Forgive me for being late to the NFC/Professional grading debate, but I think both @churlocker and @pfm’s takes are reasonable and together are an excellent example of why the concept of “authentic” is full of grey areas that we often don’t recognize. When I ran this poll in November, there was a lot of interesting stuff to come out of it. Out of approximately 70 votes, E4 members rated test cards that were made with authentic materials but never intended to be distributed to the public at 8.6/10 for authenticity. However, the rating for cards manufactured with authentic materials but with questionable or unverifiable provenance at 5.6/10. I’d hazard a guess that test sheets that end up being NFC’d into cards would probably be somewhere in the middle, but it would be interesting to see exactly where.
CGC in particular has been much more adventurous with their grading, where their concept of authenticity in most cases is as long as it was printed with authentic materials, it’s good to go. CGC doesn’t care where or how you get the card or how it gets to be shaped like a card. PSA has been more strict, considering method of distribution and provenance as part of authenticity as well. It’s strange to see PSA grading a test print given how they’ve assessed authenticity in the past, but nevertheless they’ve done it.
I think it’s healthy to have different concepts of authenticity present within the grading marketplace, as long as those concepts are clear and consistent, which in many cases they are not. CGC will grade Prerelease Raichu but won’t grade Collector Charizard. PSA will grade this test print Pidgeot but won’t grade an Art Academy Mew. These standards of authenticity also aren’t published anywhere, which makes it hard as consumers to understand exactly what grading companies are attesting to when they claim a card is authentic.
It reminds me of this discussion about altered signature cards. Most grading companies only attest to the authenticity of the signature itself, but many signatures these days have personalizations and sketches. Is a signature still “authentic” if the personalization has been wiped and a sketch is added to the card afterwards by someone who isn’t the artist? What if someone colors in their Charizard after the artist signed the card to make it shiny?
Whether it’s NFC’d test prints or altered signatures, part of the “ick” we feel when we see them encapsulated is because CGC’s broader concept of authenticity is very new to the market–and auto fever is testing signature authentication to never-before-seen levels. I don’t think people are used to seeing a card in a graded slab and then hearing that someone broke down a test sheet so they could make more profit off of selling cards individually. It doesn’t feel right because we’re used to having a more restrictive approach to these things. While I personally agree with the idea that labeling cards as NFC is the best way to go about this, I also see the point that it is hard to objectively determine where and how a cut was made, in the same sense that it’s hard to determine exactly who colored in a Charizard or sketched a Pokemon on a signed card.
The point of my post is that you’re never going to arrive on a perfect definition of authentic. But grading companies need to publish and make very obvious what their standards for authenticity are, and then apply them consistently throughout.