And I’m just here as it seems to be the right thread for dumping links of random card “restoring” business in Japan. No, I don’t think they started before 2020.
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I understand this and I have always agreed with this argument, the point I was making was actually supporting this idea, a lot of sellers and people who are restoring cards use the argument that they are preserving the card, that’s what I was going after, it doesn’t contribute to the card it only takes away and I don’t understand why people who aren’t sellers support it
Want to know something crazy? Its understood that the FIRST GRADED PSA CARD EVER,
The T206 Honus Wagner card with cert 0000001 is proven to be altered
Altering cards has been here since the very beginning
It’s actually harder to alter cards today than in the past. PSA graders had significantly less technology to work with, and Pokemon in particular was a side note to them. The cards were low in value and the company didnt take it seriously
Once i purchased an old cert sabrinas gengar that i saw as a regrade candidate.
In my pregrading i noticed blue ink on 2 edges! It was clearly recolored. But it bothered me how easily this got passed the graders
Something like this is hard to do/get away with these days. Psa uses technology in the prescan that supposedly easily picks up on this and also the lighting that graders have is far superior and makes it easier to detect this as well
Do i think cleaning, aka removing dirt and polishing are more prevalent today? Yes
But im much less concerned about this than i am with someone going into michaels and color matching the blue or getting precision tools to cut 0.3mm off an edge..
Cleaning is at least gray area. Straight up coloring in edgewear is not even defendable. And this is much harder to get away with today
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Yeah and the guy who did it was also sentenced to federal prison. I’m speaking generally when I say this but I don’t think people fully understand that adding or removing material from the card to inflate the grade is simply fraud.
I think it’s a sad reflection of the lack of principles or accountability in this hobby that we can collectively overlook literal fraud as if it’s part of the culture.
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I understand what ur saying but the topic isnt if altering cards is morally justified
The thread is about new certs being altered and my point is old certs are altered too.
Some bad points were made by many in this thread saying psa didnt care about pokemon and that card values were low so u needed to get a 10 to even make money
Thats exactly the reason to alter cards… you needed the ten, and psa didnt care so the altering went under the radar
I am around from the start and also the card cleaning had never been a thing in the past.
We did have altering from the start but it was: using ink on the blue borders to get rid of the white spots.
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What’s even crazier about this is that it’s a 2 cert that has been reslabbed, meaning that PSA missed it the second time around as well.
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LOL cards with a small spot would get a 10 those days, so no altering needed.
I have been grading (and will untill I run out of cards) my own fresh pulled very very very large collection.
I think I found a new buyerspool overhere. I don’t alter, I don’t clean, never did, never will.
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How often does card cleaning/altering actually turn a 8 → 9 or 9 → 10?
From all the stuff I’ve seen it’s mostly cards in the 4-7 range that get a small bump with this practice, but not to NM/M or M standards.
Maybe I’m wrong tho.
There was also a trimmed venusaur, “trimasaur”. They appeared probably around 2017-18. This is when sports guys started to take more notice of Pokémon.
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I thought you didn’t care lol, also the law doesn’t care very much about morals, they do care about fraud though at the end of the day we’re discussing why we distrust trimming and the altering of cards which relates to some being a little cautious of buying graded cards, so yes in a way most of this conversation relates to the main topic in one way or another from my perspective anyway
I think the overall point is that altering of cards has gone up at a really fast rate, compared to 15 years ago where an altered card was rare to find, I think the general point is that it’s getting more and more stressful to buy and card (graded in this case) because of how much scamming there is these days, 20 years ago nobody would take the time to create high quality pokemans fakes or alter cards because there wasn’t much money in it, but now that there’s money in faking and altering cards people are doing it, why do you think the hognus Wagner was altered in the first place?
I mean i get what ur saying
Now its even stressful to have a pokemon package with fedex for fear it will be stolen
But in some ways its getting better
PSA themselves are really good now at managing this whole thing. They cant detect wax though but according to the ceo they will soon have the technology to detect it even if its invisible to the eye
I think the thing that scares me is not having old scans.
The guy who famously bought ultra clean psa 10s, then regraded the same card over and over, but used the discarded 10 labels on 8s and 9s and sold them as tens.
He did this to many thousands of cards and it went on for years…
And whos to say hes the only one who was clever to that?
I appreciate the new certs, i want those original scans.. even if it means i pay a slight premium
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4-7 is still a large value bump, but those are the “repaired” cards like dent removal.
In my experience the “polish” doesn’t do anything.
It can’t actually remove scratches or print lines as some people think it can. I bet they haven’t actually used it and honestly it’s just misinformation.
The people who are saying it CAN do it, are giving free marketing to Kurts Card Care lol. It’s not a magic cream. Honestly it’s a crap product.
That being said, there is significant repair work being done by a lot of people, such as humidor repair to remove dents and creases which is impressive but of course shouldn’t be able to pass a grading company and should 100% be declared as “restored”.
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People will literally do anything but actually look at the card that they are buying.
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Another issue, is that the damage caused by “soaking” cards in a solution can sometimes not appear until AFTER the card has been graded.
See an example here;
The chemical in the solution the card is soaked in damages the glue, and when the card faces a change in atmosphere (ie humidity) the holo layer begins to peel from the card stock.
When the owner purchased the graded card, there was no such damage. After having had it stored in his collection for some weeks he noticed the issue.
See another example here, the card was sent to PSA without the peeling, was graded in an 8, and in QC it was pulled as it was peeling, eventually marked as authentic.
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That’a absolutely mental. Okay, now even I’m a little paranoid about buying cards now.
Can you provide a link to that Rayquaza card. Would like to read more about it etc.
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I’ve never seen this with the polish as it dries super fast.
I never have seen tcg cards been soaked. This was fairly common with certain old sports cards though.
It could have been from using a humidor system to remove dents.