Guide
Everything that goes on a graded card label, the three routes people try, and the one that produces a slab you can actually sell. Short version: the label has to be sealed inside the case with the card, so it gets made during grading — not on your printer.
Before you can design one, it helps to know what a label is doing. Every grading company's label carries roughly the same six things, and each one is there for a reason:
Everything else — the color, the artwork, the layout — is decoration. Useful decoration, because it's what makes a shelf of slabs worth looking at, but it carries no information. That's the gap custom labels fill, and it's why they don't interfere with anything the label needs to do.
Search for slab labels and you'll find three very different things being sold. They're worth separating, because only one of them produces a card you can sell as graded.
Plenty of sellers offer printable label stock, templates and pre-cut inserts sized for common slab dimensions. These are genuinely useful for what they are: a custom display piece for a card in your own collection, a themed one-of-one, a birthday gift, a team set you want to look consistent on a shelf.
What they can't do is carry a grade. There's no certification number behind them, nothing to look up, and no third party attesting to the card's condition. A card in a self-made slab is a raw card in a plastic case, and the market prices it that way.
This one comes up constantly and the answer is short: don't. A reprinted PSA label on a card misrepresents who graded it. The cert number won't resolve in PSA's database, or worse it will resolve to a completely different card, which is exactly how these get caught. Selling the result is fraud, and it's the kind that's trivially detectable because verification is free and public.
If the appeal is that you want a slab that doesn't look like everyone else's, that's a legitimate want — it's just solved by getting a custom label from a company that will actually issue you a verifiable cert number for it.
The real version. The card is graded, a label is designed specifically for it, and both are sealed into the same tamper-evident case together. You get the design freedom of route one and the verifiability of a normal slab, because the cert number is real and the grade behind it is real.
This is what MPE's custom label styles are, and the rest of this guide walks through how it works.
You don't design or print anything. Here's the actual sequence:
If you're specifying a custom label rather than printing one, the choices that matter are fewer than you might think — and most bad custom labels fail for the same handful of reasons.
A custom label at MPE is a flat +$3 per card on top of your grading tier. No minimum order, no design fee, no difference in price between styles.
| What you want | Grading | Label | Total per card |
|---|---|---|---|
| Graded, standard label | $5 | — | $5 |
| Graded + custom label | $5 | $3 | $8 |
| Graded fast + custom label | $9 | $3 | $12 |
For context, that's less than the cheapest plain white label from any legacy grader. The full breakdown is on the pricing page, and if you're weighing it against the alternatives, what card grading actually costs covers the whole field including shipping and add-ons.
You don't print it yourself. A grading card label has to be sealed inside a tamper-evident slab alongside the card to mean anything, so it's created during grading. At MPE you start a submission, tick the custom label add-on for $3 a card, and the label is designed from the high-resolution scan taken when your card arrives.
You can, and people do — for custom one-of-one display pieces, or for reholdering raw cards in generic slabs. What they can't do is carry a real grade. A label only means something if it's backed by a certification number that resolves in a grading company's public database, and no printable label can create one.
Reprinted PSA labels sold online aren't legitimate. Putting a replica PSA label on a card misrepresents who graded it, the cert number won't verify in PSA's database, and selling the result is fraud. If you want a slab that looks different, get a custom label from a grading company that actually issues you a verifiable cert number for it.
The year, the set, the player or character, the card number, any parallel or variation, the numeric grade with its written name, the grading company's branding, and a unique certification serial. The serial is the part that matters — it's what lets anyone confirm the grade independently.
At MPE it's a flat $3 per card on top of whichever grading tier you choose, so a card graded and slabbed with a custom label starts at $8 all in. No minimum order and no separate design fee.
Not without cracking the slab. Once a card is sealed, the only way to change the label is to break the case, which voids the existing grade. If you want a custom label on an already-graded card it has to be cracked and resubmitted, and it'll receive a new grade and a new certification number.
No. Grading and label design are separate steps handled by different people. The grade is assigned on centering, corners, edges and surface before any artwork is applied, and the design has no bearing on the number.
See the MPE label styles → · How grading works → · Verify a cert number →
