I was browsing PWCC and noticed a handful of 9XX cert cards. I usually like to see why high end cards, especially newer certs, got PSA 9s. So, I flipped them over to see the back and my gut feeling was that the borders appeared thinner than a normal card.
The Victory Ring and Orb are consecutive certs with a bunch of high end cards in the same submission. What is also sus is that if you check +/- 10 cert numbers you’ll notice some of the cards have been deactivated. Something seems off.
I tried a handful of times to do an overlay in Photopea and ended up making a GIF to show the difference. To the best of my ability, I lined up the corners and resized the cards so the text was a 1:1 match. In the gif, I’m using the opacity bar to change the top layer from opaque to transparent.
I’m not perfect at this and was wondering what you guys think?
Methodology Critique
The trophy cards above may have been trimmed however I believe it is not possible to draw conclusions by overlaying fanatics scans in photoshop because the method that fanatics uses to create scans for their listings creates variance across scan dimensions as you can see below in the dimensions of the trophy cards and one registeel promo used as a control sample.
Controls
Although it may not be necessary, I controlled for age of the card, PSA new slabs and JP print quality by picking Japanese control samples from 2005 all in the new PSA slab.
Experiment
I tried overlaying two less valuable cards, which are less likely to have been trimmed. Because of the difference in scan dimensions I was unable to uniformly line up the cards, without scaling their dimensions. The transparent edge in the bottom left of the image below is where the control sample registeel promo and delta vaporeon are not aligned.
This gets into semantics but I think PWCC used to use a camera that was fed cards on a conveyor system, but it is possible they use/used scans. Not sure if this matters but offering it as a detail.
I did notice when brining the images in, I had to transform the x and y-dimensions separately as opposed to locking the aspect ratio. This method poses questionable results, which you have pointed out, but I’m not sure of another approach.
For the victory ring, I think I locked it down to +/- 1 pixel. But even with this effort I don’t have complete confidence. I appreciate you taking the time to look
I’ll try to get an image later, but the corners also bothered me. Japanese cards have immaculate corners and these had varying curvature.
