Near Mint = almost no damage (maybe has minor factory damage like a corner spot or print lines)
Mint = No damage (including factory damage like print lines)
Gem Mint = No damage (see above) and perfect centering (within a % window that cannot be easily distinguished without tools)
(Nothing above gem mint bc gem mint should already be perfection to the extent it actually matters)
Afaik, no company has a grading scale like this. Instead these three are shifted down to where my idea of near mint is what these companies thinks is good enough to be a gem quality mint card
i think it would be different if people’s expectations were correctly set in motion from the beginning. i always look back at something like video games where nothing ever gets a perfect grade because nothing is ever actually perfect.
I no longer feel we need to bust out magnifiers just to find a flaw, but i do feel like a “gem mint” should mean a gem quality mint card.
anything less just dilutes the meaning, much like all of these 9.5s now being 10s.
I’ve got 5 cards to get gem mint left in my set. After this I’m going back to raw. I’ve learnt way too much about this grading lark it’s all a gimmick.
I don’t really have any skin in the grading game, but I like the new CGC labels. I think the blue color was a bit too polarizing (looks nice with some cards, worse with others). The new one is nicely neutral-ish.
I do have some CGC 9.5s that I eventually intended to sell, so that’s a bit nice. But I don’t know if the premium of old CGC 9.5 → new CGC 10 will be that much–maybe in the long term, after everyone has long forgotten about this whole rebranding thing.
I mean if you were CGC would you even trust yourself at this point? They have zero faith in their own capabilities and have proved that with buzz light-year to infinity and beyond speed!
