How to Read a CGC Label

A CGC label is not a PSA label with a different logo on it. It carries more identity and fewer opinions, it has two tens that both print 10, and some of what it certifies sits on the side you cannot see. Read it in the order it is built and it stops being a sticker with a number on it.

Read the identity before you read the number

WHAT THE CARD IS

Everyone's eye goes to the big numeral first. Train yourself out of it. A grade is a claim about one specific card, and the top lines are where that card gets named: the year and set, the card name, the card number, the language. Read them against the card through the plastic, every time. The set symbol should match the set named; the collector number should match the label.

This matters more than it sounds. Population reports and comps are counted per card, so a slab catalogued as the wrong version prices itself against the wrong market — usually in the seller's favour. It is also the only part of the label you can check in ten seconds.

The variety line is doing real work

WHICH VERSION OF IT

Below the identity sits a short line of designation text. It is easy to skim and often the most valuable text on the label: 1st Edition, Shadowless, Holofoil, Reverse Holofoil, staff and prerelease stamps, error notes. None of it is a condition judgement — it is CGC naming which printing is inside.

A pedigree is the same kind of claim: it names a previous owner rather than a condition, and CGC adds one only where the collection is significant and documented. It can move a price on its own.

On plenty of cards the gap between two varieties is wider than the gap between a 9 and a 10. Before you call one of two 9s overpriced, check both say the same things on the line above the grade.

The number, and the adjective beside it

HOW GOOD CGC SAYS IT IS

CGC grades on a 1-to-10 scale with half points through it, and every grade carries an adjective as well as a number. The adjective is the part that tells a non-specialist what they are looking at. The rungs below condense CGC's published criteria.

The half points are set out in full above because that is the only way to see the one irregularity in them. Every rung from 9.5 down to 2.5 is the grade below it with a plus on the end. The pattern would make 1.5 a Poor+; CGC calls it Fair, and the scale then stops at Poor 1. So read the adjective: a listing quoting a bare 10 has withheld the half that decides Pristine from Gem Mint.

Two things about the centering figures, both read off CGC's grading-scale page rather than inferred from it. The first is where they sit. Both tens carry one — 50/50 for Pristine, 55/45 for Gem Mint — and so does every whole grade from Mint 9 down to Very Good 3, loosening by exactly five points a rung: 60/40, 65/35, 70/30, 75/25, 80/20, 85/15, 90/10. The half rungs in between carry none at all, so a listing quoting a centering figure for a 7.5 or a 4.5 is quoting something CGC does not print. The second is the qualifier: most of those figures are published under CGC's for sports and non-sports cards heading, which is worth knowing if what you are sending is a TCG. And the figure is a threshold, not a score — clearing 65/35 does not buy you the 8, because corners, edges and surface still have to arrive.

The two tens

SAME NUMBER, DIFFERENT CARD

Here is the piece of CGC grammar that catches people out. A card that grades 10 comes back as either a Pristine 10 or a Gem Mint 10. Both print 10. They are not the same slab.

Pristine 10 is virtually flawless to the naked eye — 50/50 centering, clean colour and registration — and it gets its own label, so you can spot one across a room. Gem Mint 10 earned a 10 overall but missed Pristine on one criterion: front centering may run to roughly 55/45, the reverse further.

So the question to ask about a CGC ten is never "is it a ten." It is "which ten."

Two older tens also circulate, and both come from one event: on 20 June 2023 CCG announced that two sibling companies — CGC Trading Cards, and CSG, or Certified Sports Guaranty — would combine into today's CGC Cards. That announcement, and the merger FAQ that still sits beside it on cgccards.com, are the documents that govern how their old numbers read now.

The first reads Perfect 10. CSG's own announcement of that label, dated 12 May 2022, defines it exactly: a card graded 10 overall with all four criteria — centering, corners, edges and surface — also at 10, printed on a gold foil-embossed label. The 20 June 2023 announcement says the grade was seldom used and would no longer be assigned; the merger FAQ adds the reasoning, that respondents found three separate tens too many and that far more Pristine 10s than Perfect 10s had been certified. The same FAQ carries the line that matters if you own one: a Perfect 10 sent in for reholdering comes back as a Pristine 10, and CGC recommends submitters do not reholder them. CGC's current scale keeps it in a legacy key as a retired grade that retains Perfect 10 status. The cert still stands; reholdering trades a discontinued label for a common one.

The second reads Gem Mint 9.5 — a number the current scale gives to Mint+, which makes it look like a demotion. It is not. The same announcement states that cards previously graded Gem Mint 9.5 are exactly equivalent to Gem Mint 10 under the updated scale, and CGC restated them at Gem Mint 10 in its own lookup, population report and registry. A buyer skimming listings still sees 9.5, so if you are selling one, say so.

The number is the smallest claim on the label. The lines above it and the cert below it are what make the number mean anything.

Subgrades: what they were, and why a new slab won't have any

FOUR NUMBERS, THEN NONE

Subgrades — centering, corners, edges and surface, each scored beside the overall grade — were an optional paid extra at CGC Trading Cards, never part of the standard service; the one case where they came free was the Perfect 10, whose label carried complimentary quad-10 subgrades on its reverse. Optional is what a comparison chart means when it puts CGC mid-field, between Beckett's four numbers on a BGS slab and PSA's none. What changed at the 2023 merger is availability, not meaning: the add-on came off the order form, and CGC gave its reason in the 20 June 2023 announcement: fewer than 5% of recent submissions had included a request for subgrades. The merger FAQ dates that figure to June 2023 and shows the trend beneath it — demand had fallen almost every month running, before and after the fee went up. Two things follow.

• A CGC slab with four subgrades on it is not a fake. It is an older holder — and the merger FAQ warns that a subgraded card sent in for reholdering comes back without them. A reason to leave it alone.
• You cannot add subgrades to a new CGC submission. If four printed numbers are the thing you want, that is a decision about a different grading house, not a service level at this one.

When you do meet a subgraded CGC slab, read the lowest of the four first. It tells you where the flaw is — a soft corner, an off-centre cut, a scratch — which is what the next buyer will haggle over. Same overall grade, different weak subgrade: a different card to sell.

An autograph grade is the other number you may meet on a CGC label, and it is not the card's grade. CGC grades signatures on trading card games, sports and non-sports cards alike — a signed Pokémon card is squarely in scope. Two routes reach it: CGC Signature Series, where an authorised CGC representative witnesses the signing, and a combined submission where JSA authenticates a signature nobody at CGC watched. Which route a slab took is part of what you are buying.

Verify the cert before you believe any of it

CHECKING IT IS REAL

Field 05 on the plate above is the one you cannot read. CGC lists the defences built into its card labels as microprinting, UV ink and holographic foil, alongside the certification number and barcode — spread across the label rather than sitting on one line of it. That is what a loupe and a UV torch are for. Two checks you can run without either, in this order.

First, the barcode. Scan it with any barcode reader. The value it decodes to should match the certification number printed next to it. A mismatch ends the conversation.

Second, the lookup. Enter the certification number on cgccards.com, or scan the QR code on the back — same job. You get CGC's description and grade for that number and, more usefully, CGC's own photographs of the holdered card. Compare them with the card in front of you, down to the crop and the corners. A cert that returns a different card, or none, has told you everything.

Do all of that before you look up what the card is worth. Identity, variety and cert are the load-bearing parts of a CGC label. The grade is only the last line of a claim the rest of it has to earn.

Where this sits

• STEP 01How to Choose Between PSA and CGC
• STEP 03How to Decide If Beckett Is Worth It