Look first.
Grade second.
Mail your cards in and a person looks at every one of them — centering, corners, edges, surface — before anything is sent to a grading company. You find out which cards are worth it and which ones we would leave raw, and you are invoiced after, not before.
- Centering
- Corners
- Edges
- Surface
A second opinion,
before the money.
Grading costs the same whether a card comes back the number you hoped for or one nobody wanted. A pre-check is the step in between: someone holds the card under a light, looks at the four things the grade is built from, and tells you whether it is worth sending.
Collectors call it different things — pre-grading, card prep, using a middleman. It is the same job either way, and it exists because the expensive mistake in this hobby is not picking the wrong grading company. It is paying to grade a card that was never going to be worth grading.
We are not a grading company and we will not hand you a predicted number, because nobody can honestly promise one — the grade is the grading company's call. What you get is what we saw when we looked at your card, and a straight answer on whether it is worth the fee. Sometimes that answer is no, and that is the answer that saves you money.
Then we handle the rest: the accepted cards go to PSA, BGS, CGC, SGC, TAG on your behalf, and you track the whole thing from your account.
Four things, every card, both sides.
Centering, corners, edges and surface — the same four the grade is built from. Here is what each one actually means when a card is in your hand.
Centering
How the image sits inside its borders, front and back. It is the flaw people miss most often, because it is the one you cannot feel — you have to hold the card square and compare one border against the one opposite it.
Corners
All four, front and back, under a light that shows fraying and soft points a phone camera flattens out. A corner that looks fine face-on can be rounded when you turn the card.
Edges
The four sides, for nicks, whitening and chipping — the wear a card picks up from a binder, a stack or a trip through the post. Dark-bordered cards show it hardest.
Surface
Tilted under raking light for print lines, scratches, dimples, scuffs and gloss loss. This is the check that most rewards handling the card instead of looking at a photo of it.
Being told no is the point.
A pre-check that never turns anything down is not a pre-check. Here is exactly what happens to a card we would not send on.
We tell you what we saw
In your order's chat, in plain words — which card, and what it was that stopped us.
The call is still yours
Say send it anyway and we send it. A decline is our opinion, not a veto — it is your card, your money and your decision to make.
Otherwise it stays out
Unless you tell us different, a card we would leave raw is not sent on to a grading company on your behalf.
A card that stays out isn't charged
The flat $5 covers the cards we pre-check and actually send on. Nothing else.
It comes home with the rest
Declined cards ship back alongside the graded ones when the order returns. Want them sooner than that? Message us on the order and we'll arrange a separate return shipment.
The rest of the order carries on
Everything worth grading goes to the company you picked — PSA, BGS, CGC, SGC, TAG.
Nothing until we have looked.
Submitting is free. Our flat fee is invoiced after the pre-check, and the grading companies' own fees never run through it.
There is no checkout when you submit. You add your cards, pick a grader, and ship them in.
One flat rate for the pre-check and the submission — the same for every grading company.
Each company's own grading fees are billed to you directly, apart from our flat fee.
One pair of hands, a lot of cards.
A pre-check is only worth what the person doing it knows. So here is who does it.
Founder
Josh
Founder of Graded Investors. Has graded over 30,000 cards since 2020, pre-checking every one by hand for centering, corners, edges and surface before it ships to PSA, BGS, CGC, SGC, TAG.
That number is the only credential that matters here. Every one of those cards was held under a light and looked at before it went anywhere, which is the only way anyone learns what a grading company does with a soft corner, a faint print line, or a border that sits a hair off. It is why a pre-check is worth having — and why we would rather talk you out of a submission than take the fee for it.
More about JoshThe questions people actually ask.
Short answers, no hedging. If the honest answer is no, it says no.
Send them in and find out.
Submitting is free. We pre-check every card by hand, tell you what we would send and what we would leave raw, and invoice the flat $5 per card afterwards.
Read more on grading in the articlesPrices in USD. Each grading company's own fees are separate and billed to you directly.