Posted By:
Al C.risafulliLeon:
My last post was directed at the original poster, who's post seems, to me, to contain at least some degree of sour grapes.
That said, without having your card in hand, I'd give it a low grade but not a 10. It is miscut, with poor registration and a chipped lower left corner. There is paper loss on the back. I'm one of those people that thinks that paper loss - even on the back - even on a blank-backed card - should be dealt with harshly. Paper loss is paper loss, IMO. If I bought a card that was a 50 and it had paper loss on the back, I would be very unhappy.
That said, this is also one of those examples where the card is much, much nicer than the technical grade, and definitely one I'd be proud to have in my collection.
If the card was mine, I'd bring it with me to the National and ask why it as a 10. Perhaps they'd point out something I didn't see, and perhaps they'd say they made a mistake and it should be a 30, which is what it looks like to me.
Unlike a lot of people here, I'm willing to accept a certain degree of variance from a grading company. There are human beings grading the cards. They have bad days, they get headaches, they write down a wrong number, they misjudge things, they miss something someone else might have seen, they see something someone else might have missed, they misread a number, they judge something one way on Monday and ever-so-slightly differently on Tuesday. All in all, though, they do a fantastic job with an incredibly mundane, repetitive task. We should all do so well at our own repetitive tasks.
-Al