About The Under Glass

The Under Glass (theunderglass.com) publishes guides to protecting, grading and pricing sports cards. The guides are organised by the protection ladder: the order a card moves through from a raw pull to a finished display.

Who it’s for

Collectors who arrive with one concrete question: which sleeve, which holder, whether a card is worth sending for grading, which grading company, which price tool, and what it will cost. We try to answer that question directly, show where each figure comes from, and say plainly what we don’t know.

The protection ladder

Every guide sits on one rung of the ladder:

1. Penny sleeve — the thin, soft plastic sleeve that is the first layer around a raw card.
2. Toploader — the rigid plastic holder a sleeved card slides into.
3. Semi-rigid — a holder stiffer than a sleeve and more flexible than a toploader.
4. Grading submission — sending a card to a grading company such as PSA, SGC, CGC, TAG or Beckett, and deciding whether it is worth doing at all.
5. Slab — the sealed case a graded card comes back in.
6. Display case — how a finished card is stored or shown.

Alongside the ladder we compare price tools, including Card Ladder, Market Movers, 130point and PriceCharting: what each one is for, and where they differ.

How we research

• We work from manufacturer spec sheets and product listings.
• For grading, we use the grading companies’ own published policies, fees and FAQs.
• For prices, we use public sales data as shown by named price tools.
• Every figure in an article carries a named, dated source, listed at the end of the article. If we cannot source a figure, we leave it out.
• We do not claim hands-on testing unless an article says exactly what was handled and how.

The full process is on our methodology page, and the rules we hold ourselves to are in our editorial standards.

How we make money

We earn commissions from some links. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. We only place a buy link when we have an active affiliate relationship for that product, and many articles carry no buy links at all. Links that can earn us money go through theunderglass.com/go/… and are marked rel="sponsored". Commissions never change what we recommend. The details, and the list of programs we are currently part of, are on our affiliate disclosure page.

What we never do

• Predict card prices or promise investment returns.
• Print a figure we can’t source.
• Claim we tested something we didn’t handle.
• Let a commission decide what we recommend.

Contact

Corrections, questions and partnership enquiries all go to one address: support@merchant-dash.com.

Last updated: September 2026