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Judge DredI called PSA and spoke to two different people on two different days. Both PSA reps stated that they will not encapsulate altered cards. I assumed that they meant cards that were obviously trimmed from an original size or cards that had color added, etc. I'm pretty sure that they didn't include hand cut cards like Post cereal, etc.
I saw that SGC graded some Zeenuts without the tabs. Interesting, those could be considered trimmed cards.....
It was posted (in this thread) that GAI grades trimmed cards and labels them AUTHENTIC without assigning a grade to them. This becomes very interesting because now we have the wild wild west of card grading. There are no industry standards. What a mess.
PSA doesn't even provide a definition for AUTHENTIC on their web site. But after reading this thread there's a contradiction of terms amongst grading companies.
I asked the last PSA person (with whom I spoke) to consider defining the AUTHENTIC nomenclature (of grading) on their labels. I guess nomenclature would be an incorrect term because that might imply that there is some type of scientific method or classification to the rather subjective and arduous task of grading - "hmmm, looks good to me, lets call it a 6".