How to Grade Magic Cards
What Grading Actually Does
Grading sends a card to a third-party company that authenticates it as genuine, evaluates its condition against a standardized numeric scale, and seals it in a tamper-evident holder. For Magic cards, grading serves two purposes at once: it removes any doubt about authenticity — which matters enormously for Reserved List and Power Nine cards given how often they are counterfeited — and it locks in a condition assessment that a buyer can trust without inspecting the card in hand.
A graded card in a high grade typically sells for a real premium over the same card raw, and that premium tends to grow with the card's overall value and age.
PSA vs BGS vs CGC for Magic
PSA (Professional Sports Authenticator)
The most widely recognized third-party grading company across the collectibles world generally, and a common choice for Magic submissions. PSA uses a 1-10 scale, with 10 as the top grade. Its brand recognition and large existing population of graded vintage cards make PSA slabs easy to sell and easy for buyers to price confidently.
BGS (Beckett Grading Services)
BGS grades on the same 1-10 scale but publishes four individual subgrades alongside the overall grade, giving buyers a more granular picture of exactly where a card is strong or weak. A BGS 10 with a perfect 10 in all four subgrades — a Black Label — is treated as the single most prestigious grade obtainable in the hobby and is exceedingly rare.
CGC (Certified Guaranty Company)
CGC built its reputation grading comics and expanded into trading cards, including Magic, more recently. It uses the same 1-10 scale, offers optional subgrades, and has earned a reputation for consistent standards. CGC cases are held in a UV-protective inner well, a detail collectors of valuable vintage cards particularly appreciate.
No single company is objectively "correct" — all three authenticate genuine cards and reject counterfeits, and the choice often comes down to which company's population reports and resale market a collector trusts most for a given card.
The Four Subgrades
Every grading company evaluates a card across four underlying categories, whether or not it publishes them individually:
- Centering — how evenly the printed image and border sit within the card frame, front and back.
- Corners — sharpness and freedom from whitening, dings, or rounding at all four corners.
- Edges — smoothness and lack of chipping, fraying, or roughness along all four edges.
- Surface — freedom from scratches, print lines, indentations, or scuffing across the full front and back.
A card can look excellent overall and still lose a grade to a single weak subgrade, most commonly centering, which is the category most collectors underestimate when self-assessing a card before submission.
When Is Grading Worth It
Grading only makes financial sense when the expected graded value clears the raw value plus grading costs, shipping, and insurance combined. As a rough guideline, cards worth meaningfully more than the grading fee in excellent raw condition are the ones worth submitting; low-value commons and uncommons almost never clear that bar regardless of condition.
Vintage cards — original dual lands, Power Nine, anything from Alpha, Beta, or Unlimited — are the strongest grading candidates because vintage collectors place a large premium on authenticated, encapsulated copies given how often these cards are targeted by counterfeiters. Modern chase cards in apparent near-perfect condition, particularly foils, borderless treatments, and serialized cards like certain printings of The One Ring, are also strong candidates. Bulk staples and low-value playables are rarely worth grading no matter how clean they look.
Pre-Grading: Know the Value First
Before spending on submission fees, shipping, and insurance, it pays to know exactly what a card is worth raw and how much a graded premium could realistically add. Scan your cards with Tappr to get current market pricing across your whole collection, then focus your grading budget on the cards where the math clearly works — usually your oldest, rarest, and cleanest copies rather than everything that looks nice at a glance.
Preparing a Card for Submission
- Inspect the card honestly under bright light and, ideally, a loupe. Check all four corners, both surfaces, and centering before assuming a top grade is likely.
- House the card in a penny sleeve inside a semi-rigid holder for shipping — most grading companies specify an accepted holder type in their submission instructions.
- Fill out the submission form with accurate card name, set, and declared value; inaccurate declared values can complicate insurance claims if a package is lost or damaged.
- Ship in a sturdy, padded box and insure it for the full declared value of the cards inside.
Turnaround time varies enormously by service tier, from a few business days for premium expedited service to several months for economy tiers, so factor timeline into your decision alongside cost.
