I know this is about trading card games and not board games, but I would say they’re very close in principle, considering the complexity of games like Magic. I recently discovered the mysterious world of “grading”, in which services like PSA will grade your card as to add some felt value to the card itself, because of its rarity and how near to mint it is.
We’re talking about services that will grade the same card differently three times if you send it back, because of course they have no practical way of having an absolute meter for every possible imperfection.
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Even your complaint doesn’t meet the definition of a scam. They can be wrong or imprecise without being deceptive.
But, I would go further and say you’ve misunderstood the activity of grading, which is signing that a given item aligns with a given rubric. In trading cards these rubrics are standardized (see TCGplayer.com grading system).
You’re free to disagree with a grading, free to not trust grades by given vendors. But it’s kinda silly to suggest grading as a concept is meaningless (especially if “meaning” can only exist with infinitely precision and accuracy).
It is a scam. Just not in the legal sense. You get the product and service you paid for, you just fell for the marketing that sold you a story that your hobby is an investment.
Ironically I think anime/weeb YouTuber Geoff Thew actually put together a pretty telling case when he was talking about how these parasites are trying to turn manga slabs into a thing the same way they did to MTG and American comics.
In theory, a service like PSA should be useful as a neutral third party that makes an unbiased appraisal of a card that both a buyer and seller can agree on. In reality, they are absolutely a scam and provide almost nothing of value. You could determine the condition of a card yourself using just a magnifying glass and five minutes of your time. For whatever reason, they’ve convinced enough people that a professional grade is necessary for buying/selling cards.
You are correct that their grades are subjective. I’ve heard of people who will send the same card back multiple times to try to get a better grade, which can be worth it for very high-value cards.
The service of grading and protecting a card is not inherently a scam, but yeah PSA specifically spent a few decades cornering that market so they could operate the business as a scam. Remember the main goal of business in a free market system is to stop making the market free.
It is as much a scam as the cards themselves. Artificial scarcity designed to addict our brains to gambling.
The grading feeds on/into the main scam of the cards themselves. The whole cycle requires that we place “value” on their slabs of paper and grading helps make that value more concrete in your brain. The more value you see in the cards the more of them that you want to buy. More cards sold means more grading, so the cycle goes round.
Have fun playing the game, just be aware the whole thing is no different than going to the casino. They just hope the psychological effect of not gambling with money addicts extra people who wouldn’t normally gamble with money (i.e. children or those morally opposed to gambling)… and the house always wins.
Playing a card game is not the same as going to a casino lmfao. Just because the only card games you chose to play were setup like gatcha doesn’t mean every card game is a scam. Why are you choosing to participate in a scam if you know it’s a scam? Just print proxies if you’re that butthurt about a particular company’s business strategy, or play a different card game that isn’t actively hostile to the player.
