With cards I'd be more concerned with trimming than the cards being fakes. There are some issues that are hard to tell, but most aren't.
I used to be against grading, I figured someone should become familiar with an issue before buying expensive star cards. Then a few years ago I saw a few things that made me start to change my mind.
The stacks of raw cards Simply weren't around at shows, when I started, nearly every dealer at every small show would have 50's and 60's cards in some quantity, and most had at least a few T cards or Goudeys.
So the opportunity to see and handle thousands of vintage cards and get a feel for what looked "right" just wasn't there.
At about the same time I started seeing dealers with loads of mid grade 50's cards slabbed, which seemed silly till I saw what the higher grades went for. I asked one dealer who said he wasn't a great grader, so he sent cards in in bulk. Thousands of them. And the prices he got for the high grades more than covered the grading of the mid grade ones.
I still have some worries about the acidic cardboard degrading inside the slab and the acid accelerating that process.
But I've become ambivalent about grading. I think it can be good for high grade cards and ones prone to reprinting. I don't think it's all that useful for low grade cards, except for ones that have been trimmed neatly and are hard to spot the alterations.
The downside is that any card that's oddly cut or undersize -even slabbed- is now suspect. They should have a way of slabbing well preserved cards that are outside the published specs.
Steve B
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