Posted By:
Chris CountsI've always thought that trimmed cards are underrated. I feel the same way about cards with tape stains (which usually have better than average corners, by the way), and I don't mind off-centered cards as well, which you can often pick up for 25-50% of the price of a well-centered card. Hairline creases will sink a cards value, so I look for them as well. I figure I'm far from perfect, so why should I expect perfection from my cards? I like to say my goal as a collector is to find "perfectly flawed cards."
Amazingly, I recently bought some "trimmed" Diamond Stars off eBay. I paid about $4 a card. When I measured them, they looked okay, but the corners seemed too sharp to be legit. So I took three of my dupes to the San Jose card show two weeks ago and showed them to a grader from GAI. He said one might be trimmed, but the other two were definitely untrimmed. He pregraded one a "7" and the other only a "4.5" due to bad centering (he said its corners were worthy of a "8"). Since I could never imagine myself paying a premium for even a "6," I traded away the two cards before they were even encapsulated, and I walked away with a bunch of nice but flawed cards.