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[Snowman]

Originally Posted by hcv123

I at least in part agree with much of what you shared Travis. Similarly in comic books - cleaning and pressing has become "accepted" in the marketplace. Where I choose to differ is this - the "3rd party opinion peddlers" claim to consistently be able to identify and reject "altered" cards - even having different designations for the alterations they detect (as an aside in response to a separate post - I 1000% think it is RIDICULOUS that they mark cards that sat in screw downs too long as "altered") when the truth is they clearly cannot. Leaving those who "slipped one past" benefitting and those who did not or are buyers of the one that did being hurt - an unfair playing field for those depending on their opinions. If they could catch even 98% of them or stop claiming they can and stop trying or even being honest and admit - some slip by, then I would agree with your statement in its entirety. My problem is they claim to do something they cannot, it, therefore, gets applied unequally and benefits some while hurting others.

Absolutely! I completely agree with you there. The screw-down damage equating to an "alteration" is a joke. How is a corner getting squished any different from an indentation elsewhere on a card's surface? And they don't even differentiate on the flip between a screw-down damaged card and a trimmed card.

I also agree that the TPGs falsely advertise their abilities. I think it's mostly born out of hubris. I think years ago, they honestly believed they'd be able to catch this stuff. After all, it's not that difficult to identify a trimmed edge when someone cuts it with an Exacto knife or a pair of scissors, or even a guillotine-style office paper cutter. The BODA threads were probably a HUGE eye-opener for them with respect to the scope of this problem (or at least it should have been). If someone has the right equipment (and clearly there is no shortage of people who do) then those trimmed cards simply cannot be distinguished from a factory edge. The fact that cards are cut with blades at the manufacturers should have made this obvious, but they thought they all had eagle eyes. It's just like all the lemmings in the Blowhard threads who all think they could easily detect any trimmed card, then they all proceed to disagree about which edges were trimmed on the cards that get posted lol. Then they all say, "just measure it" as if that's actually sufficient for determining if a card has been trimmed. The reality is, it's just not that easy to detect a "properly?" "well?" deceitfully trimmed card, unfortunately. There's too much variance in card sizes from the manufacturer for a ruler to matter most of the time. Sure, if you trim a card 1/8" short, then it's easy to detect. But I'd wager good money that they catch the overwhelming majority of cards that actually measure 1/8" short percentage-wise. But these guys are literally shaving off 1/64th of an inch sometimes. That's insane. I bet some of these oversized cards could be micro-trimmed 3 or 4 times and would still measure to specs.

I don't think it's just an issue of insufficient time being spent on each card either. Sure, given more time, they'll be able to detect more trimmed cards, but you're probably talking about moving the needle from being able to detect 22% of trimmed cards to 26% of trimmed cards or something negligible like that if they had more time on each card.

They could just come clean and be honest about their limitations. Just admit that it's not possible to detect a high percentage of these and that they'll just do the best they can. The problem with that approach though is that it opens up the door to more of this behavior and fast tracks it to being more widely accepted. I think they want to see if they can still detect it. That's partly what they were hoping for when they acquired Genamint. But it's a fool's errand. The reason these cuts cannot be detected is because there simply isn't a difference there to detect. It's like cutting a piece of paper in two places with the same pair of scissors and then handing it to someone else and asking them to tell you which cut was made first by examining the cuts with a ruler and a jeweler's loupe.

It would be interesting to run an experiment where we sent in large quantities of different cards, each with various alterations to each of the TPGs to see what they were able to detect and then analyze the results. I wouldn't even be surprised if the majority of alterations actually get through at every single TPG. It'd be interesting to run an experiment with the forum members too. Especially over at Blowhard where seemingly everyone thinks they could easilty catch this stuff. You could post a 20 card test, half of which have been expertly trimmed and the other half not. Ask them to identify which cards have been trimmed and on which edges, but don't tell them how many are untrimmed, just post all 20 cards blind. They'll say every single card was trimmed and the edges they identify would probably be nearly chosen at random.