checked the corners and edges. In this case I was looking for white specks which are indicative of dings and chips.
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| Aaron Rodgers Bowman Rookie Card |
A lot of the cards had really banged up corners and edges. It was very easy to rule out a lot of the cards based on corners and edges alone. In the end, I had settled on two cards which I thought to be in sufficiently good enough condition to warrant a BGS 9.5 grade. After carefully examining the scans for print spots, dirt, or other spots which might indicate surface card damage, and then re-examining the cards' corners and edges, I bought the better of the two. I paid $11.55 for it.
When I received that card from COMC in my next shipment, I was pleased to see that the card was indeed in great shape. I knew I had a BGS 9.0 at the very least and a great shot at nabbing a BGS 9.5.
Remember, to get a BGS 9.5, you have to have at least three 9.5 subgrades, and any subgrades which aren't a 9.5 must be a 9.0. (See this old blog post for general overview of the BGS grading formula.)
A couple months later this card was sent off to Beckett for BGS grading. When I got it back, I was happy to see that it got graded as a BGS 9.5 Gem Mint! All four subgrades got a grade of 9.5.
The value of this card, having been graded a BGS 9.5, is approximately $25 to $50 on eBay. Considering that it cost me around $15 to have it graded this wouldn't be a huge profit, if any, if I were selling it to make money but I'm not. This is a PC card and I'm happy to just put it in my collection. It does bring me happiness and sense of pride though, knowing that I found it raw on COMC. This just goes to show that with a little hard work, and a careful eye, that you can find BGS 9.5 cards on COMC.
Give it a shot!
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