Best Pokémon cards to grade

The table below applies one formula to CardTrack's catalogue, but the same four questions work on any card, including ones outside our top 100:

1. Is the price gap big enough? The PSA 10 (or 9) value has to clear the raw price and the grading fee with real room to spare — a card whose graded price barely covers the cost of submitting it has no margin for a lower-than-hoped grade.
2. Is there enough population to trust a gem rate? A rate built on a handful of graded copies is closer to a guess than a measurement — CardTrack requires at least 10 graded copies before ranking a card by expected profit at all, and flags the confidence band on every row that qualifies.
3. Does the card actually gem often enough? A high PSA 10 price on a card that rarely gems is not a better bet than a lower price on a card that gems reliably — that is the entire reason this page ranks by expected profit rather than best case.
4. Is the specific copy actually clean? None of the above says anything about the card in your hand — a population's gem rate describes other people's submissions, not yours. Check centering, corners, edges and surface with the AI card grader or the centering calculator before you submit.

The default order is expected profit, which is the honest one. Switch the sort to best case only if you want to see the PSA 10 jackpots regardless of how often they happen, to gem rate if you care more about certainty than size, or to expected ROI if you are comparing a cheap card against a dear one and want the return per dollar tied up. The raw-price band is the most useful filter: set it to what you are willing to spend, and the era and set filters narrow the list to cards you can actually find. For one card at your own odds, the grading ROI calculator runs the same formula with the inputs exposed.

Every row carries the same five numbers — raw price, PSA 9 and PSA 10 prices, the grading cost for the ten, and the gem rate with its sample from the PSA population report — plus a one-line reason for its position. Read the sample before the gem rate: a 40% rate on 12 graded copies is a coin toss dressed up as a statistic, and the confidence label says so. The minimum-graded-copies filter removes those rows in one step.

Across the whole population of 4,569 cards with a raw price of $5 or more that clear the fee at a PSA 10, 4,279 have a measurable gem rate, and 2,780 (65% of those) come out ahead once every grade is weighted by how often it happens. By era, the positive-expected-value cards are led by Modern (2011–2019) with 974, then Classic (2004–2010) with 797, then Vintage (1999–2003) with 693. The difference between the first figure and the last is the gap between "could pay" and "is expected to pay" — the PSA 10 premium index measures the first, the gem rate supplies the second — and it is the reason the page ranks the way it does.

Expected profit = (gem rate × PSA 10) + (PSA 9 rate × PSA 9) + (sub-9 rate × the card's own sub-9 prices) − raw price − grading cost. Best case is the PSA 10 leg alone. Grading cost is the PSA tier fee for the graded value plus roughly $20 round-trip shipping, at fees as of 2026-09-26; the paused PSA Value tier is excluded and membership is not included.

Population selection bias. Gem rates are the share of the graded population at PSA 10 (PSA population report; CGC's when PSA has fewer than 10 copies). That population is self-selected: collectors grade their cleanest copies, and near misses get cracked and resubmitted, so it overstates what a random raw copy would achieve. Read a gem rate as an upper bound, and read it against its sample — confidence is high from 100, medium from 30, low from 10 graded copies; under 10, the card is shown as best-case only rather than ranked.

Prices. Raw is CardTrack's blended near-mint price for the exact printing; PSA 9 and PSA 10 come from the card's graded price ladder, with a PSA 9 estimated at 0.4× the 10 when the ladder has no 9. Where the ladder has no price for a lower grade, that leg is valued at raw. None of this is a sold price for your copy — it is a model of what the market has paid, and grading outcomes are not guaranteed.

PSA isn't the only option. This table's figures are all PSA, since PSA 10s typically carry the strongest resale premium for Pokémon — but CGC and BGS grade on the same 1–10 scale at different prices per card (PSA from $59.99, CGC from $20, BGS from $79.95), and none of the three requires a paid membership to submit. See the full fee and turnaround comparison before choosing.