How to Judge a Card Seller

Check the grading, not the photo

A card's value rests almost entirely on its grade. Cards graded by PSA, BGS, or SGC carry a serial number on the slab, and every one of those numbers can be looked up on the grader's own site. If a listing shows a graded slab, verify the number there before anything else.

Raw cards are not automatically a bad deal, but they are priced on someone's judgement rather than a third party's. Treat a raw card's condition claim as an opinion until it has been graded.

Read reviews where they were left

Reviews quoted on a seller's own site cannot be traced back to the buyer, the date, or the item. Reviews on the marketplace where the sale happened can. That is the difference that matters, and it is why this page no longer carries testimonials of its own.

Compare against sold prices

Asking prices tell you what a seller hopes to get. Completed sales tell you what people actually paid. For any card you are considering, look up recent sold listings for the same player, set, and grade — those three together, not just the player name.

What this site does

Rookie Clubs collects publicly available research on NBA cards: players, sets, and what drives their value. We do not grade cards and we do not appraise them. Where a figure comes from a third party, we say so, and where something is a judgement call, we say that too.