Here is a quick update to my last post regarding the PSA card grading submission process and its Collector’s Club membership.

Just last week PSA President Steve Sloan sent out a message to all customers stating, “The reality is that we recently received more cards in three days than we did during the previous three months.” Sloan goes on to say, “Given our growing backlog, it would be disingenuous for us to continue to accept submissions for cards that we will be unable to process in the foreseeable future. It’s an unpleasant conclusion, especially after the March 1 price increase, but it is necessary to properly serve the customers who have already submitted to PSA. Effective immediately, PSA is temporarily suspending our Value, Regular and Express service levels. This will allow us to fully unbox and receive the recent surge of orders and focus on our most impacted service lines. We will take a tiered approach to reintroducing these service levels. Our goal is to bring all suspended service levels back by July 1, 2021. Collectors Club members will have their memberships automatically extended to match the duration of the Value suspension. This extension will ensure existing members have 12 full months to utilize their annual Collectors Club benefits.”

Clearly PSA is struggling with the influx of submissions, but after just over one month’s time of membership, I have seen both the price increase on March 1, 2021 and now have had my membership essentially put on pause. I understand the hobby is growing in popularity and interest is at an all-time high. After all, I am a part of this influx in submissions having just recently gotten back into the hobby myself. However, as a customer of their company who is paying for their service and is a part of PSA Collector’s Club membership; I would both hope and like to think that there is more that could be done to alleviate any discontentment created by the current circumstances than to just send out an email to customers and give extensions of time to receive a service that had already been paid for and was expected in the first place. Either way, it will be interesting to see how PSA handles this situation and what effects this will have on the grading submission process moving forward.

Just recently, I was able to rejoin the PSA Collectors Club. Membership in the club allows individuals to submit trading cards and other collectibles to be professionally graded and authenticated. It has been years since I was last a member. Life happens, and you are too busy for or get distracted from doing the things you enjoy. One of those things for me has always been collecting sports cards and trading cards. So, to put it mildly, I was excited about my membership and getting back into the hobby that I have missed. The only subscription level available at the time I joined the Collectors Club was the Silver Membership. This made deciding which membership tier to select extremely simple. After reviewing the official step-by-step submission guide and doing a little research of my own, I got right to work on my first submission.

For anyone reading who may not be familiar with what a PSA Card Grading Submission form looks like, I will keep it simple. The form usually has eight columns total, but in the table below I kept it to just three. Line number, spec. number, min. grade, no qualifiers, and declared value total are the remaining five columns that I left out for simplicity. The line number states what number line of the form each card submission is on. The spec. number is automatically generated following your completion of the submission. The min. grade column is for you to assign the minimum grade value you would like your card submission to receive, for it to still be encapsulated in a PSA graded card holder. Otherwise, any card that receives a grade below its assigned min. grade value will not be encapsulated and returned to you the same way it was sent. Also, keep in mind that you are still responsible for paying the service fee whether it is below the min. grade value or not.

Similarly, the no qualifiers column allows you to decide which cards not be encapsulated if they were to receive any of the following qualifiers: staining (ST), print defects (PD), marks (MK), miscuts (MC), being off center (OC) and lastly, out of focus (OF). I chose not to assign any minimum grade values or use the no qualifiers option. Quantity, sport and card description are the forms remaining three columns, examples of how to fill them out can be seen in my submission below.

I included cards from different sports and from a range of different decades. After reading several articles online, the three things I found most important in filling out the form were to group cards of the same sport together, be consistent with whether the years are organized in ascending or descending order, and lastly, make sure that both the order of the cards on the form and the physical order of your cards in the submission are the same. Doing this will prevent your submission from being delayed.

As a result of the pandemic, PSA has been receiving a record number of submissions. The turnaround time for the PSA Collectors Club Value services is quite lengthy. Orders are at an all-time high and the current backlog for the Clubs Value Modern service level is more than 8 months. So unfortunately, it may be some time before this submission comes back. As soon as it has, the results will be posted to our site. In the meantime, check out our shop page to see what we have for sale; new products are always being added to our inventory. Comments can be left below and keep an eye out for my next grading submission!