PSA - Cards moving in the case

[jchcollins]

To me, the oversized holder problem - or the situation when they have the proper holder but don't use it or are out of stock or whatever - is super egregious if the card noticeably sloshes around in there. I have enough problems just with the cards moving somewhat in the proper holders that were designed for them. The consensus on this seems to be that yes, some cards will move somewhat, but generally not enough to cause noticeable damage or pose major problem. People have done tests with dropping cards, and even attaching them to cans of paint shaken in the machine at Home Depot - with varying results. Some claim that yes even though the cards move, they do not get damaged. Others (this seems to be more prevalent among modern cards with chrome and other attributes easier to chip) claim they can see damage.

For me, I think it depends on the extent of how much the card moves inside the holder. If I can turn the slab on it's side or upside down and the card doesn't move (even if it might if you really shook it or whammed it on something) then I tend to leave those in the holder. But for slabs when you can see the card just casually shift inside with very light movement of the holder, say you turn your wrist - to me this is annoying as hell. When I see a vintage card do that, I generally will bust it out of the slab if keeping in my personal collection. My experience has been that 1950's cards generally stay pretty well put in their slabs; I'm guessing this is because they were mostly printed on thicker, higher quality card stock. But for some late 1960's through the 1970's issues - the cards are so thin that they generally slide around all over the place. 1970, '72, and '75 Topps seem particularly bad about this. These I really have a hard time not busting them out. Even if I'm realatively confident that no noticeable damage is going to occur, the thought of it drives me nuts and I'd rather be safe than sorry.

The "sleeve" idea to prevent this I think is a good one, but it always seems to be implemented poorly. The complaints about PSA's use of mylar are a given and have been brought up numerous times before - and whatever BVG uses seems to be generally so shoddy that it's not worth it either. Dust specs, poor quality plastic - and I once even removed a small hunk of wood from the interior of a BVG sleeve that was trapped between it and the surface of the card.

If you are a super aficionado of graded cards, I guess this can cause an issue - but for me - it's hard to get much simpler than the trusty old penny sleeve and toploader. Rarely do the cards slide the same with this method, and when they do, the buffer created by the sleeve with the card makes it so the card itself is not going to be in a position to hit anything hard. Card Savers work well for this fix too, although in general I'm not a fan of how openly flexible they are.