Anyone who wonders what Evan Mathis is up to...
 

He's trying to "unify the trading card industry"

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Who is Evan Mathis?

The collector's antithesis of John Galt

Former NFL player and controversial figure in the hobby. Lots of virtual ink on Net54 about him.

The amount of vintage uncut sheets he's acquired over the years should make some collectors who view their collections as investments a bit nervous. It's a crazy amount of uncut...that might not be uncut any longer...

This is the guy that made a card trimming tutorial correct?

One of the all time greats in the hobby. He has exposed it for what it really is countless times. Weirdly very few seem to care and most carry on like he or the many many like him don't exist.

Some chump who brags about trimming cards.

+1.

Correct

One industry under Evan, indivisible, with high grades and profits for all?

LOL

He didn't come across to me as being braggadocious. I interpreted it more as him showing everyone what goes on behind the curtain.

The vast majority of people still don't get it. They still think it's a few cards here and there and a handful of bad actors. But it's literally millions of cards. There is no such thing as a gem mint vintage card. The only way to get one is to make one. If you get a truly perfect pack pulled card with the nicest factory edges, corners, and centering you can get, the best it can grade is a 9, and realistically probably an 8 by today's standards. You'd have to pull a Mathis if you want a 10. And all these trimmed cards that pass through grading have shifted the grading scale accordingly. The graders see a "perfect" card and instead of flagging it as trimmed, they instead think that cards in that condition truly do exist out of the pack. So they adjust the scale accordingly, and the best untampered with cards can now no longer achieve mint or gem mint grades. Those are now reserved for cards that look perfect. Or too perfect rather.

Anyone who buys high grade vintage isn't collecting cards. They're collecting slabs. If you want to pay to play that game, then the hobby will provide what you seek. I don't know the extent to which he was/is involved in the trimming scandals and/or profiting from it in the past, but at least Mathis was willing to show you what's really behind that curtain so that we can all be better informed buyers.

Whatever his motive, or personal ethics, Mathis shared some important truths about what goes on in this hobby.

No doubt, it was great information, seemed more a tutorial than an expose to me though.

You can find posts here years ago where Evan was acknowledging tons of cards are trimmed.

Did he acknowledge he was trimming them? I don't know. Wasn't there a big blowout with him over at blowout also, I don't remember the details as I'm not a blowout guy.

He put out a video showing how he trimmed cards.

I don't think he admitted it back then but it was sort of implicit in how matter of fact he was about it.

I think it was intended as a middle finger to PSA. They won't allow him to grade cards anymore, which he is bitter about (and which he expressly stated in an interview). In the early days of grading, everyone knew what was going on. PSA included. It was a good ol' boys club. It was all hush-hush. All those guys were slicing up cards. They knew it. They allowed it. It's only in recent years that some of this stuff has become more public and exposed. Now PSA wants to pretend like they weren't complicit early on, banning the customers upon whose backs they built their brand. Mathis asked Nat Turner to reinstate his submission privileges and promised not to send in trimmed cards. Of course, he was denied. In response, he showed Nat a bunch of cards in Nat's personal collection that either he himself trimmed or that his friends trimmed. Then he effectively said, "fine, you want to see how ignorant you guys are, here... here's 100x more trimmers than you had last week. Have fun with BODA." Meanwhile, he just submits through friends and bulk submitters instead, and PSA keeps up their facade of pretending like they can identify trimmed cards.

I've said this a few times, but this hobby desperately needs a "secret shopper" that submits known altered and unaltered cards to every TPG, reporting statistics on the percentage of Type I and Type II errors they make (e.g., how often they miss trimmed cards, and how often they falsely flag untrimmed cards). Would be very interesting to see those results.

You might say the Jose Canseco of cards...

While I agree with the sentiment, I get a lot of "old timer" collections in on consignment and still pull the occasional 9 on a vintage card that is beyond reproach. For instance I just got a 1968 Topps Hockey set in a 50 year old cigar box, got tons of 8's and a couple 9's including Gordie Howe. I've also gotten 9's on commons from 1955 and 1956 in the last year from similar sources. Now if you are talking pre war, I haven't personally submitted a 9, but wouldn't be surprised if there are a handful of legit ones out there in old collections.

Again I agree the majority of new high grades on vintage are suspect, but the problem is you can't just assume everything is bad, though I guess that's one way of protecting yourself.

I wonder if PSA stopped allowing him to submit before or after his tiktok trimming tutorial video?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOkVBJsLEjk

I'm not happy unless I can buy high and sell low.....I will leave all that profit making garbage for others.

Pretty sure it was before.

Substitute "depressing" for "interesting."

I'd also like to see a secret shopper buy up 100 PSA 10s from an insider and resubmit them raw.

It was (is?) possible to get a ten out of the pack or set. I’ve had several of them over the years. Much as I dislike grading I can’t be so cynical as to say that every ten is doctored, at least not in the post 1980 arena.

It used to be possible. I would argue that it no longer is (or that it's nearly impossible rather, and that any 10 you might be lucky enough to get would almost certainly not regrade as a 10 again if cracked and resubmitted). Surely, there's a turning point where card manufacturing eventually rose to a level where they were capable of producing gem mint cards, and if you get some nice pack-fresh cards from those years, you can still get gem mint grades (as you said, post 1980ish - with a few exceptions like the Rickey Henderson RC). But for pre-war and the early Topps stuff, pretty much everything from the 50s and 60s, they just didn't make truly gem mint cards. You'd have to grade those on a curve to give them a 10. PSA used to do this. They used to give 9s and 10s to really nice-looking cards with flaws in the early days, but they no longer do. Every card has edge defects and corners that aren't perfectly sharp. Nowadays, the only way to get a "perfect" card is to "improve" one. PSA sees so many trimmed cards that they now think those are legit pack-pulled cards. And they've become the new standard by which all other cards are now measured against.

PSA has simply moved the goalposts too far from where they used to be. They had moved it by about a full grade prior to the pandemic when compared to the early days, and have moved it another full grade since then (give or take). If you haven't been submitting vintage cards for grading in the past year or two, then you may not have recognized it. But cards that used to be graded as 6s and even 7s are currently being put into 4 and 5 holders with extreme regularity. You can occasionally still get a fair grader, but on average, it's really gotten bad there. The correlation between grade distributions for each card and what year they were submitted is extremely high.

I've graded thousands of vintage cards over the past few years, and I keep meticulous records. Grading today is just a vastly different landscape than it used to be.

This is Spot On Truth.

I should also point out that SGC is doing a pretty solid job of maintaining consistent, fair, and accurate grades across the board for the most part. They've tightened up their standards a little bit as well since the early days, but at least they haven't moved their goalposts by two full grades like PSA has. And they actually utilize the half point grading system, unlike PSA. If your card is dead centered and free of some major defect, it's probably getting the half point bump 80-90% of the time at SGC and about 1-2% of the time at PSA. And that's not an exaggeration.

It was well before that.

I sadly can’t argue with this. I’d like to be able to but I don’t think I can.

Man, if this isnt a perfect analogy.

Based on an admittedly small sample size, namely one sub of 35 or so cards, I disagree. Mine were all graded down 2 or more grades.

I would bet my life the same is not true for their favored insiders.

I'm no favored insider, but I will share that I have noticed my expensive submissions seem to grade more reasonably than my cheap submissions. My theory is the big stuff is going to the experienced graders who have been there a while, the cheap stuff is going to guys who only know shiny crap.

Yep, this is precisely my experience as well. All of my premium, walk-through, super express, etc. submissions are usually graded accurately, or at least fairly. They've tightened up a little from the early days, but it's more like one goalpost move than two. All of my cheap vintage bulk subs are the cards that are getting hammered. Those subs are being graded by the guys who truly have no idea what they're doing. I have two more bulk vintage subs at PSA right now that I know I'm going to regret sending them. My last two bulk subs were just cracked out immediately and are now headed off to SGC.

+2

I have a theory that my eleven-decade old cards are getting docked for loss of gloss.

At least, I read their standards, which are stated objectively, and that's all I can come up with.

Hmhm I think that is okay .

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My theory is that they are not allowed to read their own standards. It is clearly forbidden.

My theory is more a troop of monkeys spinning wheels. Somedays you get a good wheel and somedays you don't.:D

Here is the output for the new PSA AI-driven automated grading system:

https://media4.giphy.com/media/dwThV...=200w.gif&ct=g

SGC's version relies on unique proprietary software:

https://media3.giphy.com/media/T2b7J...=200w.gif&ct=g

CGC went with a high output system:

https://i.imgur.com/jyFFYvW.gif

And Beckett still does things with a human touch:

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...ong%20jack.gif

That gorilla is awesome. I think he had just got his cards back and felt like we do when we get them back 😏.

VERY funny Adam.

Was thinking the same thing about that Gorilla, my kind of guy, we could be friends.

I scrolled past Adam's post at a 6yo birthday party. NSFW. hahahahahaha. Can't explain Ken Jeong's hand movement to young children without disapproving looks from their parent.

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Oh, they'll find out soon enough on their own.

he's rolling dice, obviously.