Recently I posted about poor cardstock quality, and overall quality control on English Hidden Fates cards. The experience was so bad, that I told myself I would stay away from modern English product.
(Un)fortunately, I got a ‘too good to miss’ black friday deal on the autumn collector chests, so I went ahead and bought 38 of them with the intention of taking out the 3 awesome promos for grading, and sell everything else in bundles ‘What’s the worse that can happen? Maybe 5-10 promos will be ungradeable’ I thought. Boy was I wrong, out of 38 of each promo card, this is what I was able to salvage as potentially gradeable:
As a rough average, this means around 75% of the promos in these chests will be ungradeable. And even the ones I sent to PSA seem more likely to get 8-9s rather than 10s. And we are not talking minor whitening or the occasional dent. These promos have dents, scratches, whitening, corners that seem to have been cut by a 5 year old with a scissors, you name it.
The businessman in me is not too worried as I will still recoup my investment, but the collector in me can’t stop feeling frustrated at how disrespectful this is towards the fan base. How many kids/teenagers will be getting one of these for christmas, only to get 3 promo cards in played condition? Not cool…
I discussed my issues with Hidden Fates card quality here.
It was more to do with cards warping after a few days, and the odd card with what looked like printer oil stains, so even though I agree with you on the gradeability of the cards in Hidden Fates, I do not think the quality of the product/materials was acceptable from a colectors standpoint.
Overall, what I am trying to point out is how the overall quality of English product leaves much to be desired. If you are a graded card collector buying sealed product, you risk getting damaged cards, if you are a binder collector, you risk having cards in your binder warp completely after a few days.
The fact this happens in English product but not in Japanese, also demonstrates that English card collectors are paying the same (if not more) for a lower quality iteration of the same product, which is unfair.
I only own like two modern cards and they’re in JP (cp6 charizard reprint and scream promo). I know a few of my friends think modern JP is going to close in on the gap between it and modern English, but I don’t know enough about modern to have any thoughts about it. But what I will say is from my observations of Hidden Fates they are 100% better in quality, how they grade,etc than anything I’ve ever seen with English. But I’m sure your case stands true too. Probably not consistent or something.