Being from Holland, I had the privelage to open up a Dutch first edition Fossil boosterbox.
I bought the box for about 300 in 2015, back when opening boxes like this for fun was still a thing.
It was awesome, however the experience became a little sour when all the cards came back as 9’s (looking perfect to me).
I started thinking, is there a (to me unknown) problem with Dutch cards? I thought I’d make the question a bit broader by also including French and German.
I actually find the quality of Dutch/German/French WOTC era cards to be better than English, especially edges and corners. I think the materials used for the cards were a bit sturdier and the packaging process may have been better at not damaging cards.
Its hard to get vintage 10’s from PSA, and you may have had a particularly strict grader. For example the card you posted a picture of the back of has a small ding along the top left side (near the corner), and that may have been enough for the grader to drop it to a 9. If you really think they deserve 10’s, feel free to crack and regrade.
Thanks mate. I have graded quite some cards, some of which seemed to be a lot worse, but indeed a strict grader is possible I guess.
Cracking seems dangerous to me. Is there a safe way?
I’ve cracked 15-20 slabs and have had no issues. I’d recommend looking up a youtube video on how to do it, its not super difficult but hard to describe through just words.
The foreign language 1st edition Base cards were printed in Belgium. The company hated Pokemon cards and didn’t put much effort into printing good quality cards. I got this information years ago from a guy in Holland. Most of my foreign language cards are in the PSA 7-9 range. With very few PSA 10 cards.
That makes sens to me. For example, the German Jungle Snorlax first edition PSA 10 seems to be a pop 1.
The cards I send in weren´t perfect perfect, but they were a lot cleaner than many cards that received 10´s.
This is because there has been significantly less foreign language WOTC cards graded compared to English.
For example: English Jungle has a total of 36,114 PSA 10’s out of 276,366 total cards graded, for a 13% PSA 10 rate (again, note this is all cards and not just holos). German Jungle has 867 PSA 10’s out of 3,597 total cards graded, for a 24% PSA 10 rate.
My personal sample size has been small, but these numbers back up what I have seen.
