Buy the card, not the grade - stories

[jchcollins]

Originally Posted by MarcosCards

I think I can enjoy my cards just fine without them being encased in hard plastic.
Marcos

And there is nothing wrong with doing precisely that. Life was a lot simpler with my collection as a kid when the cards just were what they were and didn't have judgment passed and hanging over them in a slab. I know in my day I cherished quite a few lower grade vintage cards and thought a lot less about grading, or at least the minutiae that goes into it. A card was either in pretty good shape...or it wasn't. Grading today obviously has become a subculture unto itself. I find TPG's useful when buying cards that I can't hold in my hands first (i.e. 99% of the time...), and yes if there is a card that really pops in a slab that can be nice sometimes as well - but it's certainly not a hard requirement for me to enjoy whatever baseball card is in question. Just this weekend I busted out a not-very-cheap 1956 Topps card from a BVG slab - not because I disagreed with the grade, but because there was lint or dust or something trapped between the inner sleeve and the hard plastic that made it look like there was print snow on the player's face. Voila, problem solved and now I have a much nicer looking card. If I'm not immediately planning to try to flip a card (that's rare for me anyway) I'll often liberate it from it's slab over something minor like that. I've always been that way.