PSA Adds Raw Card Tracking in Major Collection App Update

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NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 21: A man sells vintage baseball cards prior to the start of the last game at Yankee Stadium between the Baltimore Orioles and the New York Yankees on September 21, 2008 at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx borough of New York City. Yankee Stadium held it's inaugural game on April 18, 1923 against the Boston Red Sox and tonight's match will be the final game to be played at the historic stadium. During it's 85 years as ''The Home of Champions,'' the stadium has also been known as ''The House that Ruth Built'' and ''The Cathedral.'' The stadium has been host to 33 World Series, three Papal visits and has been visited by legends such as Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Bera, Mickey Mantle and boxing great Muhummad Ali. In 2009 the Yankees will move across the street to a newly constructed stadium estimated to cost $1.3 billion. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

PSA no longer wants to enter the picture only after a collector decides a card is worth grading.

The company rolled out a significant update to its Collection experience on September 23, adding support for ungraded cards alongside PSA slabs and other graded cards. Collectors can now monitor estimated portfolio value, track individual cards over time, organize them into folders and create public collections to share or sell.

The raw-card addition is the important part.

It gives PSA a place in the collecting process before a card ever enters a submission box — particularly notable while the company’s cheapest grading tiers remain unavailable.

PSA App Can Now Track Raw Cards Before They Are Graded

Previously, PSA’s digital ecosystem naturally centered on authenticated and graded cards. The new Collection experience broadens that considerably.

Collectors can add an ungraded card, follow its estimated value over time and research how examples in different grades have performed. PSA said in announcing the update that users can then use that information when deciding what to do with the card next.

That creates a fairly obvious path: find a card, add it to Collection, monitor the market, research graded examples and submit it to PSA if the numbers — and the card’s condition — make sense.

The app already allows collectors to scan cards for identification and pricing information and build grading submissions from a phone. Its current App Store listing describes support for sports cards as well as Pokémon, ONE PIECE, Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh! cards.

Just don’t confuse a portfolio estimate with a grade. A raw card’s eventual PSA grade can substantially change its market value, and PSA explicitly warns that past sales do not guarantee future performance and that its Collection tools are not investment advice.

PSA Collection Is Not Limited to PSA Slabs

There is another noteworthy piece to PSA’s expanding collection-management push: collectors do not have to keep only PSA-graded cards there.

PSA’s current FAQ says Collection supports ungraded cards along with cards graded by PSA, SGC, BGS, BVC, CSG and CGC.

That makes the product considerably more useful for collectors whose shelves do not conveniently observe grading-company boundaries.

The update also introduces folders that can be sorted or filtered by factors including grading status and changes in value. Those folders can be turned into public links, allowing collectors to share only a particular PC, set or batch of cards for sale instead of exposing the entire collection.

Update Arrives While PSA Value Grading Remains Paused

The timing gives the raw-card feature another practical use.

PSA reported on September 22 that its active global grading backlog had fallen to approximately 9 million cards. As Heavy previously reported on PSA’s grading backlog, its lower-priced Value services remain paused, with PSA identifying a backlog below 5 million as the threshold for reopening those tiers.

PSA recently introduced a $59.99 Standard service, but that still leaves collectors without the cheaper Value options that existed before the company’s June shutdown. Heavy detailed the new PSA Standard grading service earlier in September.

That means plenty of cards will remain raw while collectors wait, sort and decide what actually deserves a grading fee.

PSA now has somewhere it would like them to put those cards in the meantime.