Does anyone here have access to an elemental analyzer? There is science to be done

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I figured I would reach out to the community to see if anyone here has access to an elemental analyzer. These machines are very expensive and difficult to get your hands on if you don’t work in a lab. I’m guessing that the people with easiest access to these would be specialized chemists and I know it’s a long shot but it’s worth an ask.

There are some cards that I believe can be tampered with to make them appear as errors when they are in fact not errors. If I could figure out the chemical composition of these cards then I could definitively figure out whether or not they can be tampered with in the ways that I expect.

Thanks for your time :slight_smile:

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This is “the most e4” thread that I have ever read.

I would recommend the following:

  1. Reach out to some graduate students or postdocs at your local university. They may be stupid enough to help you with this.

  2. Contact a company that offers these types of services and inquire about a quote. It is unlikely that any of them will have conducted these types of analyses on trading cards, so they may not take you seriously.

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Doesn’t cgc use some sort of spectroscopy machine?

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If a printing error is indistinguishable from post-production damage, what gives it its value? :thinking:

What is the appeal, if I may ask?

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The point of the thread is that it is distinguishable :slight_smile:

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Yes, but on a molecular level! :sweat_smile:

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Given the cards that they’ve let slip through recently… no :joy:

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No way that’s a thing right? Unless they have like one they use if they highly suspect something maybe.

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I believe that they are accepting cards that have been altered and ARE distinguishable. I’m trying to prove that the cards that they have accepted in the past are not errors.

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OP looking for a spectrometry machine which would tell you the chemical composition.

I have access to one but wouldn’t be able to run a card on it :stuck_out_tongue:

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Are we allowed to see what anything is that you’re looking at. It’s all yours this thread is witness to that lol.

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Alas, I figured if anyone had access to one they might not be able to use it :joy:

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I will post my findings once I finish. I’m not going to publicly post them until I conclude my research and prove it one way or the other :slight_smile:

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I can’t say I know that much about the ways chemicals are identified outside of NRM (but its still been years since I’ve learned that stuff)

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Here’s a screenshot from a cgc article. “X-ray fluorescence (XRF) scanner”. Not sure how sophisticated the technique is (or needs to be for this case)

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super pricey to use sadly

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Either way is brilliant. Anything like this I find fascinating.

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I just received confirmation that CGC is not currently grading the cards in question due to authenticity concerns. I’m still going to do some tests just to make the general public more aware of how these cards may be able to be altered :slight_smile:

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Damn you take away a man’s subgrades and he wants to hit you at a molecular level

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LOL this is actually completely unrelated, I’ve been thinking about this for months, it was just something that I remembered to finally ask people on the forum. Good meme though :joy:

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This is one of the more elaborate schemes to sleep better at night.

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