kr0n's Blog Corner

those are some pretty good grades,why would you not be using SGC again?

Yikes, just seeing this now.
There's a rather long list of things that are wrong or outright horrible with SGC.
First and foremost, their cards rattle a lot after they've been encapsulated. That pretty much defeats the entire purpose of having it graded, if it can still depreciate after the grading process, a 98 today could bang around and quickly become a 94, 92 and so on.
There's 4 pictures in my bucket of the same card where I tried to show how it can move, every picture I moved the holder so the "gap" was in a different corner.

They also misnamed one of the cards, misnaming it to a set that is actually scheduled to come out tomorrow. On another card, there was a scratch from top to bottom on the back of the holder, also pictured.

Also, they refuse or can't grade thick cards (don't know the exact point size). But I sent a non-patch card from The Cup (Exquisite in every other sport) and they sent it back ungraded citing it was too thick to encapsulate.

They gave a parallel card the "Rookie" attribute, while leaving it off of a "true rookie", which even THEN is inconsistent to their own system.
i.e.:
"2009-10 SP Game Used Ed. #122 Riku Helenius Rookie Silver Spec. 04/10" (parallel)
"2009-10 UD Black Diamond #162 Riku Helenius Rookie Triple Gold 06/10" (parallel, and the card name is absolutely butchered)
"2009-10 SP Authentic #203 Matt Duchene Rookie Auto. 354/999"
"2010-11 SP Authentic #264 Nino Niederreiter Autographed 232/999"

Their labels are inconsistent, and they don't seem to want to resize the font of their labels, leaving things half named/half-detailed. Even the ones they do get "right", their naming doesn't match that of Beckett. That's not a BGS vs. SGC issue, as far as I'm concerned the Beckett naming system is the system, and I have a touch of OCD. Additionally, the placement and use of their gold brand name label is inconsistent. Sometimes its on the back, sometimes its upside down, sometimes its not even on there.

Going on with the inconsistencies, they put some cards in sleeves before encapsulating them, but not all. It seems that they only do that with GU cards, which is a shame because that prevented them from bumping around entirely. So perhaps if they splurged a little and used a penny sleeve in every single encapsulation I wouldn't have this opinion.

Also, and this may be a matter of me starting with BGS, but they have no distinguishing features for cards with exceptional grades (i.e. BGS' gold labels for 9.5 and 10). To my knowledge BGS is the only place that has variety amongst their labels, PSA and SGC do not.

According to SGC and their labels, a SGC 98 is equivalent to a 10 (in BGS? PSA? Any place that uses 1-10?) and given all of the aforementioned, I have a hard time taking that claim seriously. What is a SGC 100 equivalent to?

The couple positives I will give SGC is I do actually like the look of their holders (when they're correct and accurate) the black filling they use really adds to the aesthetic appeal of the overall final product.

I also like that they automatically included the serial numbering on the label, it would cost you $3 per card to have Beckett add that.

All in all, it was an absolutely horrid experience. Going through this actually killed my desire to do anything at all in the hobby, I think I took a 2 month break from everything cardboard after I received my SGC order.

I can't remember the exact number, but the breakdown was roughly along the lines of:
33 cards sent in.
4 Not graded (1 too thick, the others didn't meet minimum grade).
22 cards that rattle.
7 that did not rattle.
4 of the 7 that did not rattle were in sleeves inside the encapsulation.

The next step, whenever it may be, is to get some of these crossed over to BGS and we'll see if I really got 10 Pristine (BGS 10) cards in my 29 cards that were graded. That'd be 34%, damn impressive.


That should sum up pretty well why I would never use SGC again.

Cheers,
Adam