PSA, CardsHQ look to curb repack scams with new Graded Grails Repack Certification service
The repacking segment of the sports cards and memorabilia space is taking a giant step in the right direction.
On Wednesday, a collaboration between third-party authentication giant PSA and the CardsHQ card shop are making the popular trend of repacking safer for buyers. CardsHQ launched Graded Grails, the first PSA-certified repack, while PSA launched the PSA Repack Certification service.
Repacking is when a business or individual creates a pack containing a number of cards or a single card and sells it at a set price. A buyer is gambling to either pull a chase card, which will be worth more than the price they paid for the pack, or a lesser value card.
CardsHQ and Sports Card Investor founder Geoff Wilson has watched with dismay over the years as widespread repack scams have tainted the hobby. With no real repack regulations, that part of the industry has turned into the wild, wild west.
There are stories of breakers or card shop owners knowing which repacks, or mystery bags, contain the biggest hits—and reserving those repacks for their friends or top customers, or holding them back to the very end of a break to get customers to spend more to maximize revenue. There are other stories of the biggest hits in a repacks’ checklist never actually being put into the repack at all.
Wilson and PSA set out to give every collector a fair chance.
“We tried to go the route here of being ultra-transparent,” Wilson told SCD. “That means, for example, publishing the complete checklist, every single card within a product release to our website. It means posting the odds of being able to pull every single card in that checklist.
“Of course, now through the PSA certification, it means that PSA is certifying that is in fact the checklist and every single one of those cards made it into a box. It means PSA is also certifying that the boxes were assembled by them, sealed by them, randomized by them, packed into cases by them, and we had no knowledge of what card is in what box, and what box is in what case.”
Collectors, the parent company of PSA, is seeking to eliminate the guesswork for the customer.
“Next week’s a great example. If you walk down the aisles of The National, I would guess a high percentage of booths will be selling a repack product. Some of those are phenomenal products and others, unfortunately, aren’t,” Nathan Wolfe, president of Collectors marketplace, told SCD. “We think that this program can help clear up for consumers that, hey, if it’s been certified by PSA, we can trust this thing.”
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Wilson is hoping the new repack operation will be a game-changer for the industry.
“I really see this as really impactful for the hobby, because I think, unfortunately, there’s a lot of repack products out there that are not fair to the end collector,” Wilson said. “And I’m hoping that ultimately what this does is sets a new standard for repacks and gets more collectors asking questions about the transparency, honesty, and fairness of various repack products. I hope it therefore encourages other repack providers and breakers to take more steps to ensure the integrity of their products.”
CardsHQ is currently in the process of acquiring the cards it will use in its repacks. The card shop is picking up items by various means: PSA’s eBay store, through the PSA Offers feature to buy cards from collectors who have had them graded; purchasing collectors’ cards at CardsHQ headquarters; and from card shows. All the cards acquired will be shipped to PSA’s vault in Delaware.
Once CardsHQ has all its cards for a particular series it will feature for Graded Grails, PSA will pull those cards and start the repack process on its end.
PERFECT TIMING
The CardsHQ and PSA project has impeccable timing following last week’s massive memorabilia forgery bust in Indiana. Industry leaders have told SCD that breakers that break repacks on their livestreams could be impacted the most by the alleged dump of forged autographs and holograms into the market by dealer Brett Lemieux.
“I think this is going to solve a problem that I think a lot of people like to ignore,” Wilson said.
According to CardsHQ, the debut series of Graded Grails will launch on the first day of the National Sports Collectors Convention on July 30. It will include a debut series for football, a debut series for basketball, and two series for baseball. Pokémon will follow soon after.
All of the Graded Grails sports repacks are priced at $299 per box. The major grail chase cards inside are valued at $1,800 or more, and the lower-value cards around $140 as of the time of acquisition. Every possible card and the odds of getting them will be displayed on the website gradedgrailsrepack.com.
Collectors interested in picking up a repack at The National can stop by CardHQ’s booth in the Breakers Pavilion. Graded Grails also will be available for purchase at CardsHQ in Atlanta. A limited quantity of Graded Grails boxes will be on the CardsHQ website for preorder on July 23.
Prior to PSA and CardsHQ starting a partnership with the repacks, PSA executives had internally been pondering how it could get into that segment of the hobby.
“The repack phenomenon in the hobby has been an incredible storyline these past couple years,” Wolfe said. “As it evolves and new formats are kind of capturing collectors’ interests, I think few categories are growing faster than repacks. We’ve been tracking this for some time now, and I think we saw PSA’s role in it to kind of honor our commitments to raw cards with transparency and trust that has defined our service for decades.”
Wilson is hoping the reaction from the card community is overwhelmingly in favor of this new safety measure.
“I hope that people see the potential for this to really make the industry better,” Wilson said. “I hope that people see this as a step forward and realize that we’re trying to clean up what is unfortunately kind of an icky part of the industry—where some people are getting ripped off, and that this is a step towards more fairness, more transparency, more accountability. I hope that collectors cheer this on as a way of making the hobby a little bit better and a little bit safer for its participants.”