Question about grading hand cut cards.

[Leon]

Case made...The sheet he was on was probably about 100-200 dollars.
I should add, this is more about buyers than grading companies. I would grade them as such too. It's more about the sales side. The whole sheet isn't even a rare sheet to obtain.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/1928-W-565-...MAAOSwWxNYqfLT
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[Exhibitman]

Originally Posted by Leon

Case made...The sheet he was on was probably about 100-200 dollars.
I should add, this is more about buyers than grading companies. I would grade them as such too. It's more about the sales side. The whole sheet isn't even a rare sheet to obtain.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/1928-W-565-...MAAOSwWxNYqfLT
.

The sheets are available but cutting them out well is actually challenging. The lines between the individual cards are not straight; you can tell that the paste-up of the original art was made from a bunch of different singles pieced together by hand then screened rather from than a single sheet of images with lines drawn on. I cut down a damaged sheet to get at this card:



I had to carefully calculate how to cut and I had to sacrifice the integrity of neighboring cards to get there.

Fortunately for the baseball cards, they are 'jokers' and were placed on the bottom row of the sheet, so there is only one really hairy cut to make, at the top of the card.

As for hand cutting standards with PSA, I was not aware of them when I sent in this card:



I can probably bust it out and redo the cuts and get the grade up on eye appeal, but I don't care...

As for the overall question of grading cut out cards, it all depends on the item. When the mfg. or publisher intended that the item be cut into cards, I don't think it is right to stigmatize use of the product as intended. Here is the Pac-Man RC as it appeared in the Japanese magazine:



Seems pretty clear to me: labeled as "cards" with separate numbers and backs. Why wouldn't you cut them out? Ditto these, labeled as cards and with dotted lines:



Hector "Macho Man" Camacho's RC.

Now, this kind of thing (A18 album page), I never agreed with cutting out:





But strip cards, hell, they were meant to be cut; were kids really expected to keep an 18 inch long strip of paper?