Posted By:
TomLeon........sorry to be a dunderhead here but what would they be slabbing as 'authentic' if not something trimmed or rebacked or whatever? If it is 100% authentic then it should be qualified to get a grade and not need just the 'authentic' label. It would be deemed authentic because it was slabbed with a grade.
Otherwise, the most useful service would be to slab cards that were trimmed and altered. Maybe you make the distinction that anything ADDED to cards would invalidate their encapsulaton as 'authentic' but not anything taken away from the card. Don't know. Just don't see the 'value add' of 'authentic' if not for some altered cards.
Sorry to be the devil's advocate (or just himself) but to be truly useful, it would have to go farther in my estimation. Maybe 'authentic' is given with the caveat that it falls under a different, non-moneyback guarantee, but I still fall back to those Lipset lots of E107's and other E cards from the McPherson collection.
That would be a lot of potential revenue they would be dismissing because of trimming. And it would be a SERVICE to the collecting community because they might otherwise be passed off unscrupulously (okay, I know I spelled that wrong probably) on ebay. Encapsulation as 'authentic-altered' or just 'authentic' would ease the mind of MANY a new collector (and some not-so-new ones).