August 26, 2026, Deoxys VSTAR GG46, $79.99 at Regular.
That is what PSA charges me today for the cheapest tier it is actually accepting, and the card then sits in a queue for 70 to 80 business days before it comes home. Cracking a PSA 9 Deoxys VSTAR GG46 and resubmitting it loses money at the trailing gem rate, so the answer this week is hold, and I'd rather hand you the arithmetic than the verdict. The default answer in this column is hold, and this week the $79.99 fee is what settles it. You'll see every line of it below, including the two lines that argue against my own conclusion.
What it costs to try this
The PSA 9 is the cheap part. 15 PSA 9 copies changed hands on eBay in the month to August 23, and the median of that tape is $55.60. Add the $79.99 fee and you're $135.59 into a card before a single grader has looked at the corners, which is already more than double what an ungraded copy of the same card has been fetching all month. It also ignores postage both ways and insurance, which every submitter pays.
What the trade pays if it hits
The PSA 10 has traded 30 times since July 27. The median of those sales is $240.00 and the range runs from $182.00 up to $289.05, which is a wide band for a card this heavily graded and a sign that which buyer you get matters. PriceCharting put the same card at $223.36 when I opened the product page this morning, and the four sales in the week to August 26 ran from $193.00 up to $213.50, every one of them under that median.
That softening matters more than usual on a trade with a queue attached to it. A card mailed today comes back in roughly four months, and nothing about the last three weeks of this tape suggests the market will wait politely. Here is the whole trade, in the order the money leaves your hands, with the date I read each figure attached to it.
- Buy the slab: $55.60, the median of 15 PSA 9 sales on eBay since July 29.
- Pay PSA: $79.99 for Regular, which is the cheapest tier the company is accepting today, with the Value tiers still paused.
- Wait: 70 to 80 business days per the pricing page I read on August 26, which is roughly four months of the market moving without you.
- Sell the 10 if it hits: the $240.00 median since July 27, less the 13% the marketplace takes on the sale, leaves $208.80 in hand against $135.59 spent, so $73.21 clear.
- Sell the 9 if it doesn't: $48.37 after the same 13%, so a miss today costs you $87.22.
The gem rate that decides it
Those two outcomes are the whole gamble, and the number that prices them is the share of submissions coming back as tens. Breakeven on this card is 54%, using our tracker's own price legs, and 54.4% if you run it against the realised eBay tape instead. The trailing 30 day gem rate is 53%, measured across the 238 grades this card added in the month to August 23. Lifetime sits at 53.9%, which for once agrees with the trailing figure rather than flattering it, because 6,082 of the 11,289 copies ever sent in came back a ten.
Run 53% against those two outcomes and the trade returns minus $2.19 a card. Use the PriceCharting figure of $223.36 for the ten and it falls to minus $9.51, and use only the last week of sales and it falls to minus $19.48. Every version of the price legs I could verify today lands on the same side of zero, so the answer does not hinge on which of them you believe. A rate of 53% off 238 grades carries a 95% band of 46.7% to 59.3%, so breakeven sits inside the error bar, and a trade you cannot distinguish from a coin toss is not worth $79.99 to enter.
Why even 53% is too generous
A gem rate counts every submission, and most submissions are raw cards straight out of a sleeve or a fresh pack. The card you're about to crack is not one of those, because PSA already looked at it once and found a reason to hold it back. Centring, a soft corner, a hair of print line, whatever the grader saw the first time is still sitting there when you tape the card into a new submission envelope and mail it back. Nobody publishes a regrade rate on cracked nines, so I can't price that discount. I can only tell you it runs downward, because the flaw that capped the grade the first time travels with the card.
There's a version of this trade I'd take, and it isn't far from here. It needs the PSA 10 back above $300.00, which would drop breakeven to roughly 41%, or a gem rate above 65% with the price where it is. Neither is close today, and dressing up a single point of gap would be dishonest. The same arithmetic on every card we track sits on the PSA 9 arbitrage board, and the formula behind the breakeven figure is set out on the page documenting how we compute it. If you'd rather test your own fee and sale assumptions, the grading ROI calculator takes them.
Hold the nine if you already own it, because the graded market is paying you nothing today for the risk of a resubmission. If you want the ten, the ten is on the tape at $240.00 and it doesn't cost you four months of waiting or a coin flip on the corners. Our read on the Tag Team GX population nobody checked shows the same habit of trusting a number without opening it. Buy the ten outright, or leave this one in its holder.