New allegations on BO

[commishbob]

Originally Posted by jchcollins

Yes, sorry if I'm being unclear. If a card is altered, it WILL get the "A" from SGC. But the A stands for Authentic, not "altered" per se, and they do not distinguish on the flip if the card is just "authentic" or "authetic altered" the way that PSA does. So their rejection codes say "A" but that is in the case something you submit is altered, and you don't check the box to "slab if authentic". If you don't, the card gets sent back to you unslabbed. If you do check that box, it gets slabbed "A" only.

The reason I make the distinction is that some people get cards slabbed only to verify authenticity, and don't care about the grade. This is probably rare, but it happens. When filling out the submission form, you can check "A Only" in another area, and the card just gets slabbed but not graded. I did this recently with a card I knew they would not give a number grade to.

I suppose it's reasonable to assume still that an SGC A is "altered", most of them anyway, but was just making the point that's not necessarily going to be true all of the time. At least they are consistent in their methodology. PSA will give some cards "Authentic" only, some cards "Authentic Altered", and in the past I've seen "Authentic - Trimmed" or perhaps most egregiously - "Athentic - Restored" in cases where the card has a pedigree, is ridiculously expensive, or has considerable hobby press speculation around it.

This is what I have done on the VERY rare instances where I submitted a card. I bought a raw '58 Mantle that seemed too nice for the price and I requested only the Authorized 'grade', which it got. I only wanted to know it was a legit card. When it came back it came out of the slab and into the set binder.