[Archive]

Posted By: John Wojak

If you've ever tried to cut off a thin strip of paper or cardboard, when you get to the very edge the paper tends to pull away a little and what you get is what people call a "bat ear" - a little point that sticks up. For example, a card that was trimmed along the bottom border (very common with E90-1, e92/101/102 and other caramels with those very wide bottom borders) will frequently have a very nice bottom border with sharp corners that, upon close examination, have points sticking down at the very corners. This, in conjunction with a too-short card or too-good-to-be-true corners, is a real red flag. Generally, trust your eyes. If you have examined in person, or in scans on ebay etc., hundreds of cards from a particular set (and every set has its own quirks) you will know what the appropriate height/width appearance and border width should be, and a card that has been trimmed on the sides or ends will just look wrong. And study the worn, low-grade cards, not the high grade cards, to see what the card SHOULD look like. Nobody is going to mess with and trim a card that still has a bunch of creases in it, or paper loss, so you know that the edges are the real thing. Get a feel for how wide the borders should be. Then when you see a high grade card, a hundred year old 7 or 8, you'll be surprised at how many of them just don't have the same border width as the low grade cards, and you can't study the high grade cards to see what the border widths should look like. Then, when you see a card you are interested in, measure it. I actually take a ruler sometimes and measure the scan on the screen of my computer and do a height v. width proportional calculation. On a scan you can't tell absolute height or width, but you can tell if the proportion between the width and the height is right or wrong compared to a standard card. Believe me, it works. Another thing to look for is angle cuts - a lot of caramel cards have angle cuts; some like e90-1 and the e92/101/102 family tend to have angle cuts on the top and bottom. Just poor cutting quality. But they almost always have a matching cut top and bottom, like if the whole sheet was misaligned for the whole cut run. If you see an angle cut on top or bottom, and the opposite edge is straight across with sharp corners, in general that should raise a concern. Above all, take the time to get to view as as many examples of the particular set you are interested in as you can to get a feel for them, not only for what a typical card should look like, but also to see what types of cutting or printing anomalies appear commonly on the low-grade (and therefore probably unaltered) cards and are probably factory glitches and not tampering. Some sets are generally very uniformly cut (like t206s) and some are notoriously poorly cut (like e220s). What may be acceptable for one set will not be acceptable for another.