its coz the sports bros moved onto pokemans coz no one wants some irl dude on their card
The Van Gogh fakes were the first time I was really afraid that I could be tricked.
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While I agree that ultimately people are responsible for their own actions, I would argue that card cleaning companies are complicit and actively enabling (really profiting from) people altering cards for dishonest and exploitative reasons. Personally, I don’t think some terms of service disclosures buried in their fine print absolves them of responsibility.
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Bingo on the two main points. Percentages on their own aren’t that useful. Also this is a 400% increase in the altered cards caught by PSA. Are there more now or are they getting better at catching them? What even is “altered”? Marker on the edge? They seem to overlook most kinds of “treatments” so the statistics aren’t very useful.
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Yes, and without the absolute numbers, and nothing about their criteria for declaring a card altered there is nothing to conclude or interpret here.
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It’s interesting hearing others’ takes on cleaning cards and companies that offer the service. I was considering spending money to get some tiny dings flattened on a staff prerelease promo I have, but it does seem like a slippery slope for more severe modifications and alterations
Thought I’d add some pertinent content here. Rattle published a video today about a slew of Pokemon card content creators secretly getting their cards altered (CTR, Poke Vault, etc), including CTR allegedly altering his collection of Gold Star Celebi (alleged by commenters and Rattle)
It is absolutely insane how quickly Pokemon card collecting is challenging baseball card collecting as the capital of card altering. For decades, that was a pastime of baseball collectors, which too many people in Pokemon seem enthusiastic to adopt
I am already meticulous about buying raw cards, but with the volume of cards being altered daily, I’m greatly concerned that in just a few years the odds of accidentally buying an altered card will be greater than not. Scary stuff
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What a shame
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Pretty timely for the Marsh situation given the PSA report coming out.
CTR (cooltrainerryan) been pretty public(in several of his grading return videos where he briefly mentions it and in the promotional live stream) about sending his cards to marsh for “cleaning” aka altering.
The amount of people who probably gave marsh business because CTR promoted him is likely astounding. And CTR hasn’t made a statement yet that I’m aware or apologized for promoting a scammer/alteration service to his mostly younger audience. Such a shame. I’m sure marsh likely damaged one of his cards too like vault’s, but for him not to say anything about it publicly is even shadier.
Regardless of him doing it for his own collection, which I doubt that’s all he was doing considering how many slabs he sells, he’s an absolute scumbag. Marsh should be in jail for fraud and from what it sounds like theft too from unreturned cards. Hopefully PSA sues him too. Now that its getting publicity I’m sure we will see other creators come out with videos.
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Its never this at the end of the day
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CTR has always been cringe.
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Prismatic Evolutions is the set that gives the recent mania a face. Makes sense that the promo inside it represents something like this.
@rtas Would you really be concerned about a 200% increase if they now identified 3 altered cards instead of 1 altered cards?
They grade 100,000 cards per day but they don’t grade 100,000 altered cards per day. If they only identify a small number of altered cards, any number larger than that greatly inflates the percentage. Two hyperbolic examples: (a) 1 altered card found to 3 altered cards is a 200% increase but they only identified 2 new altered cards which does not equate to a large scale problem as that represents 2/100,000 cards; (b) 10,000 altered cards to 15,000 altered cards is a 50% increase, which is a much smaller percentage, but represents roughly 5000 more CARDS that were altered. If you do not have a baseline measurement, you cannot correctly interpret what the percentage increase actually means. Do not be a Timmy when it comes to interpreting percentages WITHOUT the raw count data.
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You also don’t have the numbers. Calm your karate chop and use your focus energy on something productive today bud.
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lmao you got me, that made me smile haha 
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Lol all good! I love machop, always pick one up at rock tunnel every time I play gen 1 
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This is the problem with percentages, the “most counterfeited” has 12 submissions whereas 821 submissions tried to get the '86 fleer through. Which one is really “more counterfeited”?
A 400% increase could mean a change from 0.0001% of cards to 0.0004% of cards submitted. I think the most interesting thing about this is to find out that PSA is actually tracking instances
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I can only imagine altered cards and counterfeits are tracked separately as well. They obviously want to make themselves look good with this marketing, so I agree more data would be nice.