I’m failing to see how this is entitlement. You are paying a company for a product. You, as the consumer who is trading your money in exchange for the company’s product, are well within your right to expect and desire that the product is delivered to you in good condition. Would you be whistling the same tune if you ordered a table from a store and it arrived with a big scratch across the surface? I also don’t see how a product being “made for kids” is a counter to this argument. Are kids deserving of lower quality product? People be jumping through hoops these days to bag on young people. Companies are not your friends and accepting less from them only shows them that it is okay to run your sh*t and take your money.
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I love how everyone forgets about the competitive TCG players too, including the senior and masters divisions.
Bad QC can be the difference between a tournament legal card or not.
Edit: Replying to the original post, I don’t think print lines are that big of a deal but let’s face it;English sets have bigger QC issues than print lines.
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@needszeebs A PRINTER putting a PRINT LINE on a piece of paper as it comes out of a machine at probably 1000s of copies per minute is well within the accepted range for a $0.40 piece of cardboard. Yeah, if my $1500 dining room table had a big scratch I would not accept it upon delivery. That is not comparable to a Pokémon card with a print line.
Saying that print line impacts the legality of a card for tournament play is laughable.
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I didn’t say print line. I said bad QC.
@galalyth fair enough. I’m saying the print line pictured by OP is not bad QC.
lol come on man, now your stretching the truth a bit. there is no kid on this planet that is going to care about a printline on a pack that their parents bought.
most kids dont even know what quality control means. you seem to really forgot what the mind of a child is like.
Pokemon cards today are objectively much better quality than entire eras 5+ years ago. They literally improved their QC. Even in at their worst (BW era), it was still fine.
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I forget nothing, I cared about print lines when I was a kid. And after the first two I always bought my own packs.
Japanese cards have higher quality stock and better print quality all around. Buying packs of Japanese cards, or boxes is cheaper than English. There are less cards in Japanese product, as the sets are smaller. The point is that, for whatever reason, English seems to have a lower standard of quality (at least, when viewing the product purely from an outside perspective). I don’t know what printers are different, different stock, company standard, cultural standard, volume of product being produced, etc., is causing that discrepancy. A lot of English cards can look played straight out of the pack, whether it be print lines, centering, whitening, or even just straight up damage. That is not acceptable to me. I am not here to pontificate about what needs to be done to bridge that gap, but I know that I don’t find it acceptable. Whether it is a large purchase, or something smaller and cheaper that is mass-produced, if I am spending my money it, I am entitled to have an opinion about the quality of the product.
I am not familiar with tournament play and the relation to card quality, so I cannot comment on that.
I don’t think the argument is that quality hasn’t improved over time. I also want to clarify that I am not referring to specifically this one card with a print line. I am simply saying that if I am spending my money on cardboard that is pretty, I want it to LOOK pretty. I find it frustrating when I pay for cards, only to pull the card I wanted and see it has a giant black print line dead-center across the entire card (or it’s miscut, damaged, etc.). Regardless of how QC has changed, it is still an issue that keeps popping up (specifically in English). I am not asking them for a favour to fix-up just out of the goodness of their heart, their entire business model consists of creating something that is worth our time and money.
Have you ignored my post in the other subforum?
Every single one of the Japanese V and VMAXes I bought had print lines. Holos have print lines. Tag teams have print lines.
If anything, the English cards are better for that. I’ve seen only holos with print lines so far.
I keep hearing JP is best, well in my experience it’s not. It’s quite pathetic honestly. One Centiskorch card had 3 print lines both horizontal and vertical.
And for others in the thread, let’s not pretend that TPC don’t know that their $4 product is being traded for many more times than that. They obviously know it’s a collector’s item, otherwise why do they keep commissioning alternate arts and having a flood of secret rares. QC is bad, that’s like objectively true and it really shouldn’t be.
Wouldn’t the biggest reason be because no one cares about modern sports cards?
I’m not American so this may be wrong, but the only reason those existed were for collecting weren’t they? There’s nothing else attached to them.
In this modern era, they are outdated because of so many other competing avenues of entertainment. And this may be ignorant, but what art can really be commissioned for baseball cards or whatever? The modern sportsperson is both equally adored and despised as well, I think there’s much less importance placed on them as a hero so who would want to collect cards of them?
damn, you just came in here and came for everyone 
I didn’t see your other post, and if I did and responded to it, I’m sorry I can’t remember. It sucks that your experience with Japanese has been bad. I’ve purchased many Japanese product and I’ve only really had one issue, that being Shiny Star V & print lines (which still wasn’t even that big of a deal). Everything else has been pretty impressive coming from English. I cannot remember the last time I opened an English product and had it not be a disaster in terms of QC. Obviously I am not trying to say it doesn’t happen in Japan, I am just saying it is a much more significant occurrence in English from my experience and what I’ve heard/ observed from others.
tell’em
Id say then your in a very extreme minority. I never had conversations as a young kid with my elementary school classmates about printlines on Pokemon cards. I dont know any kids now a days that I could pick off the street and would say that with Pokemon cards, the printlines are their biggest problem. Especially when the parents are footing the bill most of the time.
Yeah, you really dont know much about american culture if you think athletes here arent treated like heroes. Some are treated like gods. Some cities will prioritize sports over everything. There are high schools in texas that have higher athletic budgets than academic ones.
Pokemon cards, while hot right now, has got nothing on sports. There is no Pokemon cards hitting 7 figures and not sure if there will be any in the near future. Sports is on another stratosphere in terms of popularity. And its probably because it has more mass appeal. Pokemon has a limited audience since its mainly a niche thing, but sports is everywhere in every culture across the world. And many people across the world also watch the american sports leagues, so the audience is way larger.
This is a PSA 9, is that really substandard printing quality?
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Pretty shocked to see there are people sympathetic to OP in this. Amazing how we participate in a hobby where the same people who get irritated over print lines are prob also cheering when they pull a crimped card (prob something that’s more worth being mad about). Would it make everyone feel better if CGC added to their label “inadvertent print line error”?
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Fair enough, then is the original comment correct or not about sports cards being printed at super high quality but having no one collect them?
If anything people collect jerseys and other more ‘appropriate’ items than cards that aren’t even really associated with the team/players? But then again, I’m thinking of football more than anything and haven’t seen anything like that. Like, if you’re supporting the team, you buy merch from the store and not some trading cards.
Whereas I suppose in America there’s some tradition for sports cards for the major sports? Baseball, NHL, NFL, NBA. But even then, these are external companies making these cards aren’t they?
I was under the impression the art on the card was the most valuable bit, no?
So anything disrupting the art is more of a problem than IMO being off-centre, or having whitening on the back etc.
This line is across the Pikachu. It ruins the art.
I guess I should clarify value not in terms of PSA or monetary worth but to your own self. The art is disrupted so the value decreases.
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Sorry if it came off that way!
It’s more like, I just started collecting again since WOTC era, after many years of just observing the art because I found a Facebook group that was selling their pulls and other cards. Then, based on random feedback on forums, reddit, youtube etc. of how Japanese cards are better printed and people continuously showing bad QC English cards, I bought some (as they were cheaper too) and then got really annoyed how every single one of the cards had print lines, some having multiple on one card - and yet it’s still called “near mint”.
As I mentioned in other posts, for me it’s about the art since I don’t care for getting things graded etc. and print lines are the biggest distraction on the card. If they aren’t on the picture part of the card it’s less of an issue (for holos) but otherwise, and on these V, VMAX, FA cards, it feels like they can’t get right the one thing that makes the card - the artwork. That’s like their one job.
And for the cards to be spanning from Sun & Moon (holos) to every SWSH set, means that the Japanese are seemingly accepting of it? And also I don’t know how secret art cards can then have so much value assigned to it when there are print lines. The secret cards’ only purpose is the chase/art so for me it doesn’t make sense and yet no one seemingly wants to talk about it.