why eseries is best
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I saw that your argument implied older certs would be more desirable due to the lack of incentive to alter a card with a 1st edition stamp. If I understood your point correctly, keep in mind that older certs come with the lack of aftermarket stamp authentication experience offered to them by @fazool
I know you aren’t saying old certs are 100% safe, but I just wanted to bring up my point that a newer cert such as today would have been authenticated after PSA’s fake stamp lesson.
I don’t understand it either. Maybe I should’ve altered the beard
My interpretation is that Japanese 1st Ed is just as dope as Wotc 1st Ed.
Ok time for a rememe
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The argument in favour of old certs is based on a future where a large number of fake stamped cards are being graded. Any new cert has a non-trivial probability of being fake and old certs (say, anything prior to today) had a virtually zero percent chance of having a fake stamp because it’s just not a thing yet. It’s just a level of provenance that already exists in an analogous way for things that are commonly faked in the hobby (boxes, signatures). The premium is associated with the probability the item is legit
Also, the idea that PSA somehow “learned” something from that experience is, frankly, naive.
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Best $5,000.00 I ever spent. It’s saved me possibly a million dollars👍.
www.leica-microsystems.com/products/stereo-microscopes-macroscopes/
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Have you caught any fakes with that microscope you maybe would of bought otherwise?
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Wouldn’t a $15 jeweler’s loupe also do the trick? Or do you need that much magnification?
Not just “any fake” but every fake. You’ll master it in within a day of set up. You don’t need this good of a one though, but it helps, We have a member here who reps for Leica for anyone interested.
One request though. Don’t ask me why the graders don’t do the same thing, especially for review requests.
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Along King’s point, at the high end, could relying on a densitometer work? The fraudulent stamps are almost certainly of a different ink than the original comp, and are likely to be stamped at a different pressure (and thus diff saturation).
They catch some bad ones but absolutely not all, which I can attest to. Keep in mind the scammers are getting better and better and with sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line, well, you’d be careful too;)
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Not sure but I do know there were different pressures used even with legit ones. Just take the thick/thin stamps which were pressure related.
I can say the only thing that changed their mind was Gary and Scott. At one point they were absolutely refusing to talk to me about it, and were even going to charge me review fees for “wasting their time.”
It took a large amount of calls, and constant pressure for them to even honor the “guarantee” which did not honor market price, but the price I had paid 2 years earlier.
I’m very happy that the charizard I purchased after that one was from Gary, and one he graded himself.
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I feel bad for regular joes who don’t have access to some of the help this forum can give
And I hope you still got the card Faz 
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Haha yeah I know it sounds crazy. But hear me out. One of my previous employers had to do some pretty crazy things to keep counterfeit parts, machine, electronics…you name it, out of their supply chain. Was a constant battle. Some fakes were so good they didn’t get discovered for years, if ever. So when it comes to a small printed stamp on a card, I’m betting there are at least a few out there that could fool most of us.
I kept picturing myself in your situation and can’t believe how calm you were, or at least appeared — so good on you. Glad it worked out just fine
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Maybe at first glance, sure. But it’s impossible (or nearly) to perfectly replicate something that was mass-produced in a very specific way two decades ago. So with the right equipment, any fake should be detectable. Unless, of course, someone actually got ahold of the original printing equipment/ink.
As an aside: This is all assuming that there aren’t any consistent, subtle differences between Shadowless and 1st Edition Base cards (outside of the stamp). Do we know that that Shadowless and 1st Ed. Base minus the stamp were totally identical? Or is it possible there are highly subtle differences that could be detected (along the lines of text alignment in Alpha/Beta)? If so, this would make all of the fake stamp worry moot.
@zorloth,yeah, I can see that working for base set due to such variation in the runs. It wouldn’t surprise me if shadowless vs 1st had material differences. I wonder what the impact would be on other sets though: t17, lugia…I would be curious if anyone has examined shadowless vs 1st under a microscope for other wotc 1st vs non.
I don’t trust myself to be able to distinguish, which is why I stay away from non-graded 1st editions especially as prices keep increasing.
Shadowless and 1st edition were the same print run. They’re exactly the same minus the stamp.
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