I feel like it hasn’t been fully clarified to you yet.
PSA graded your cards auto, not the the card itself.
If this card lacked the sig, it would have came back with a lovely “nonoholder” label.
Cool card for sure, and I remember thinking so when I saw it on Mercari after the TX Auto-fest over the summer - but it’s not an error in the true sense, it was intentionally done one way or the other. Thus the complete opposite of a true error imo.
GL!
Send it to BGS, they’ll tell you if it’s real or not. My 1st Ed Base Set Square Poliwrath turned out was not 
Bgs grades handcut cards for both sports and non sports. PSA is more strict on handcuts, but they don’t have a Pokémon expert. There is no third party grading company that will properly authenticate a square cut. Experts on this forum are better than what both companies have on staff.
Buddy you really need to chill. You realize the people PSA consults for their pokemon information are on this forum right?. Crack open any PSA/SMR article and read the names.
You are conflating working for a company with being an expert in a field; those are completely separate points. There is no one at PSA that is anywhere near the level of Gary, myself, or plenty of other experts on this forum.
Enjoy your purchase. But stop trying to emotionally authenticate something that isn’t true.
Bro, stop getting defensive. It’s almost impossible to tell if it’s 100% legit, as compared to it being easily identifiable if its fake or handcut. But the odds of it being not handcut are almost not there, and grading doesn’t prove the legitimacy in regard to the context you’re talking about. Sounds like you’re more upset about the purchase than anyone else is.
I read what you said before. You’re just arguing in circles. You’re not being attacked. Someone politely let you know more about the context of your card in regard to the thread you posted it in. You got butthurt because it wasn’t what you wanted to hear. Stop crying and arguing. This isn’t even a debate, so there’s no point in you getting defensive. You will never be able to prove this card isn’t handcut essentially, with all likelihood it being the opposite. Your points of why it’s legit aren’t true. It was authenticated because of the sig. Guarantee if someone gets their handcut square cut signed and sent, some will come back encapsulated. But who cares. It’s your money. You clearly feel cheated out of it now, so maybe do more research, my man.
Everyone has been telling you that yours is likely handcut. There are almost no legit full square cuts from base set. That was the point. There are some telltale signs, but you’ll never be 100% certain and that’s something you clearly weren’t aware of. You’re the one that made this into an argument.
Why is it whenever you speak, I get Vietnam flashbacks of a certain French, female troll/collector. It’s a mixture of the defensiveness and casual humblebragging of how much money you have lol
@tndh, Your thread was moved since the card is not a legitimate error.
Since you had difficulty reading the reasons why your card is hand cut before, here are the points again with an added bonus:
WOTC is not Nintendo.
Your Charizard was not in the video you provided.
Base set cards were hand cut and sold on the open market. This isn’t an opinion. This is why you see constant base cut cards. They were verifiably cut second hand, by businesses, not wotc.
An actual error cut distributed in a pack won’t have 4 pristine corners. This is the dead giveaway. Notice in the video you linked, the corners will naturally have indents and/or are softer due to packaging.
Unless you were at an official WOTC event, and can name the staff member, there is no legitimate way to authentic a WOTC square cut card. They were only given to the staff/prizes as jokes. Charizard was not one of them.
The video you posted shows organic error cuts from Nintendo, Not WOTC. Those nintendo cuts are very infrequent, and tend to be C/U cards, as those are in the front or back of the pack. The logical deduction: isn’t it coincidental the most valuable card has the most “square cut” copies for sale?
There’s no way to definitely “prove” something to be cut in a factory vs outside a factory (outside from very obvious things such as cutting it yourself or pulling it from a pack). There are only indicators or clues that will assign a greater probability to one explanation over another. This is one of the reasons square cuts are met with skepticism in the so-called serious collector space.
I also agree that the psa authentication means nothing regarding the cut since 1) they no longer grade square cuts without signatures and 2) they will slab a napkin with a signature on it.
There are many things that would suggest this card in particular is hand cut that have already been mentioned. Based on what I’ve seen so far I’d favour the handcut explanation. But honestly with something like this, the pragmatic approach when deciding to buy a card like this is to put the burden of proof on the factory cut claim. I would assume hand cut unless there was some additional evidence or information suggesting otherwise.
ANYWAY regardless of the source of the cut it is still a unique piece and still has an arita signature. Just from what I’ve seen so far, trying to argue that the cut is legitimate is a losing battle and the constant defensiveness just comes off as you being salty to people who are trying to share their knowledge with you in order to help you become better informed.
@tndh , I’m sorry to hear you got robbed. It happens to the best of us sometimes. I was nearly blackout drunk last week and dialed in about $300 worth of batman and the dude that sold to me only gave me 3 GRAMS instead of $300 worth. I didn’t notice what had happened til he had already drove off! For me, I learned a valuable lesson. If you get too drunk, you can get suckered. Moral of the story is, drink less when you make these kinds of purchases and don’t get mad at other people for your own mistakes. Suck it up and move on.
This is more spicy than the hunting thread. lol
Ouf, this thread is a perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. I also think most of what should be said has already been said, and this will be a good archive for future members to look at.
@tndh,
First off, your card is awesome, and seriously I don’t see what’s the point of the square cut part unless you plan on selling it in the future. If it was up to me it would be a card I would keep as it is too nice to be sold!
The onus is on YOU to provide proof that it was square cut at factory, along with its provenance, NOT Scott (Smpratte). Without provenance on something that can be altered, all we have is a story with no evidence that corroborates the story. If I claim that Jesus blessed my base charizard, I can’t ask skeptics that they need to prove how my charizard is not blessed by Jesus by telling them to show me a real blessed base charizard for comparison. I would need to scrounge up the evidence to prove it myself.
PSA messes up the grading and labeling sometimes, and you can’t just point to how PSA graded the card meaning it was legit. The Rayquaza below is clearly not an English graded Gold Star Rayquaza. You can claim that since PSA graded it as such, then it must be an English graded rayquaza, however it’s clearly wrong:
If stay around more in these forums, or look in past threads, a lot of provenance, data, evidence that PSA uses actually came from members from this website.
Honestly, NONE OF THIS MATTERS because you own the card, you can say or do whatever you want with it. Call it squarecut, hand cut, whatever. We can give our opinions on the card with whatever knowledge and data we have, but you don’t have to agree with us. It only matters if you decide to sell this card in the future on ebay/publicly and claim it was a factory square cut. When that happens, this will then be re-discussed again, and it will be our words versus yours. It’ll be up to the buyer who’s interested to determine who’s expertise to confer to.
Actually Gumbercules, I’m no expert at autographed signatures but pretty sure they graded the card, not the signature. They only authenticated the signature Otherwise the case will look like this:
Ever see a BGS 9.5 Gem Mint Square Cut without a 9 subgrade?
How does Gary know his squares were factory cut?
Why can Gary tell the difference between the two even if he doesn’t know their actual origin?
I may have revealed some of these answers to one or two people here but not positive. Understanding all the answers though could make this travesty an even bigger problem which is why it all can’t be revealed to everybody.
For fun, take a crack and guess at these;)
But why male models?
I did not take this personally at all, and I agree with what you said. I overextended with me at the line I bolded above, I meant he can THINK whatever he wants with the card or believe what he believes if he’s in denial.
Hehe, I also think I watched too many Pawn Star episodes now, where countless of people would always have a story spun on their item they are trying to sell, but the lack of evidence, provenance and proof makes them just stories. With zero proof, these stories don’t add any value to their items. I sort of loosely tied his denial with it being a story, because it requires authentication from a previous WOTC staff who themselves also have proof that a charizard was handed out (which it never had), making it an impossible scenario. This kind of feels similar to a story like those pawn star clients who brings in a bat that they claimed it has been used by babe ruth. However, they then have no photographic or signed proof by the player or an authentication service to show that what they said was legitimate. I guess the difference between pawn stars and tndh is, like you said, him repeating his original statement without validity and without re-correcting his statement.
As far as taking the word of former wotc employees, uhmm I’ll pass. Most the time Ive heard that, the info turns out being wrong though normally innocuous…or…the people stating that’s where they heard it are simply creating proof.
This observation isn’t always true though.
That’s precisely the problem. Members of the forum, along with people knowledgeable in the field of miscuts stated that there is no true square cut charizard. It does not exist. How do we provide proof on something that does not exist in the world, legitimately? Proof has been provided with other miscut cards, just not a square charizard because it does not exist.
You’re quite literally using the same fallacy over and over again, an argument from ignorance. What if there is no real thing? How would you prove that yours is factory square cut? Your argument when we ask you for square cut proof is that PSA graded your card, which I already proved that they make mistakes from time to time, along with Scott saying that they are lenient when the card is signed.
Ditto is really trying to help you man. This is the part that isn’t sinking in: “thats why im asking whoever has the true square cut charizard. i want to see it for comparisons . and i dont know whats the big deal, yall telling me a bunch of stuffs and never provided what im looking for.lol. show me the “real” thing”.
There is no “true square cut charizard” from wotc. Those square cuts came from sheets that were cut OUTSIDE of the factory.