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Last Updated On: August 4th, 2024
Card collecting, much like the sports they’re connected to, is often a game of millimeters. A card whose centering is off by even the slimmest of margins could be dinged, its value plummet, and collectibility hampered. The same goes for other visually apparent defects: surface issues, coloration, and more.
Given that a card’s quality is paramount to its collectibility, collectors often want the absolute best version that they can find. To that end, the hobby has created a thriving cottage industry of professionals who will go the extra mile to ensure a card is top-notch.
This article is about two of the companies who specialize in determining a card’s eye appeal: Mike Baker Authenticated (MBA) and Fanatics Collect Eye Appeal (formerly PWCC Eye Appeal). We’ll discuss each company’s “Eye Appeal Assessments” and whether they truly make a difference for a card’s bottom-line valuation.
Table of Contents
Overview: Importance of Eye Appeal
Scarcity, grade, collectibility; these are all common factors that determine a card’s value. But just as important is a card’s aesthetic quality, i.e., it’s eye appeal. There are really two ways of thinking about eye appeal.
First, we have the card’s design. This world is more or less entirely subjective; though we may agree that there’s something classy and timeless about a vintage card’s look, we may fervently disagree about whether the latest neon Prizm parallel is eye catching or an eyesore.
Second, and more important for this discussion, are the objective features of a card’s eye appeal. Is a card perfectly (50/50) centered? Is its colorization vivid? Does the surface suffer from cosmetic damage?
Consider that even cards with the same exact grade can differ in selling price due to the nuance of eye appeal. A dead-centered PSA 10 (50/50) will likely do better than a card that only meets the minimum centering criteria of 60/40 on the front.
This is altogether unsurprising. After all, card collectors tend to be a picky bunch on the lookout for any edge they can get on the competition.
Vintage Cards
Eye appeal is especially important with vintage cards. In the 19th century, cards were designed and printed using wood or metal blocks. When halftone printing (the style that involves printing thousands of small dots) came around, it was a game-changer.
Still, halftone printing is absolutely Paleolithic compared to the digital printing common today. Most cards pulled today are almost always NM-MT or better, thanks to improved print quality.
Vintage cards also suffer from improper care. While collectors now tend to use gloves or unpack cards carefully to prevent damage, older cards were considered more like toys and, unfortunately, disposed of like so.
How does eye appeal work in practice? Take a gander at these two 1954 Topps Hank Aaron cards, both of which earned a PSA 4 grade:
Your eyes can probably tell a few striking differences between these cards. Check out the centering; the card on the left looks far better centered than the right. Additionally, the card on the right is much more vivid (though this could also be the product of better photography and digitizing equipment used to upload a photo of the card).
These cards sold within eight days of one another in July 2024. As you might have guessed, the card on the left went for $4,999, while the card on the right sold for $4,000. That’s almost a thousand dollar difference for a card of the same grade. In this case, we can say eye appeal almost certainly played a role in this price difference. It often does when tracking well-centered baseball cards on auction.
Two Major Eye Appeal Assessments: MBA & Fanatics
How do you get an edge on the competition and ensure that your card is the best of the best? Enter Eye appeal assessments.
Eye appeal assessments are like grading the grader. You can use your own eyes to identify eye appeal, but obtaining an above-average or better designation from a major service instantly recognizes your card as top-tier quality compared with others in the same grade. It’s the equivalent of the Hank Aaron test from above, but with the weight of a professional assessment.
There are two major players in the eye appeal assessment market: Mike Baker Authenticated (MBA) and Fanatics Eye Appeal (formerly PWCC). Since many cards that have undergone the Fanatics eye appeal assessment will have PWCC in their designation, we’ll use both initializations interchangeably in this article.
The process works like this: a collector who has a card graded can submit the slab to either Fanatics or MBA, who will assess the card’s quality against other cards with the same grade. In theory, this lets collectors understand where their card ranks against its peers. After the eye appeal assessment, a sticker is attached to the slab if it meets the minimum criteria.
MBA (Mike Baker Authenticated)
Founded in 2020, MBA utilizes its “experience, passion and creativity” to deliver the “highest quality certification” to collectors.
For $3 per card, MBA performs a 10-point certification procedure that verifies a card’s authenticity, measurement, alterations, centering, corner wear, edges, surface issues, staining, and print defects before awarding an eye appeal level.
Currently, MBA eye appeal limits its testing to PSA, SGC, and BGS slabs. Additionally, MBA offers three tiers of certification: MBA Black Diamond (reserved only for PSA 10, SGC 10, and BGS Black Label), MBA Gold, and MBA Silver.
Crucially, MBA assesses a card’s quality within the given grade. In other words, it takes the graders’ standards and analyzes where a card sits on that grade’s spectrum; is your PSA 10 really an edge case between a Mint and Gem Mint? Or is your Near-Mint actually closer to a Mint? These are the questions answered by MBA with its eye appeal assessment. Eye appeal is also especially helpful when differentiating between PSA 9 Mint cards given PSA does not offer a 9.5 grade like many other grading services do.
MBA provides a certification check, meaning once a card receives an eye appeal assessment, it sticks for life. It’s a solid way to cut back against potentially fraudulent eye appeal assessment stickers.
But strangely, MBA doesn’t provide a clear weighting system. Consider that, for this sticker to mean anything, there should be some built-in scarcity involved. For instance, as we’ll see in a moment, PWCC limits the number of top-end eye appeal assessment grades to a small fraction of the overall population. Without a clear weighting system, MBA could (in theory) issue MBA Gold grades for each submission.
Fanatics / PWCC
Fanatics functions in a similar way to MBA, with a few key differences.
For starters, Fanatics only accepts vintage (pre-1987) graded cards with a market value of at least $250. This makes sense for many of the reasons we discussed above: vintage cards tend to exist on a wide spectrum in any given grade, thanks to the less-than-stellar printing technology available.
Second, Fanatics does offer a weighted metric for its assessments. Only cards in the top-30% receive a sticker – those that do fall into the top-30% are given an “A” grade for above average. Those in the top-15% receive an “E” for exceptional, and those in the top-5% earn an “S” for superior.
Another important difference with Fanatics’ eye appeal assessment is that it is not offered as a stand-alone service. Collectors cannot pay a fee, send cards for review, and expect to receive them back after assessment. Instead, the service is free for cards stored in its intake vault.
Finally, since Fanatics now owns PWCC, collectors can re-submit their PWCC eye appeal assessment stickers for a crossover Fanatics sticker, free of charge.
Do Eye Appeal Assessments Increase Card Values?
It’s time for the million-dollar question: are these eye appeal assessments adding value, or are they merely a worthless ornament on the card’s slab?
The truth, as you might imagine, is somewhere in between. Let’s look at a few vintage cards to see how they perform at auction with and without an eye appeal assessment. Our research will come straight from Card Ladder, one of our favorite tools to keep the hobby’s pulse.
1980 Topps Bird / Johnson RC
Let’s start with a card that we just used as an example: the 1980 Topps Bird/Johnson RC.
On the MBA side, a PSA 8 card with an MBA Gold sticker sold for $3,000 in July 2024. Over the course of the month, that card (without an MBA assessment) generally sold between $2,300 and $2,900. Perhaps not the biggest bump in the world here.
How about over at Fanatics? On May 23, 2024, Goldin Auctions sold a PSA 8.5 graded version of the card with a PWCC-S eye appeal assessment score for $5,372. Two additional sales in May 2024 for the same card, no eye appeal assessment, however, were for $4,580 and $6,000.
A PSA 7 card that earned a PWCC-A sold for $1,260 in July 2024. That $1,200 figure is right around where other July sales of the card sans eye appeal assessment also fell. So, at least for this card, we don’t see a ton of value added by the sticker.
1984 Star Michael Jordan #101 RC
How do the stickers work for another 1980s basketball icon? Let’s take a look at recent sales of Michael Jordan’s 1984 Star RC:
One card on that list stands out among the rest—the PWCC-E assessed card. It is impressive that it sells for anywhere between $13,000 and $20,000 better than the competition. This card was an all-time high watermark for this card, as it has normally trended near $30,000 or less.
Given how strong of an outlier this card is compared to others of the same grade, we should perhaps ask if its merely an aberration rather than indicative of the value-added by an eye appeal assessment.
Regardless, this card is extraordinarily eye-appealing (pictured above). We see a bit of the halftone printing in the small dots, but it’s a visual masterpiece for the most part. It almost looks like a card one would unpack today. Speaking of…
2015 Upper Deck Connor McDavid Young Guns RC #201
You won’t find any modern examples of cards with a Fanatics/PWCC sticker. So to get an idea of how an eye appeal assessment might enhance a post-1987 card, we turn to MBA and this 2015 Upper Deck Connor McDavid Young Guns RC.
Despite his short career, it’s safe to say that McDavid will be remembered as one of the best hockey players of his generation, if not all time. He undoubtedly brings some of the X factors that we look for in determining a player’s collectibility.
Add in that this card is an SGC Pristine, one of the finest grades offered, and we have a true masterpiece on our hands. But does the MBA sticker add any value? In March 2024, this card sold for $2,297 with an MBA Gold sticker. Less than two weeks later, this card sold for $2,750 without an MBA sticker.
Many of these cards tend to go for between $1,500 and $2,000, but while the MBA sticker accounts for some sort of a boost, we also have evidence of cards without a sticker selling for even more.
1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. RC #1
Another “modern” card so far as Fanatics is concerned, this 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. RC became the face of the hobby’s junk wax era. Here’s where we see the MBA eye appeal assessment really matter. Generally, PSA 10s sell for between $1,900 and $2,000. But check out the following sales of a PSA 10 with an MBA Gold sticker:
That third sale, the $2,340, was also hampered by an older PSA slab, which can keep prices low (and makes for a great reason to reholder your slabs).
We have to ask ourselves why this is the case. An easy answer might be found in the card’s pop-count. As this card was arguably the most collectible of the aforementioned junk wax era, it also has an extraordinarily high population. PSA has graded 4,253 Gem Mints alone, while PSA has graded just 341 of the 1984 Star Jordan cards in total.
As a result, what we may be seeing is the MBA sticker serving as yet another way for collectors to distinguish between cards of such high pop-counts. A lone PSA 10 isn’t enough when there are over 4,000 others in the market; an MBA Gold adds just a bit more of the rarity factor.
Summary: Should You Care?
In the final analysis, we can tell that, in some cases, eye appeal assessments have the potential to add value to your cards. The Jordan Star RC saw a significant boost in value accompanied with a PWCC-E sticker. Also, the Griffey RC with a top MBA Gold sticker provided differentiation among a sea of other gems for such a high-pop card.
One thing we know is that even without an eye appeal sticker, cards with great eye appeal (to the naked eye) are generally rewarded with higher prices. The Hank Aaron RC we discussed is evidence of the same. The question to ask is whether the Jordan Star in PSA 7 would’ve still achieved a premium at auction without an eye appeal sticker. We believe it would similar to the Aaron RC, but not as much as $20,000. In an online auction, the eye appeal bump gave prospective buyers more confidence that the card they’re eying is in fact one of the best of its grade.
At the very least, we know eye appeals won’t hurt your card’s value. Your graded slab will hold the same baseline value both with and without a sticker. Although there’s certainly a level of prestige added when your card is one of the top 5% of all printed and owning the same grade. Since Fanatics offers a free assessment upon intake anyway, you have nothing to lose in this regard. Even at $3 per card (plus shipping both ways), MBA offers an extremely affordable service for those interested in having their cards assessed and returned to them.
Like most exercises in the hobby, whether it’s worth it comes down to the individual collector and their ultimate goals. A collector looking to add a card to the PC might see an eye appeal assessment as a way to make their collection pop. Similarly, someone focused more on flipping might like that an eye appeal sticker is yet another tool to sell their cards with a marketing differentiator.