One year apart, ten times fewer tens

Start with the claim as it is usually made: Topps used cheaper stock in the seventies, so those cards survived worse.

Neither half of that stands up.

The decade sits exactly where it should

Take the early-career cards this index tracks and average the PSA grades by decade.

1950s: 3.76.
1970s: 5.29.
1980s: 6.43.
2000s: 7.37.

That is a smooth climb with age, which is what you would expect from survival time alone. Older cards were handled for longer by more children. The 1970s land between the 1950s and the 1980s, roughly where a straight line between them would put them.

There is no dip. Whatever the decade is guilty of, it is not something our data can see at the level of the decade.

Our sister site tracking non-sport cards has a much larger 1970s sample, and it points the same way: the 1977 Topps Star Wars cards average close to 7 across more than fifteen hundred graded classes, which is better than the 1980s sport cards here.

A 1977 card outgrading a 1985 one is not consistent with a decade of bad cardboard.

What is actually true

The problem is real, but it lives at the level of the set rather than the decade, and PSA's own numbers make the cause obvious.

Compare two consecutive years of the same product from the same company.

1970 Topps baseball: about eight-tenths of one per cent of submissions grade PSA 10, and close to 16 per cent grade 9.

1971 Topps baseball: about one-tenth of one per cent grade PSA 10, and 4 per cent grade 9.

Ten times fewer tens and a quarter as many nines, one year apart.

Same factory, same paper, same presses, same cutting blades, same children buying them from the same shops. The variable that changed was the design. 1971 has black borders.

A black border shows every chip, every corner touch and every handling mark that a white border hides completely. The card does not survive worse. It just cannot conceal what happened to it.

The same thing happened in football that year. The 1971 Topps football set used bright red and blue borders and is widely held to be the hardest Topps set of the 1970s or 1980s to assemble in high grade. Of its 263 cards, only 24 have ever received a PSA 10 at all, and 31 of them have never had a 9 or a 10.

The blades

There is a second cause, and it is more of an indictment than the borders are.

PSA's own account of the 1971 football set describes Topps' cutting practice through the 1960s and 1970s plainly: they would wait to change the cutting blades until the blade would physically no longer cut through the sheets.

A blunt blade does not make a clean edge. It tears. The result is the rough-cut edge that appears on a large share of cards from that period, and it is not damage a collector caused. It left the factory like that.

Centering compounds it. Severely off-centre cards, 70/30 and worse, are common enough in some of these sets that collectors describe opening a pack and finding most of it miscut, rough-cut, or both.

So a 1971 card had to survive three things that a 1970 card mostly did not: a border that reveals everything, an edge that may have been torn rather than cut, and centering that was frequently poor before anybody touched it.

Why this matters more than it sounds

Because it changes what a grade means, and we have written about how easily grade data gets misread.

A PSA 8 from a black-bordered 1971 set and a PSA 8 from a white-bordered 1970 set are described identically and represent completely different achievements. The first survived a design that punishes every contact. The second survived a design that forgives most of them.

That is the same point our non-sport site makes about the five 1977 Star Wars series, where the blue-bordered first series averages nearly a full grade below the other four. Blue borders with white stars printed on them show everything. Yellow borders do not.

Border colour is one of the few design decisions that still moves prices half a century later, and nobody at Topps was thinking about it when they made the choice.

What to do with this

Three things.

Judge the set, not the decade. There is no useful generalisation about 1970s cards. There are specific years with specific design problems, and years either side of them that are perfectly ordinary.

Expect the grade ladder to be steeper on a bordered set. Where one per cent of submissions reach a 9, the step from 8 to 9 is a different market rather than a modest premium. On a set where 16 per cent do, it is a modest premium.

And do not treat a rough cut as damage. On cards from this period it is frequently a factory characteristic. It will still cost you grade points, which is worth knowing before you pay for a raw card that looks mistreated and simply is not.

The thing worth sitting with

We keep finding that the things which decide a vintage card's price were never decisions about the card at all. Children destroying the 1950s and adults preserving the 1980s was not anybody's plan.

And neither was this. Somebody at Topps chose a black border in 1971 because it looked good, and a blunt blade stayed in the machine because replacing it cost money, and fifty-five years later those two decisions are still the difference between a card that grades and one that does not.

This index tracks early-career cards across every era and grade, so the comparisons here can be checked directly. You can read how we work the numbers out.

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