The standard catalog for baseball cards has long been Beckett Baseball Card Monthly magazine. For over 30 years, Beckett has provided collectors with the most comprehensive price guide and tracking of the baseball card market. In recent years, PSA/DNA has emerged as a challenger to Beckett’s longtime dominance with the release of their online-only price guide.

Beckett Baseball Card Monthly first began publishing price guides and market reports in the mid-1980s. In the pre-Internet era, their magazine was really the only widely-accessible source for collectors to get updated market values on their growing collections. Each month, the guide would list out values for hundreds of individual cards from the most popular baseball sets from the 1950s on up. They would track trends in the hobby and provided insights on what cards and players were hot or not.

For collectors, having the black-and-white “Beckett Price Guide” section of the magazine was incredibly valuable. It gave a sense of how much collections were worth and helped determine asking prices when trading or selling cards. Dealers and collectors both came to accept Beckett prices as the standard in the industry. Even today, potential customers on websites like eBay will often list a card’s value as its “Beckett price.”

While Beckett still reigns supreme in brick-and-mortar hobby shops and shows, in recent years PSA/DNA has made a major push to be seen as the new price bible online. Their price guide is fully digital and benefits from being attached to one of the largest third-party grading companies. On their website, collectors can look up estimated values for literally millions of individual graded cards going back over 50+ years of production.

PSA/DNA’s guide has some advantages over Beckett’s print format. For one, it is fully searchable online so collectors don’t have to sift through pages of magazine issues to find one specific card. The values also update in real-time based on recent auction sales data. In contrast, Beckett prices only change monthly when a new issue is published. Further, since PSA grades and encapsulates so many cards, their prices also reflect condition-specific value premiums for graded items.

While Beckett still exerts influence due to its history and availability outside of just digital format, there is no question that PSA/DNA has made impressive strides. In particular, their guide has become the go-to reference for modern cards from the 1990s onward, which make up the bulk of items traded online. Younger collectors who primarily deal in digital marketplaces are also more likely to be familiar with and trust the PSA/DNA guide over Beckett.

Looking ahead, both price guides play important roles but also have weaknesses. Beckett risks losing relevance if it does not build out a stronger digital presence, while PSA is still establishing itself as the top authority across all card eras—not just modern. A potential outcome could see the two merging their reference data together into a single standard listing. Otherwise, they may continue to coexist with Beckett retaining print leadership but conceding more ground online to the technically-savvy PSA guide. Regardless, having multiple authoritative sources for card values is overall beneficial, as it fosters transparency and competition in the marketplace.

While Beckett Baseball Card Monthly long held a monopoly on the standard baseball card price guide, PSA/DNA has asserted itself in recent years as a viable contender. Both publications make immense contributions to the collector universe but also have adjustments still to make. Moving forward, either closer collaboration or a free market dynamic between the two resources will ensure baseball enthusiasts worldwide maintain access to credible pricing information.