The ethical people who alter cards and the ethical ebay sellers and auction houses that facilitate them have made it a very difficult hobby to navigate for people who care to some extent about having unaltered cards in decent grades. The best I have been able to figure out is to scrutinize cards pretty carefully within the limits of my knowledge of how to detect alterations, to avoid certain sellers like the plague they are, and to VCP every card I am thinking of buying to see if it can be traced to one of those sellers. But I am sure it is only effective to a limited extent.
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My avatar is a sketch by my son who is an art school graduate. Some of his sketches and paintings are at
https://www.jamesspaethartwork.com/
He is available to do custom drawings in graphite, charcoal and other media. He also sells some of his works as note cards/greeting cards on Etsy under JamesSpaethArt.
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