Meet Matt Drazin

I've been collecting since elementary school, when my mom traded packs of basketball cards for finished homework and whole boxes for good report cards. That year I put together the 1992 Upper Deck basketball set, and I never really stopped. Over the decades the collecting muscle stretched into art, records, and guitars, but since 2020 I've been back in sports cards full-time. My personal collection leans on aesthetics: foil, hologram, serial-numbered, acetate, a great emblem — cards that look like they were engineered, not just printed.

Day job: User Experience design. It turns out the same muscle that gets spent scrutinizing pixel-level alignment, edge cases, and microcopy in software is the one that evaluates a card's surface, centering, and corners. I'm trained to notice the thing most people skim past, and to care about it even when nobody asked me to. That's the eye every card gets when it lands on my desk.

GradingPrep didn't start as a business. It started as me pre-screening submissions for my own Whatnot show as @puffnuggets. I didn't want to send subs to PSA, BGS, or SGC that would come back with avoidable surface dings or creases I'd missed under bad lighting. So I built myself a process: magnification, controlled lighting, methodical surface work, archival sleeving, and honest grade predictions before anything hit a grader's queue. Friends started asking if I could prep their cards too. Then viewers of the show. Then strangers. Thousands of cards later, it's a real business with real infrastructure — a live customer dashboard, a submission pipeline that covers PSA, BGS, SGC, and CGC, and the same obsessive eye on every order, whether it's one card or two hundred.

The thing I care about most is trust. When you mail cards to a stranger, you want to know the person on the other end is going to handle them the way you would. The promise here is simple: honest evaluations (even when the verdict is "this isn't worth grading"), professional prep work, transparent pricing, and full visibility into where your cards are at every step. That's the service I wish had existed when I first started submitting, and that's what GradingPrep is built to be.