[Oscar_Stanage]

Originally Posted by perezfan

The fact that a rough cut isn't punished but off-center is heavily punished shows you just how arbitrary and senseless "professional" grading is. Both are factory traits, and should be treated similarly.

Take their assigned number with a grain of salt. There's very little consistency, and the people grading them devote about as much time as Lucy and Ethel spent on each piece of chocolate on the conveyor belt.

That said, it varies from grader to grader and day to day. But rough-cut corners do tend to get favorable treatment and garner more forgiveness than straight-cut edges... the "affirmative action" of trading cards, if you will.

I don't agree that penalizing centering and not cut is arbitrary. If a factory uses a wire to cut cards, it is not avoidable, it's just how they did it at the time. Centering, on the other hand, is a characteristic distributed randomly. They were not able to precisely measure all the time, and sometimes it worked well, other times not. Cards should certainly be penalized for bad centering.