A few weeks ago I saw this card on eBay and thought it was one of the worst 9’s I’d ever seen - indent in the top right corner, looks like killer wear in top right corner, both sides shredded.
The seller had a lot of other cards listed that were also terrible with shredded sides, enough that I was suspect but eventually did just chalk it up to a truly terrible grader.
Today I remembered that PSA now scans all cards they grade and went to check on the card -
Do the PSA scans really hide that much damage? The relatively low value of this card is the only thing stopping me thinking it’s a swapped card scam, like the kind I believe a Chinese seller was doing with high end 10s.
Agreed. PSA has never really gotten their scanning “right.”
On very rare occasions, they accurately highlight damage. This was a PSA 9 Jolteon Gold Star that I was about to buy, but the scan changed my mind when I saw the damaged upper left corner.
I also thought it may have been swapped out at first, but checked one other sold listing from the seller. There were some key similarities in the whitening from PSA scans and eBay listing so I checked the Machamp again and found the terrible whitening on the PSA scan once I zoomed in.
Here is another sold listing of a Japanese PSA 9 Houndoom. If you want to get a better look at the scan, then open the image in another tab and zoom in on the highlighted spots.
It’s (maybe not) worth mentioning that the images PSA takes at the $150 tier or above are much clearer. Closer to the photos that PWCC takes.
I’ll also add that the standard photos are really not worth much. To contrast the OP, on a recent sub it looked like some of the cards I sent had their edges sliced off in the PSA photos, but when I got them back in person they looked absolutely fine.
In this particular case though yes, the damage isn’t clear at all.
