Off-centre costs you forty per cent. A print defect costs you fourteen.

We measured it the only way that means anything: matched pairs.

How this was measured

An aggregate comparison of qualified against unqualified cards is worthless, and worth explaining why.

Qualified cards cluster on expensive vintage material, because nobody pays a grading fee to have a common card come back marked. So the average qualified card on this index actually asks more than the average unqualified one, which tells you about the mix rather than the penalty.

The only honest comparison is the same card against itself. Same player, same year, same set, same card number, same grader, same numeric grade, with and without the qualifier, and at least two listings on each side.

That gives twenty-six pairs across five qualifiers. Not a vast sample, and we will flag where it thins out.

What each qualifier costs

Expressed as what the qualified card asks against its unqualified twin, at the median.

OC, off-centre: a discount of about 40 per cent. Fourteen pairs, the largest group.

MC, miscut: about 43 per cent. Six pairs.

ST, stain: about 27 per cent. A single pair, so treat it as an indication rather than a figure.

MK, mark: about 15 per cent. Two pairs.

PD, print defect: about 14 per cent. Three pairs.

Across all twenty-six, the median discount is about a third.

The ordering is the finding

Read that list again and notice what it says.

The two qualifiers that describe centering are punished roughly three times as hard as the ones describing a mark on the card or a flaw from the printing press.

That is not obvious. A mark is damage somebody did. A print defect is a manufacturing fault the card left the factory with. Off-centre is also a manufacturing fault, and arguably the least consequential of the three, since nothing is actually wrong with the cardboard.

The market disagrees, emphatically.

The reason is that centering is the thing collectors have been trained to look at. It is measurable, it is visible in a photograph from across a room, and it is the first thing named in every grading standard. A small mark in a border is a detail you have to be shown. A card sitting 80/20 is a card that looks wrong immediately.

One card, three qualifiers

There is a natural experiment in the data and it is worth setting out on its own.

The 1987 Fleer Michael Jordan at PSA 8 exists on this index in four versions: unqualified, and with three different qualifiers. Same card, same grade, same grader.

PD asks about 86 per cent of the unqualified card.
ST asks about 73 per cent.
OC asks about 68 per cent.

One card, one grade, and a spread of nearly twenty points depending purely on which two letters PSA printed on the label.

Where it goes furthest

The discount is not uniform across price levels, and the expensive end is where it bites hardest.

On the 1986-87 Fleer Jordan at PSA 9, the most heavily listed matched pair here, with dozens of examples on each side, the off-centre version asks a little over a third of the unqualified card. A discount closer to 60 per cent than 40.

The same pattern shows on the 1979 O-Pee-Chee Gretzky at PSA 8, where the OC asks around 40 per cent of the unqualified card.

That makes sense once you see it. At the top of a card's grade ladder the buyer is paying for near-perfection, and a qualifier is a statement that the card is not that. Lower down, where nobody expected perfection anyway, the same two letters matter less.

Two pairs went the other way

Honesty requires reporting these.

Two of the twenty-six pairs show the qualified card asking more than the unqualified one: a 1988 Fleer Jordan with an OC, and a 1989 Upper Deck Griffey with a PD.

Both sit on very thin samples, two to four listings on the qualified side, and both are at the cheap end where a single optimistic seller moves an average a long way.

We would not read a qualifier premium into either. But they are in the data and leaving them out would be dishonest about how noisy this measurement is.

What to do with this

Three things.

Do not treat all qualifiers as equivalent. A PD and an OC are two letters on a label and they are not remotely the same purchase. If you are buying to keep rather than to resell, a print defect at fourteen per cent off is a considerably better trade than an off-centre at forty.

Expect a steeper discount higher up the ladder. The penalty grows with the grade, because the grade is what you were paying for.

And read the qualifier as information, not as a verdict. It names one specific fault. We have written about exactly what PSA means when it stamps a card OC on our Gretzky site, including what changed in June 2021.

The thing worth sitting with

A qualifier is PSA declining to average. Rather than dropping a card a grade for one bad attribute, they grade what is there and name the exception.

That is a more informative label than a straight number, and the market has decided it is worth between fourteen and forty per cent depending on which fault gets named.

Which means the most expensive thing that can happen to a card is not being damaged. It is being off-centre, a fault present the moment it was cut, that nobody who ever owned it could have prevented.

This index tracks qualified and unqualified classes separately, so comparisons like these can be made rather than assumed. You can read how we work the numbers out, and there is a companion piece on how a design decision rather than the cardboard decides which cards grade.

Sources