SlabShield Vault
Find out what PSA would give it — before you pay
Photograph a raw card and pre-grading measures its borders against PSA’s published centering tolerances, looks over the corners, edges and surface, and tells you which one is holding the card back. One submission costs about £25 before postage. Knowing which card deserves it is the whole point.
Every Vault gets one free pre-grade, then it is a Pro feature. Cataloguing your collection is free and stays free.
How it works
Photograph the front
Flat, in daylight, filling the frame. The back as well if you have it — back centering is half of what PSA measures, and leaving it out halves what can be said about the card.
The borders get measured
Left against right, top against bottom, as a percentage. This is the part that is arithmetic rather than opinion, and it is the commonest single reason a card comes back a 9.
Corners, edges, surface
Checked for the things that cap a grade: soft corners, edge whitening on a dark border, scratches that only show at an angle, print lines from the factory.
You get a likely grade and the reason
The reason matters more than the number. “Probably a 9, because the left border is 60/40” tells you something you can act on. A bare number does not.
What it is, and what it is not
- A measured opinion from a photograph, with the reasoning shown
- Centering checked against PSA’s own published tolerances
- A way to sort five raw cards into the one worth sending and the four that are not
- Private — nothing it returns is written to your collection or shown to anyone
- A grade. Only PSA can grade a card, with it in their hands
- A guarantee, or grounds for a claim if the real grade differs
- A valuation — what a card is worth is a separate question
- An estimate for BGS, CGC, TAG or ACE, whose scales are not the same
Does it pay for itself?
A PSA submission runs to roughly £25 in fees before you have paid to post the card there and back, insured it, and done without it for several weeks. Send one card that comes back an 8 and the whole exercise has cost you money.
Your first pre-grade is free, so you can find out what it tells you before deciding any of this matters. After that, Pro is £4.99 a month, or £49.90 a year, and scans without a limit, across pre-grading and slab scanning alike. One card you decide not to send covers the membership for four years.
Questions
Can you tell what grade a card will get from a photograph?
Not exactly, and anything that claims otherwise is selling you something. Centering can be measured from a good photograph, and PSA publish the tolerances, so that part is arithmetic. Corners, edges and surface are judged, and a grader has the card under a loupe and a bright light while a photograph does not. What a pre-grade gives you is a likely range and the specific thing holding the card back — which is enough to decide whether to pay the fee.
Is pre-grading free?
Your first one is. Every Vault gets one free pre-grade so you can see what it actually tells you; after that it is part of Vault Pro, £4.99 a month. A free Vault also gets 30 slab scans a month, which is a different tool — it reads the grader and grade off the label of a card that has already been graded. Cataloguing your collection, browsing every set and your public profile are all free and stay free.
How much does PSA grading cost, and when is it worth it?
The fee is only part of it: there is postage out, postage back, insurance on a card you cannot replace, and several weeks without it. As a rule of thumb the sums start working somewhere around the point where a card is worth a few hundred pounds raw, because the gap between a 9 and a 10 has to be bigger than everything you spent getting there. Below that, protecting the card you already have is the better spend.
What stops a card getting a PSA 10?
Centering is the commonest single reason, and it is the one you can check yourself before you post anything. After that: corners that look fine until they are magnified, edge whitening on a dark border, surface scratches that only show at an angle, and print lines that were there when the card left the factory. A pre-grade names which of those is the problem rather than just giving you a number.
Which graders does it estimate for?
It estimates against PSA, because PSA publish their centering tolerances and are what most UK collectors submit to. The grading scales at BGS, CGC, TAG and ACE are not the same, so a PSA estimate is not a prediction for those.
Protect the card whether you send it or not
A graded card is only as safe as the case around it, and a raw card you have decided to keep still wants protecting. SlabShield makes both.