If you’ve sent a Pokémon card to PSA, SGC, or Beckett in the last few years, you were dealing with the same company. That wasn’t true in 2021, and the speed at which it became true is the story worth paying attention to.
Collectors Holdings, which owns PSA, bought SGC in February 2024 and Beckett (BGS) on December 15, 2025. Three of the four names on the slabs in your display case now answer to one parent. Depending on which filing you read, that’s somewhere between 77% and 83% of every card graded in the U.S. The consumer class action filed against Collectors in April pegs it at “roughly 80%.” However you round it, one company sets the standards, the prices, and the turnaround times for most of the hobby.
That matters more for Pokémon than most people writing about this seem to notice, because almost all the coverage frames it around baseball cards. Here’s the Pokémon-collector version.
What actually happened, in order
- 2021: Collectors acquires PSA, already the market leader.
- February 2024: Collectors acquires SGC, then holding roughly 5% of the market.
- December 15, 2025: Collectors announces the Beckett/BGS acquisition, about 3% of the market.
Before those deals, GemRate’s submission data had PSA around 72%, CGC around 18%, SGC around 5%, and BGS around 3%. After them, CGC is the only independent grader of any real size left standing — one competitor, holding roughly 17–18% of the market, against a company that controls the rest.
The part that should make you read the fine print
When a company buys its competitors, the promise is always that nothing changes. The receipts so far say otherwise.
According to the class action complaint (Rasmussen v. Collectors Holdings, filed April 14, 2026 in the Central District of California), within about a month of the SGC purchase, SGC’s most popular grading tier went up 20% and its expedited service jumped as much as 275%. The complaint alleges SGC’s grading volume fell 61% in two months as resources moved to PSA. Beckett tells a similar story: its in-person grading at large shows reportedly went from about $25 a card to $60 in January 2026, right after the deal.
None of that has been proven in court — Collectors moved to dismiss the case in June, and the company’s grading president has publicly said it still treats PSA, SGC, and Beckett as competitors. A U.S. congressman asked the FTC to investigate the Beckett deal back in December. The point isn’t to predict how the lawsuit ends. The point is that “prices went up and service got slower after the merger” is exactly the pattern you’d want to watch as a collector who pays these fees.
And you’re already feeling it. PSA paused its cheaper Value tiers on June 2, 2026, sitting on a backlog of roughly 10 million cards. As of mid-2026, the cheapest PSA option is Regular at $79.99 a card. If you grade Pokémon in any volume, that number reshapes what’s even worth submitting.
What this changes about grading strategy
Two things I’d actually do differently.
First, the math on what’s worth grading moved. At $79.99 a card floor, a chunk of the mid-value Pokémon you might have flipped through PSA at $18–25 a couple years ago no longer pencils out. The grading premium has to clear the grading cost with real margin. On a card that’s $40 raw and maybe $90 in a PSA 10, you’re grading for a coin flip after fees. That’s not a submission — that’s a donation to the backlog.
The fallback rule
Hope for the best, plan for the worst.
That coin-flip example is exactly what my grading rule is built to screen out — and the rule comes down to one idea: plan for the worst before you hope for the best. Grading only feels like gambling when the downside catches you off guard. Take the surprise away and it turns into something closer to informed investing.
Here’s the fallback test I run before anything ships. First, the honest part: I take a hard, unsentimental look at the card and decide whether it genuinely has a 10 in it — not “I hope so,” but “the centering, corners, edges, and surface actually support it.” Most cards don’t clear that bar, and pretending otherwise is how people lose money.
But a 10 ceiling isn’t enough on its own, because I’m not going to bet a whole submission on a perfect grade coming back. So the card still doesn’t go unless the floor holds up too:
- The PSA 9 has to clear grading cost plus the card’s raw value. If a 9 doesn’t put me ahead of where I started, the “upside” is just risk with extra steps.
- The PSA 8 has to land close to break-even once grading cost is baked in. That’s my true downside — and if breaking even is the worst realistic case, I can send it and sleep fine.
When both floors hold, the grade stops being a coin flip. Best case, I hit the 10 and the premium is enormous; worst case, I’m somewhere near even. That asymmetry is the entire game. A smart collector doesn’t roll the dice and hope they didn’t miss a hairline flaw — or that the human on the other side of the desk isn’t having an off day. They build the off day into the math ahead of time.
Where the premium still overwhelms the fee is the top of the market, and the numbers are worth internalizing. Here’s the top of the grade ladder on a card most Pokémon collectors know — the 1999 Base Set Unlimited Charizard (#4), using PriceCharting aggregated values, August 2026:
| 1999 Base Set Charizard #4 | Value | Multiple of PSA 10 |
|---|---|---|
| PSA 10 | ~$28,100 | 1x |
| BGS 10 | ~$36,600 | ~1.3x |
| BGS 10 Black Label | ~$182,900 | ~6.5x |
That BGS Black Label — a perfect 10 across all four subgrades — runs about 6.5x the PSA 10 on a vintage blue-chip like this. It’s a reminder that the “grade is where the value concentrates” rule isn’t a modern-set gimmick; it’s most extreme exactly where the cards are scarcest. (Values via PriceCharting, August 2026. Premiums swing hard by card — CGC Pristine 10 actually lands below the PSA 10 on this Charizard — and PSA’s liquidity still wins plenty of matchups, since a PSA 10 sells faster than almost anything.)
Second, the “just use the other guy” plan has a catch. The obvious response to PSA’s prices and backlog is to send more to CGC, the last big independent. I did exactly that with a bulk order — and it’s been sitting received-but-ungraded since March. CGC also became the grader a lot of live-sellers lean on to cheaply slab even commons and dress up a stream, which is its own reason to check what a CGC grade is actually telling you before you pay up for one. The independent alternative is real, but it isn’t a magic bypass around slow turnaround and uneven standards.
The takeaway
Consolidation doesn’t ruin the hobby overnight. What it does is quietly shift the cost-benefit on every decision you make — which cards to grade, which grader to trust, whether to grade at all or just hold sealed and skip the fee entirely. The collectors who come out ahead over the next few years won’t be the ones who guessed which slab wins. They’ll be the ones who kept doing the math while the market got more expensive to play.
Sources: Rasmussen v. Collectors Holdings, Inc. (C.D. Cal., No. 8:26-cv-00897); Rep. Pat Ryan letter to the FTC (Dec. 18, 2025); GemRate submission data; PriceCharting aggregated graded values (Aug. 2026); PSA Service Level updates (2026).