Not every card purchase works out the way you expect.

My 2025 Topps Chrome Jaxson Dart UltraViolet is a good example. At the time I bought it, I thought the price made sense. The card was still benefiting from the excitement that comes with a new product, Dart’s market was active, and the UltraViolet was one of the inserts I liked most from the set.

Looking back, I overpaid.

Part of that was timing. New-product hype has a way of making early prices feel more reasonable than they really are. Part of it was grading. When I bought the card on eBay, it looked clean to me. When it arrived, it still looked clean. I inspected it in person and didn’t see anything that made me think it was going to grade poorly. I sent it to PSA hoping for a 10. It came back an 8. That changed the economics of the purchase immediately.

After grading, I basically had three choices.

I could sell it and take a significant loss, probably around half of what I had originally paid.
I could hold it and wait for the market to improve enough that a future sale made more sense.
I could PC it.

The more I looked at the card, the easier that decision became.

I actually love it. In fact, right now it’s the only card in my collection that I have physically on display. Some of that is practical—the display case I bought doesn’t fit many of my thicker cards—but it has also made me realize something. The card I’m looking at every day isn’t necessarily the rarest card I own. It isn’t the highest graded. It isn’t the most expensive. It’s just a card I really like looking at. That feels important.

Learning What I Actually Like

The UltraViolet has helped me start figuring out what I would call my collector’s voice. For a while, a lot of my collecting decisions were naturally driven by scarcity, player upside, grades, and potential value. I still care about all of those things. They’re part of what makes collecting interesting to me. But I’m realizing that visual identity matters more to me than I probably understood when I started building the collection.

I like cards that feel intentional.

Sometimes that means a card with a lot of color and visual energy.

Sometimes it means the opposite—a very clean design with one strong color palette and enough restraint to let the player and the design breathe. What I don’t seem to gravitate toward as much are cards that feel busy simply for the sake of being busy. That’s why I haven’t connected with Resurgence as much as some other collectors have. There are great cards in the product, but many of the designs are louder than what I naturally prefer.

The same is true for Downtowns. I understand why people love them, and I understand their importance in the hobby, but they don’t really fit the way I want my collection to look. Kabooms are different for me. Some of them are extremely colorful, but the designs can still feel relatively simple and focused. The color is dramatic without necessarily making the entire card feel crowded.

And then there’s UltraViolet.

It has enough going on to be visually dynamic, but the design still feels controlled. The colors are striking. The artwork feels like the point of the card rather than decoration layered on top of everything else. It feels like a poster you’d see for a modern heist film, like a “Baby Driver” type of movie. I was an actor in a previous life, and these are some of my favorite movie types, so maybe that’s why I gravitate to the design. I know this will be a controversial statement but I prefer the UltraViolet design to Kaiju, despite Kaiju being the scarcer and more valuable chase (don’t get me wrong I would absolutely love to own one of the Kaiju’s as well. I just prefer the UV design). That realization has probably been more valuable than the difference between a PSA 8 and a PSA 10.

Building a Collection Instead of Just Accumulating Cards

I also bought the Abdul Carter UltraViolet. I plan to grade that one too. Whatever grade it receives, I’m probably going to keep both. There’s something appealing about having Dart and Carter together in the same insert—two important Giants rookies, the same visually distinctive card design, and a pairing that makes sense inside the collection.

That idea of grouping cards together is becoming a bigger part of the way I think about collecting. I like groups of cards that share a visual language. Maybe it’s the same insert. Maybe it’s a coordinated color. Maybe it’s a group of cards that look like they were intentionally selected to sit beside one another rather than simply being a collection of expensive singles. That feels closer to the collection I want to build. Not just rare cards. Not just PSA 10s. Cards that look like they belong together.

The PSA 8 Is Still a PSA 8

None of this means I’ve suddenly stopped caring about grades. If I eventually find a PSA 10 Jaxson Dart UltraViolet at the right price, I can absolutely see myself upgrading. And if I do, this PSA 8 will probably go up for sale.

That doesn’t make keeping it now a mistake.

There’s a difference between recognizing that a card can be upgraded and treating the current card as something that no longer has value to you. I may eventually want the cleaner copy. But right now, this is the copy I own. It’s the one sitting on display. And every time I look at it, I’m reminded that I like the card considerably more than I dislike the number printed on the PSA label. That’s probably the biggest lesson from the purchase.

From a purely financial perspective, it wasn’t a particularly good one. I bought during a hotter part of the market. I expected a better grade. The value dropped. But collecting isn’t entirely a financial exercise. Sometimes a disappointing grade forces you to answer a much more useful question:

Do I actually like this card, or did I only like what I thought it might become?

With this one, the answer was easy. I like the card. And I think figuring that out is helping me understand what I want the rest of the collection to become.

When the Grade Stops Mattering: Finding My Collecting Style With Jaxson Dart’s UltraViolet