Advice for when you can't find a card in an SGC slab?

One of the results of my spending time on this forum is that I've become a loyal customer of SGC and SGC graded cards because of the comments and the opinions of the members here.

However, I am having difficulty knocking off some major cards on my want list. I won't say what they are, because that is best left for the B/S/T forum, but I will say that they are Hall of Fame players in the mainsteam sets. There's nothing that would find itself in the 'obscure' sets thread, as an example.

There's a large number of the cards I want in PSA slabs with the grade I'm looking for, but I've heard horror stories about buying a PSA graded card just for the purposes of crossing over to SGC. My own results (only two cards) have been mixed.

I know many of you prefer SGC, and I also know that many of you are 'reg heads' and look for certain grades for your sets.

Any advice on what to do when you can't find it in SGC, but it keeps popping up in PSA?

I have three different thoughts.

First, the advice I have (and what I decided to do with my Dockmans) is buy the card, not the holder. Accordingly, my Dockmans are a split of SGC and PSA. In terms of registry, that is bad. My set with each registry is only half complete and ranks lower that it would if all the cards were graded by the same TPG. Ultimately though I'm fine with that. I decided I'm collecting cards, not holders.

Second, you can buy raw cards and send them where you want. Again, for my Dockmans I bought a raw Chance card that looked very nice to my eye on eBay. Paid a price that was about in line with the card being an SGC 20 (and I knew it was better than that). Sent it to SGC and it got a 50. Value difference of a few hundy. However, I'm one of the folks that never, ever does the "crossover" game. Way too many horror stories.

Third...patience! If these are mainstream cards as you say, you will have no trouble buying the right one in the right slab soon enough. You might have to wait a year and keep your eyes open.

I'd go for it and spin the Wheel of Crossover. I've had pretty good results with the small handful of PSA cards I've crossed to SGC, most of which I submitted still in their PSA holders. I can't remember if I specified a minimum grade on all of them, but only one did not make the cut. I just put the card back up on eBay. I can't remember how the auction fared, but even a modest loss on top of the lost grading fees is a wager I'd make again, especially for cards that just don't show up in SGC slabs.

it's not always rainbows and butterflies with psa...but they're not as bad as some make them out to be.

When I worked at SGC, we'd often have cards sent in by dealers on behalf of customers to see if they would cross. Depending on the value of the cards, that might be something you could try if you were dealing with a willing seller. Many collectors were willing to spend the ~$20 grading to see if it would cross prior to purchasing instead of risking laying out a few hundred dollars and being 'stuck' with a card that didn't cross. I found some sellers were also interested in doing this as it helped them make a sale more often than not.