How to Start a TCG Company in 2026: The Full Playbook
Design, prototype, print, fund, distribute and protect a new trading card game. Real minimums, Kickstarter numbers and anti-counterfeit steps at launch.
Sep 29, 202612 min
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Equipment, slabs, cert databases, guarantees, insurance and pricing. What it takes to launch a card grading company while PSA sits on a 10M backlog.
A trading card grading company needs six things before it grades its first card: published grading standards, encapsulation equipment (a card-slab ultrasonic welder runs about $3,800 before holders and labels), a certificate database with a public lookup and population report, a guarantee and terms of service that cap liability, insurance and insured shipping for cards in your custody, and a pricing and turnaround position the incumbents cannot match. The opening exists: more than 26 million cards were graded in 2025, PSA paused its value tiers in June 2026 with a backlog approaching 10 million, and Beckett paused its base tiers in August. The hard part is not the machine. It is trust, and trust is built with consistency, imaging and certificates that cannot be cloned.
This guide walks through each requirement with the numbers behind it, then covers the technology decisions that separate a grader collectors resell from one they crack out of the slab.
Yes, and the incumbents created it.
The demand is there and the biggest supplier is turning it away at the low end. That is the opening. What collectors want from whoever fills it is specific: in Edge Grading's 2025 survey, 89 percent preferred grading under $20, 63 percent preferred hybrid human-and-AI grading, and trust was the top concern, including cracked-out cards coming back with different grades.
Encapsulation. Slabs are sealed by ultrasonic welding. A purpose-built card-slab welder from Caseforce runs $3,800 for a 2,600W, 15 kHz unit with horns fitted to your holder, an air compressor and a transformer; it needs compressed air at 0.5 to 0.7 MPa and ships freight. Industrial welder makers and Global Sources list alternatives and holder manufacturers. Order holders before the welder, because the horn is cut to the holder.
Holders and labels. Blank holders from a manufacturer that can hold tolerance. Labels with at least one feature a print shop cannot reproduce: a hologram, a QR code that resolves to your cert lookup, and increasingly an NFC or tamper-evident element. Vendors of tamper-evident NFC labels and security labels sell to graders directly.
Imaging and measurement. A high-resolution scanner or camera rig with consistent lighting, a centering tool, magnification for surface and edge work. TAG's process shows where the bar is: portal submission, intake and card ID, machine-learning image processing with photometric stereo imaging, verification, sonic-welded slab assembly, QA, slab imaging and a report with the raw image and QR codes for authenticity lookup, scored on both a 1 to 10 and a 1,000-point scale.
Software. A submission portal, a grading queue, a cert database, a public lookup and pop report, label printing, shipping and payments. Most of this is off the shelf now, and the online guide covers building it.
Publish them. The 1 to 10 scale with centering, corners, edges and surface is the language; what varies is transparency. ACE Grading, founded in 2021, gives free subgrades on every card, runs public cert lookup, authentication and pop report pages, and reveals the grade in an online dashboard right after payment. TAG publishes the image its grade was based on. The pattern is clear: the newer graders win trust by showing their work.
Two rules for a new grader:
Copy the structure of the leader, then decide what you can afford.
PSA's Authenticity and Grade Guarantee offers a buyback at current market value or a refund of the difference between the erroneous grade and the revised grade, capped at $250,000 per card and $500,000 lifetime per person. It excludes the original submitter, autographed and memorabilia cards, unopened packs, environmental damage and any tampered holder or label, and PSA sets market value at its own discretion.
Its submission terms cap liability at the lesser of fair market value or the maximum insured value of the chosen service level, exclude consequential damages and transit to PSA, treat grades as opinion, allow abandonment after 180 days, and take a security interest in submitted items until payment. Your terms need every one of those clauses, written for your jurisdiction, before the first card arrives.
You are a bailee: you hold property that belongs to someone else. Standard business insurance does not cover a collector's card in your safe. ACE Grading's December 2024 robbery, in which police reported about 250,000 pounds of products stolen, is the scenario to underwrite. Collectibles insurers such as American Collectors and TCG Insurance write coverage for cards; ask specifically for bailee or property-of-others coverage with a per-item and aggregate limit that matches your declared maximum insured value per service tier.
Shipping is the other half. FedEx includes $100 of liability by default, charges incrementally for declared value, and pays the lesser of repair, depreciated or replacement cost, with category maximums for some collectibles. Price insured return shipping into each tier and require submitters to insure inbound, as PSA does.
The 2026 price ladder, per a cross-grader comparison updated 28 September 2026: PSA Regular $79.99 (about two months), Express $149, Super Express $349; CGC Bulk $17 (about five months), Economy $20, Standard $55 (about ten days); TAG Basic $22, Standard $39; BGS Base $14.95, Standard $34.95. PSA's own February 2026 schedule listed Value Bulk at $21.99 to $24.99 and Regular at $74.99 to $79.99 before the June pause.
The position that fits the data: under $20 (what 89 percent want), a turnaround measured in days on the standard tier (what PSA cannot offer while the backlog clears), subgrades and imaging included, and a specialty. TCG and Pokemon are where the volume and the counterfeits are. A grader that is the fast, transparent, TCG-first option has a market for as long as the incumbents are paused, and a brand afterwards if the grades hold up.
White-label encapsulation exists if you want to start with the brand before the machine: Carbonite Cards offers encapsulation to resellers at $10 a card for 1 to 9, $8.50 for 10 to 24 and $6.50 for 25 or more. Treat the vendor's revenue examples as marketing, but the model is a legitimate way to test demand before buying a welder.
This is the 2026 problem. Fake slabs carry real cert numbers, and a QR scan confirms the number, not the card. The fix is to bind the certificate to the card image and to make the record tamper-evident.
deepidv's chain layer does the second part: every verification produces a signed envelope that is canonicalized, signed with ECDSA P-256, appended to a Merkle tree, timestamped by two independent authorities and anchored hourly on Base, with no personal data on chain and a public lookup at proof.deepidv.com. A grader can issue every cert with a proof that anyone can verify from the slab, that includes the card image hash, and that cannot be altered after issue. The cert database becomes a transparency log instead of a lookup table, and a cloned number fails the image check.
Pair it with the authenticity screen at intake and a grade estimate from deepidv's engine as the second opinion on every card, and the three failure modes collectors fear, fakes in slabs, inconsistent grades and cloned certs, each have a control.
A working budget for a small operation, before rent and staff:
Verification costs are per check: deepidv's public list prices are at deepidv.com/pricing, and the card authentication and grade estimate are available through the TCG partner program.
Equipment is the small part: a card-slab ultrasonic welder is about $3,800, plus holders, security labels, imaging and centering tools. Insurance for cards in your custody, software and legal work are the larger and recurring costs. A white-label encapsulation service lets you test demand before buying equipment.
Grading is an unregulated service in most jurisdictions, but you need a business entity, sales tax registration where you have nexus, terms of service and a guarantee, and insurance that covers property of others. Take legal advice for your jurisdiction.
Per-card fees that rise with speed and declared value, plus memberships, bulk programs and, for the largest, data and marketplace services. The market is sized at $2.24 billion in 2024 with grading at about 63 percent of it.
Consistency, published standards, imaging that shows the work, a guarantee with real caps, and certificates that cannot be cloned. Edge Grading's survey found trust was the top concern, ahead of price and turnaround.
Authenticate before grading with a photo-based check that reads print pattern, layer alignment and edge geometry, then a human review for anything flagged. deepidv provides the screen through its TCG partner program.
Bind the cert to the card image and issue it with a tamper-evident proof anchored on chain, so a lookup checks the image hash and the record cannot be altered. deepidv's chain layer provides this at proof.deepidv.com.
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Design, prototype, print, fund, distribute and protect a new trading card game. Real minimums, Kickstarter numbers and anti-counterfeit steps at launch.
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