What a Grading Company Is Actually Scoring on Your Pokémon Card

CBC published an explainer segment titled "Who decides what your Pokemon cards are worth? Grading explained", carried in its Kids News stream and distributed on 19 September 2026. You can open the CBC item here, and a parallel CBC item with the same title frames the same question.

A short broadcast segment aimed at a general and younger audience is a reasonable introduction. It is not a submission guide, and it cannot carry the criteria, the fee tiers, the turnaround times or the caveats. If you are about to put cards in a box and mail them to a third party, you need the longer version.

Every major company examines broadly the same physical attributes, then expresses its findings differently. Read the current standards on the company's own site before you submit, because wording, tiers and scales get revised.

Centering

How evenly the printed border sits inside the card's edges, front and back. Centering is measured as a ratio, and it is the one attribute you can assess yourself with reasonable confidence before submitting.

Corners

Sharpness and cleanliness under magnification. Soft corners, whitening and tiny dings are routine on cards that have been handled, and they are common ceiling-setters.

Edges

Chipping, nicks and whitening along the cut edges. Dark-bordered cards show edge wear far more readily than light ones, which is why identical handling produces different grades on different cards.

Surface

Scratches, print lines, dimples, indentations, dirt and any loss of gloss. On holofoil and textured modern rarities, surface is where most points quietly disappear.

Some services report a single overall grade. Others, including Beckett Grading Services, report subgrades for those attributes alongside the overall number, which is why two cards with the same headline grade can have visibly different condition profiles. Check the PSA grading standards, the CGC Cards grading scale and the Beckett grading information for how each company currently defines its tiers, and read the current fee and turnaround pages on those same sites rather than relying on figures quoted secondhand in forums or videos. Those numbers change.

Work through this with the card in a sleeve, under a single bright light source, tilting rather than touching.

• Identify the card properly. Language, set name or code, collector number, rarity and printing. English and Japanese releases do not map one to one, and two cards sharing an illustration are not the same printing. A reprint, a promo and an original print run are three different cards.
• Centering, front and back. Compare left/right and top/bottom border widths. Back centering counts too, and people forget it.
• Tilt the card to catch the light across the holo. Print lines and fine scratches are invisible straight-on.
• Look at all four corners under magnification. A phone camera's macro mode is usually enough to show whitening you cannot see with the naked eye.
• Check the edges against a white background, then against a dark one. Whitening reads differently on each.
• Photograph it before shipping. Date-stamped images of front, back and all four corners protect you in any transit or handling dispute.
• Gather evidence on what graded copies of that exact printing have actually sold for, not what sellers are asking. Completed sales and active listings are different facts, and one sale is not a market.

Do not clean, wipe, buff or attempt to flatten a card before submitting. Surface intervention is far more likely to create damage than remove it, and it can move a card from graded to rejected.

Rarity is about how many copies of a printing exist or were produced. A grading company does not measure this. Population reports published by graders count how many copies of a card that company has graded and at what grades — they are submission counts, not print runs. A low population number can mean a scarce card, or it can mean a cheap card nobody bothers to submit.

Condition is what the grade actually addresses, and only for the single copy examined, on the date examined, under that company's standards.

Price is set by what buyers pay, which is affected by condition but also by demand, timing, the marketplace, the currency and who happens to be bidding that week. A grade can make a card easier to price and easier to sell remotely. It does not create value, and a high asking price is not evidence of anything except one seller's hope.

Playability is a separate world again. Tournament legality depends on the format, the region and the effective date, and rotations, bans and errata change. A card that collectors prize can be unplayable in every currently sanctioned format, and a slabbed card cannot be played at all without being cracked out.

• It cannot tell you what grade your card will receive. Nobody can, including anyone reviewing photographs online. Graders examine the physical object, and two submissions of the same card to two companies can return different numbers.
• It cannot guarantee authenticity forever. A grade is one company's opinion on the day it was given. Companies have revised opinions, reholdered cards and corrected mistakes.
• It cannot promise you the fee will be recovered. The gap between raw and graded sale prices for a given printing is something you have to research yourself, in completed sales, in the currency and marketplace you would actually sell in — and it moves.
• It cannot make sealed product a sensible financial plan. Opening packs is entertainment and a collecting activity. Treating it as a route to graded value assumes pull rates and outcomes that no honest source can hand you, and a single box break is an anecdote with a sample size of one.
• This article gives you no price figures, because no dated, sourced, marketplace-specific sale evidence came with the material behind it. Any price you see quoted without a marketplace, a currency, a completed-or-asking status and a date is not evidence.

1. Read the current standards, service tiers, declared-value rules, fees and stated turnaround times on the grading company's own site, and note the date you read them. Do not rely on numbers repeated in a video or a thread.
2. Confirm the exact printing you are submitting — language, set, collector number, rarity — so the label you get back matches the card you think you own.
3. Decide your threshold in advance. If a card would only make sense to submit at the top of the scale, and your own inspection already shows edge whitening or a print line, that is the decision made.
4. Price the whole cost honestly: grading fee, shipping both ways, insurance, and any return handling.
5. Sleeve, toploader, tape the toploader closed without taping the card, and pack so nothing shifts. Keep your photographs.

If the answer comes out as "not worth it", that is a legitimate result. A well-stored raw card in a sleeve and a rigid holder, kept out of sunlight and away from humidity swings, stays exactly as collectable as it was this morning.