[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by Snowman

I would argue that your card hasn't actually lost any value. Perhaps it has lost value in your eyes, or in the eyes of a very small minority of collectors, but the card's true value is dictated by what the market thinks it's worth, not you. And the market has clearly shrugged at the trimming and alteration scandals, as did the FBI.

If you sell this at auction to someone else and tether a disclosure to it, you may appease your moral compass, but from an economics perspective, all you've done is given someone else the opportunity for arbitrage, because it is an absolute certainty that someone (and likely the very next owner) will just resell it without disclosure. In fact, the disclosure itself nearly ensures that the next owner would be someone looking to profit from the opportunity because they would simply just outbid anyone who was afraid or put off by the disclosure. The card, and it's value, will persist unless it is destroyed. And if the card were sent to PSA, they would likely not honor their grade guarantee. They would say, "nope, looks good!" just like they always go.

At the end of the day, selling with a disclosure attached accomplishes nothing. If you truly want to do the "right thing", then you need to either destroy the card, or crack it out and send it back to PSA raw with a note attached that says, "this card was recolored" and then eat the loss. But this model is unsustainable. The vast majority of high grade vintage cards have been tampered with in some way. You'd be removing a single grain of sand from the beach.

Coming to terms with the fact that the entire high grade vintage market (and even a sizeable percentage of both the lower grade vintage and the modern market) has been f*d with is something that we either just accept or we live in denial about, or are simply ignorant of altogether. How we reach proceed with that knowledge is up to us individually. It has certainly helped to shap my purchasing decisions. I almost never buy a key vintage card graded above a 6, and I look for eye appeal. Yet I still end up with altered cards regularly. If I like the card regardless, I keep it. If I don't, I just resell it. And I don't attach my opinions to the listing. If I think it's altered, I don't care. Because if I did, I might as well give up on this hobby because the number of altered cards out there is endless. I'm not going to take a loss after loss into perpetuity to ease my conscience and effectively just give someone else free money.

To quote the song from the Mikado, "Here's a pretty state of things, a pretty state of things." Man, how did we get to this point? I wonder if David Hall knew from day one his company would result in more doctoring, not less.