Quote:
Originally Posted by doug.goodman
I'm not the peanut gallery.
I have plenty of soup, I just don't pay people for opinions on mine.
Everybody who has purchased a card in the last 20 years is effected by this issue, but anybody who is just now finding out about this issue must not have noticed that the very first paid opinion delivered by the king of all paid opinion givers was for a trimmed card.
It's all been down hill from there, and anybody who ever thought it wasn't, well, they were / are delusional.
EVERY card EVER given a paid opinion is suspect.
Break out those kitchen knives (at least that's what I use) and get back to where this hobby was when (many (most?) of us) started, and before it was hijacked.
Each and every one of us who has paid for an opinion is part of the problem.
Doug "but maybe I'm completely wrong" Goodman
|
Doug, solid post, but the scenario you suggest is farcical. The hobby is not going back to the good old days of having raw cards that may or may not have been altered anyway.
I agree that all cards in TPG holders are now more suspect than they were before. But come on - cracking all cards of my TPG cards out of their cases is going to do exactly what? There won't be much value in this purification ritual and it won't make them any more or less pure.
If the cards we have purchased with 3rd party opinions are trimmed/altered/conserved whatever you want to call it, then how will breaking them out of their holders fix anything? Will it somehow purify the cards? Are raw cards more pure and thus less prone to trimming, recoloring, or as PWCC calls some practices - conservation? While I am discouraged and feel that this fiasco cannot help but result in the diminution of the value of everyone's graded collections, I don't for a minute think that my cards would be worth more cracked out than not. I would bet that even though there will be a cloud over the TPG's opinions, a slabbed card will continue to carry a premium over a raw card because it has a better chance of being the grade shown than a raw card that looks like it might be.
Someday, either a new grading company or an existing grading company will come out with a process to remove the humans from the grading process and use optical scanning and CMM tools to measure card size. They might provide this service as an upgraded service alongside human opinions which will be viewed as less reliable but perhaps ok for lower priced, lower grade commons as an authentication option.
When that day comes, there will be a new class of graded cards whose value will exceed those of the human-graded slabbed cards of today's TPG's. I would expect that PSA will actually do this themselves to clean up their image but more importantly, open up a re-grading market for themselves. It will be like the after-market parts business is for cars. It will be more lucrative than the first wave of grading and it will cost them less.
In the process they will create another pool of over 3M cards that will be the target of their next money making endeavor - regrading their previously PSA human-graded cards, but with their new technology.
This will be the only reason that I can think of (other than to alter and resubmit or play the PSA lottery game of hoping for a bump up for a re-grade) that would result mass waves of people cracking out their cards from their holders.
Until that day, I will continue to use my kitchen knives to butter my biscuits.
Tony