CGC Cards

Fast facts

• Scale: 1 → 10 with half-grades. Issues 9.5. Top grade is Pristine 10.
• Pristine 10 vs BGS Black Label: CGC Pristine allows one 9.5-equivalent area; BGS Black Label requires all four subgrades to be 10. CGC’s Pristine is slightly easier to achieve.
• Subgrades discontinued post-2023 merger. CGC no longer issues centering / corners / edges / surface breakdowns. Simpler + cheaper than it used to be.
• Membership not required:unlike PSA’s Collectors Club, CGC accepts non-member submissions. $39/yr paid tier is optional, only buys small discounts.
• Pricing model: value-tiered like PSA (upcharges kick in at higher declared values).
• Public API: none officially. An internal endpoint exists but is Cloudflare-gated. Manual cert lookup via cgccards.com/certlookup.

CSG merger — what happens to old slabs

CCG (CGC’s parent) absorbed Certified Sports Guaranty (CSG) into CGC Cards in July 2023. Current state for existing CSG slabs:

• · csgcards.com 301-redirects to cgccards.com. CSG cert lookups resolve via the CGC tool.
• · Legacy CSG Gem Mint 9.5 slabs auto-upgrade to CGC Gem Mint 10 when reholdered. Relevant for pop-report normalization.
• · Legacy CSG subgrades are frozen on the slab — no re-scoring.
• ·“Perfect 10” grade discontinued; only Pristine 10 remains at the top.

TCG + Pokémon

CGC has a dedicated TCG grading tier that’s particularly popular for Pokémon and One Piece TCG. If you’re grading Pokémon, compare CGC vs PSA TCG-specific turnaround — for vintage Pokémon, PSA Value is often cheapest but CGC is faster in practice.

Source + re-ingest trigger