What's Trending: August 2026

Last edition was a two-month catch-up. This one’s the real thing: our first clean, single-month report, covering every completed analysis run through CrackorKeep in August.

A quick note before the numbers. If you read our CGC submission results post, you already know we spent a good chunk of August digging into how the tool handles the very top of the grade scale — and why an estimated 10 is rarer than it should be. That work is ongoing, so you’ll notice this month’s data has no estimated 10s in it. That’s not a glitch; it’s the exact thing we’re being transparent about while we improve it.

What People Are Checking

Sports cards ran the show this month. Of the analyses where we could confirm a category, close to 6 in 10 were sports cards — basketball, baseball, football, and soccer combined — with hockey a strong second at roughly a quarter of confirmed submissions. Pokémon came in around 1 in 10.

That’s a real shift from launch, when hockey led. The sports-card crowd has clearly found the tool, and the range of what they’re scanning is wide: modern Prizm rookies, vintage NBA Hoops, 1980s Fleer, World Cup stickers, even a run of 1960s non-sports Batman cards.

As always, a category tag isn’t captured on every single scan, so these splits cover the subset we could confirm — treat them as the shape of the month, not to the decimal.

How the Grades Landed

Across every scan with a numeric estimate, here’s where they fell:

• Grade 9: ~48%
• Grade 8: ~23%
• Grade 7: ~15%
• Grade 6: ~7%
• Grade 5 or lower: ~8%

Roughly half of everything lands at a 9, which tracks — people tend to scan cards they already think are clean. But a real quarter of submissions came back at 7 or lower, which is the part worth paying attention to. The tool isn’t handing out 9s to everything put in front of it. When a card has a problem, it says so.

Three Cards That Stood Out

Not the highest grades necessarily — just the ones that tell you something about what a month of real scanning looks like.

LeBron James, 2024-25 Panini Prizm Silver. The single most-scanned card of the month across its variants, estimated at a 9. Modern basketball is where a lot of this month’s volume lived, and a Prizm Silver LeBron is about as on-the-nose an example as you’ll find.

1966 Topps Batman #2, “Robin the Boy Wonder.” The month’s best reminder that people don’t only scan sports and Pokémon. A sixty-year-old non-sports card came back at an estimated 6 — a realistic mid-grade read on genuinely vintage cardboard, exactly the kind of card where age and handling show.

Caitlin Clark, 2025 Panini Donruss WNBA. Scanned multiple times across different variants, landing at a 9. WNBA cards showing up repeatedly, unprompted, is a genuine signal — women’s basketball is a real and growing corner of the hobby, and it’s turning up in our data without us doing anything to invite it.

Average Condition Scores

Averaged across every scan with subgrades this month:

• Centering: 8.2
• Corners: 7.9
• Edges: 7.8
• Surface: 7.8

Centering held up best. Corners, edges, and surface all landed just under 8 — the same three categories that tend to cost cards the most, and the same pattern we flagged in our PSA 10 requirements breakdown . Surface in particular is the sneaky one: it’s the hardest of the four to judge from a photo, and it’s consistently near the bottom.

Money Math Is Doing Its Job

Of the scans where the Money Math calculator was offered, about 88% were eligible for it — meaning the large majority of cards people scan are ones where running the submit-or-skip economics actually makes sense. That’s the whole point of the feature: not just “what grade might this get,” but “is grading it worth the money.”

The Bottom Line

August’s story is a shift toward sports cards, a healthy spread of grades that proves the tool is actually discriminating, and a couple of genuinely surprising cards — vintage Batman and WNBA rookies — that show the range of who’s using this thing. We’ll be back next month. In the meantime, run your own card — it might turn up in the next report.

About the data: This report covers completed CrackorKeep card analyses from August 1 through August 31, 2026. Failed or incomplete analyses were excluded. Repeat submissions of the same card are included, and a small number of our own internal test scans are part of the totals. Category splits cover only submissions where a card type could be confirmed. All grades are AI-generated pre-grading estimates, not professional grading results.