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Old 09-17-2023, 12:52 PM
G1911 G1911 is offline
Gr.eg McCl.@y
 
Join Date: Dec 2015
Posts: 7,420
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As to the ease of trimming, it's super easy and I did it myself.

If you take a stack of cards, of basically any year and any set, there are natural size differences. I'm opening a box of 2022 Heritage High Number right now, lining up the cards from the last 3 packs on my desk, so that the bottom edge of the card is against the flat surface of the desk, I can discern with my poor and glaucoma ridden eyes that the cards are very slightly different heights. This provides the margin by which one may trim the card without leaving much evidence. Even to this day card production is not so good that the size tolerances are not perceptible to the human eye.

Using the modern tools and trimming methods, which I don't want to fully state but 'if you know you know' and they are not to hard to find. They require no expensive or unusual tooling or particular skill. I took some 1990 Score football and micro trimmed them last year. I chose these because they are worthless, I have them sitting around, and the border design lends itself to make a sizing difference more easily discernible to the human eye with the white striping pattern, so they are more difficult to shorten without it being noticed. After handling the cards a bit to produce slight corner wear at the top and bottom, I micro trimmed them. Didn't even need to practice or anything before I produced cards I knocked down to EX-MT and then cut to perfect corners and normal size, without any way to really see they were trimmed.

Edge coloring can help ID a vaguely recent trimming, among other things, but especially with modern cards, it's nigh impossible without before and after scans to have a high success rate at the identification.
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