Quote:
Originally Posted by raulus
Yep. I'm one of 3. Appreciate being outed, so thanks for that.
Full disclosure: I've never altered a card. Except for the one time when I bought a 71 Bazooka Numbered, which was hand cut. The cut job was bad, so I cleaned it up.
And I would argue that alteration is completely acceptable, without needing to be disclosed to a potential buyer. It's still in my PC, so I haven't sold it. But I will have no problem someday selling it without disclosing my hack job to the buyer.
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Perhaps you could reasonably draw a line at trimming hand-cut cards, because the borders are only ever defined by an end-user who tears or otherwise takes scissors to a factory sheet of some sort. You might be able to carve out an exception there without going down a slippery slope, because third-party graders even disclose the inevitable alteration right there on the label: "Hand Cut."
You can draw a sharp line at changing the size of a card that came from a factory and that was not distributed direct to consumers with dotted lines or borders or perforations.
Personally, I'd also draw a sharp line at adding any chemicals to the card, including water. To put that in context, I'd concede that soaking probably doesn't do longterm damage to some cards, and I probably own soaked T206s without knowing it. But we add shades of gray when a card cleaner decides to use tap water or starts messing around with Kurt's secret, proprietary "water-like" formula.
Frankly, I wouldn't trust a stranger with a financial interest in changing a card's appearance without detection to be the final arbiter of what an objectively acceptable soak looks like. Travis' comments here illustrate the point. Letting card doctors decide what counts as doctoring is like letting the fox guard the proverbial henhouse.