Definitely eye-appeal for me. When I was active on the PSA Registry, I'd sometime sacrifice a grade or two for a stunning, dead-centered, sharply focused, vibrant colored PSA 8 card instead of an PSA 9 or 10 that wasn't that aesthetically nice.
It's rather bizarre when one thinks about it. People pay sometimes tens of thousands of dollars more for a certain card compared to another because under 10X magnification they can't see traces of wear on the corners of one card but they can see microscopic wear on the corner of another card and that makes all the difference in value. The best example of late was the 1979 O-Pee-Chee Gretzky PSA 10 that went for $94,000+ while PSA 9 examples typically sell for $5,000 -$7,000. If you covered the flips on those 9's and 10, would you really see $85,000+ difference between the two?
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