I’m in the situation where I want to sell some cards that are curved, most are slightly curved and a few are more curved.
When I put it in a penny sleeve and then in a toploader it’s all straight, there are no visible artifacts and the card is most definitely not bent.
Should I mention that the card is curved when I put it on Ebay for example?
Also consider if the card would be in Mint state, would people who are looking to use the card in their private collection, or people who are looking to send the card of the PSA, be annoyed if they take the card out of the toploader and it’s curved?
Basically wondering how much people care about whether a card is curved or not.
This curve is a tough one I’m afraid, 90% of my curved cards are either horizontally or vertically curved, but this one is diagonal, after a week still no sign of progress.
Also, what would be considered mild? Like laying flat on its face if the center of the card is x mm above the table surface? What x would be considered more than mild? I have a bunch of ex series holos and mainly reverse holos that have quite the bend to them. I want to get listing them in the next month or two as there is easily $1k+ there if I take my time getting them all listed nice as they are NM/M just with quite a bend. Not sure what happened exactly as they are stored as all my other cards, maybe that foil was just a bit more sensitive due to the age or something. But my WOTC cards near them aren’t anywhere near that bad either… hmm…
Cards from WOTC with the regular foil curve vertically while certain cards with galaxy foil will tend to curve horizontally. Any curve otherwise is not natural and should be mentioned.
Once the paper has conformed to the shape over the years it will never go back on its own, but you may be able to force it back by doing what Gary suggested
It isn’t the foil that causes the curve. The holofoil is metallic based and doesn’t absorb moisture. Paper in a sense “breaths” so the cards are acting like a hydrometer as the paper absorbs humidity (moisture) from the air.
So as a rule of thumb that applies mainly to WOTC pokemon cards:
The natural curve is no more than 2-3mm vertical (all star foils) or 4mm horizontal (Rocket and Base 2 galaxy/cosmos foil).
Higher humidity causes vertical curves to worsen.
Most of the unnatural card curves I see are an indicator of direct water damage or improper binder storage like bent pages. Non-holo cards do not bend due to humidity. Like I said you can probably bend it back but depending on how you bend it there is maybe 30% chance that it will stay. Most bends will bounce back sometime within a few minutes to up to a week after. Water/humidity based bends are the worst which is why some professional card collectors use a dehumidifier. I just use silica gel packets
Just an old trick we always used in our card hospitals.
You take two off sized plastic pipes where when cut in half lengthwise one will fit flush over the other. Then you place the curved card on the bottom pipe in a countersink direction. Always use a penny sleeve. Then put the top pipe over it. This will bring the card back to normal without hurting the card…perfectly.
You must use bigger pipes so the counter curve is slight otherwise you’ll “freeze” it in the other direction.
I hope that’s clear cause I’ve never had to explain it before, if it’s not clear to everyone then maybe someone else has a better way to describe it.