Editor’s Notes (April 2021)

Posted on April 2, 2021 by Pre-War Cards

Each month, content gets updated on the Pre-War Cards site. However, while you see the regular articles that are posted, plenty of stuff is always being added behind the scenes. Much of this has to do with the updating of set descriptions and checklists in the database and each month, I’ll be posting to alert you to stuff that has been added or updated from the previous month.

Here are the items added/updated from the past month.

Greetings — time for our monthly check in.

Just one more mention for our latest sponsor, CSG. CSG, if you’re not aware, is a new grader in town as a challenger to the Big Three companies (PSA, SGC, and Beckett). If you haven’t already, definitely check out their site.

Speaking of grading, TPGs are again back in the news. At the end of March, PSA made a major announcement that it was suspending the majority of its grading services in an effort to catch up to demand. That, in turn, prompted SGC to drastically raise its prices, somewhat to try to get in front of a huge surge of demand they would have likely seen with the PSA news.

The grading problem isn’t going away anytime soon. The fact is that with the surge in prices (especially prices for graded cards), demand has never been higher. It wasn’t quelled enough even with rising prices and if a company like PSA is effectively deciding to not make money and risk losing customers by suspending services, it tells you all you need to know about their backlog. They are going to be quite busy for sometime and will almost certainly receive a flood of new submissions once they end their suspension of service.

More bad news for collectors also hit in March that eBay would be taking away the 1% eBay Bucks gained on every purchase. That’s been less impactful, not only because that’s generally a small amount but also because they’ve had a couple of the 5% bonus bucks promotions. I have no idea if those will continue at the same rate but if so, a good strategy remains of buying items on your wish list during those promotions.

In terms of card news, the big deal was the addition of two new cards to the T231 Fans Cigarettes set. You can read more about that exciting news here.

And a bit of site news as well, as I announced I’ll be expanding the set database by a bit more, adding in all other sports sets that were listed in the American Card Catalog not already on the site. This will include things like auto racing, soccer, track and field, and multi-sport sets. For a better idea of what to expect, you can read that announcement here.

New Sets Added