TAG pauses its regular tiers after submissions grow more than 800%

Growth of more than 800% is a capacity problem before it is a success story, and TAG's own method makes it worse than it would be elsewhere.

Its pitch is an itemised deduction behind every grade. That is slower work per card than issuing a single number, so the queue compounds faster at TAG than at a grader publishing one figure for the same volume. Closing Basic, Standard and Express is the arithmetic catching up.

What is left is the shape of the problem. Priority at $149 and Walkthrough above it are not tiers most collectors were using, so in practice TAG is open to a different customer than the one who made it popular. That is worth watching: graders that survive a growth spike by pricing out their original audience do not always get it back.