Two cards, same name, same set, same printing — and one sells for multiples of the other. The difference is a millimetre of white along an edge, or an image sitting a few percent off centre. This page teaches you to see what the inspectors see: the defects by their real names, the condition ladders as their publishers actually define them, and the grading houses' own centering tables. We sell nothing and grade nothing; this is the map.
Not a theory — a thing you can watch on live shelves. Two dated exhibits, built from asking prices and one posted market-price comparison, all volatile:
One card, three prices on one Japanese shelf (checked 1 Aug 2026 — verify live)
CardRush's One Piece store listed the same card — Marshall D. Teach (parallel) OP16-080— in three of its own condition ranks at once: unmarked (状態A by the shop's stated default) at ¥2,980, 〔状態A-〕 at ¥2,780, and 〔状態B〕 at ¥2,380. Same card, same shelf, one variable. A search for the 状態B marker on that store returned over two thousand results — rank-priced discounting is how the shelf works, not an oddity. (The ranks themselves are explained in Ordering from Japan.)
The condition ladder, priced in dollars (checked 1 Aug 2026 — verify live)
TCGplayer's live listings for a Base Set Alakazam holofoil formed a visible ladder the day we looked: Damaged at $25, Heavily Played at $40, Moderately Played at $54.99, against a Near Mint market-price comparison of $71.51. The three tier prices are asks, not sales, and the Near Mint figure is TCGplayer's posted market-price comparison — but the shape is the lesson: each tier down is real money.
The graded version of the same story is steeper still. PSA gates its top grades on defects invisible at arm's length, and says itself that “condition matters” and a high grade can increase a card's rarity in the market's eyes. Its Auction Prices Realized database — which PSA describes as the crucial reference for market value of graded cards — sits behind a login, so we quote no numbers from it; the standards that produce those numbers are public, and they are the rest of this page.
Our own market lists cards as NM, LP, MP or HP (auctions also allow DMG) — the five-tier ladder TCGplayer's marketplace standard defines, so we quote their definitions as the operative ones. Note there is deliberately no “Mint” tier: TCGplayer's sellable scale tops out at Near Mint.
| Tier | TCGplayer's operative wording (checked 1 Aug 2026 — verify live) |
|---|---|
| NM — Near Mint | “minimal wear from shuffling, play, or handling… may have slight edge wear or a couple minor scratches, but overall look nearly unplayed with no major defects.” |
| LP — Lightly Played | “minor edge wear, scuffs, or scratches… Noticeable imperfections are okay, but none should be too severe or at too high a volume.” |
| MP — Moderately Played | “edge wear, surface wear, scratching or scuffing, bends with creases” — bends, peels or liquid exposure can sit here if they don't impact structural integrity. |
| HP — Heavily Played | “a major amount of wear… creasing, whitening and other faults” — but must still authenticate and cannot be structurally damaged. |
| DMG — Damaged | “wear or imperfections beyond the standards for other conditions” — and cards carrying foreign substances aren't sellable there at all. |
Under the hood: a points system
TCGplayer's full standard scores each imperfection — Slight 1, Minor 2, Moderate 4, Major 8 points — and caps each tier by total: Near Mint allows 3 points, Lightly Played 6, Moderately Played 12, Heavily Played 24, Damaged beyond that (checked 1 Aug 2026 — verify live). Condition is arithmetic, not vibes: two minor scratches (4 points) already exceed Near Mint's budget.
The false friend between marketplaces
Cardmarket's seven-grade ladder (Mint, Near Mint, Excellent, Good, Light Played, Played, Poor) contains a trap: Cardmarket's Light Played is NOT TCGplayer's Lightly Played. By Cardmarket's own cross-reference table, their Excellent corresponds to the US “Slightly Played” region, and their Light Played sits two rungs lower — around the US “Played/Good” region. Buying “LP” across the Channel without checking which ladder you're on is how condition surprises happen.
The neighbours in brief: Cardmarket's current help page defines its grades with sample pictures and one-word glosses (Mint = “Perfect”, Near Mint = “Booster-Fresh”) plus hard rules we quote in the defect ledger below. eBay's trading-card categories recognise only two conditions — Graded and Ungraded — with no defect ladder at all. And Japan's CardRush runs its own per-store 状態 ranks, covered in Ordering from Japan.
Collectors say “white spots” for two different wounds, and the standards price them very differently. A card is printed colour over pale cardstock; wherever the colour layer is lost, the white core shows through. Where it shows through is everything:
On the face: Surface Wear — the Near Mint killer
TCGplayer's standard defines surface wear as the colour-containing layer “buffed or scraped away to such a degree that it reveals the base layer of cardstock” — their listed terms include whitening and speckling. Even a Slight instance (up to 2.5mm²) is not allowable at Near Mint (checked 1 Aug 2026 — verify live). One white fleck on the artwork, smaller than this letter o, and the card is Lightly Played money instead of Near Mint money.
On the edge: Edgewear — the tolerated cousin
The same loss of colour along “edges, borders, and/or corners” is a different defect with a different budget on TCGplayer's ladder: a Slight contiguous instance up to 20mm of edge is allowed at Near Mint (checked 1 Aug 2026 — verify live). TCGplayer's terms for it: border wear, fraying, nicks, rough edges. The boundary between the two defects is published to the half-millimetre — edgewear reaching 0.5mm inward from the edge is reclassified as Surface Wear, and the Near Mint door closes.
The same word means something harsher in Europe
Cardmarket's glossary rule reads, in full: “Cards with whitened borders have to be offered on Cardmarket as Poor.” The entry's framing suggests it targets deliberately whitened (altered) borders rather than ordinary wear — but the sentence itself doesn't draw that line, so treat whitened borders on Cardmarket as a Poor-grade conversation and be pleasantly surprised otherwise.
And in a slab: PSA's standards never use the word “whitening” at all — their vocabulary for the same class of wear is fraying at corners, chipping and notchingon edges, “off white” borders. The ladder is steep: corner fraying is absent from PSA 9's allowed-flaw list entirely, enters at PSA 8 as “slightest fraying at one or two corners”, and edge chipping doesn't appear until PSA 5. The white speck your thumb made is the difference between Mint and Near Mint-Mint at the grading table.
Each entry: what the defect is, and where the published standards cap a card that carries it. All TCGplayer thresholds (checked 1 Aug 2026 — verify live).
Scratches
A hairline surface mark that doesn't reveal material beneath. TCGplayer allows Slight (to 20mm) and Minor (20–40mm) scratches in every condition including Near Mint; a Moderate scratch (over 40mm) caps a card at Moderately Played. Cardmarket is far stricter: “If a card has scratches on the surface, this makes the card GOOD at best” — their note adds that foil surfaces are the sensitive case. The same scratch, two ladders, two prices.
Scuffing and clouding
Density-of-marks wear (TCGplayer's terms include clouding and “binder/sleeve gloss”): a Slight instance is allowable at Near Mint until it reveals material beneath the surface, at which point it becomes Surface Wear. On Cardmarket, “Visible clouding precludes a card from being Near Mint.”
Creases and bends
The structural defects. TCGplayer: “The presence of a crease drops the condition to Moderately Played at best” — and bends have no Slight tier at all: no bend of any size is allowed at Near Mint, and a Minor Bend caps a card at Lightly Played. Cardmarket keys warping to play: a slight concave/convex warp is tolerated below Mint, but deformation strong enough to threaten tournament legality forces the Played grade.
Grime, liquid, ink
Play dirt and finger-oil smudges are Grime — banned from Near Mint, with even Slight Grime capping at Lightly Played. Liquid exposure that compromises structure is Damaged; lesser liquid marks are Faults, banned at NM and LP. Any non-manufacturing ink is Damage, and altered cards (stamps, signatures, paint) are Damaged on TCGplayer's ladder; on Cardmarket, inked borders and owner-signed cards are always Poor. Cards with foreign substances — food, glue, anything sticky — aren't sellable on TCGplayer at all.
Factory-born defects — the fine distinctions
Some wounds arrive from the press (the rooms they're born in are walked in How a Card Is Made). The standards split hairs finely: on TCGplayer, factory rough-cut edges are explicitly not an imperfection; a single roller line doesn't affect condition, but three or more within a 5mm² area cap a card at Lightly Played, and a roller line you can feel caps it lower still; a foil bubble under 1mm is nothing, over 1mm with visible separation is Damaged; crimps and significant miscuts are automatically Damaged. And a production error is scored like wear unless every copy (or a vast majority) of that card shares it. Cardmarket takes the opposite philosophy: production errors are condition-neutral there — in their words, they “do not count as wear and tear” — with disclosure and a photo recommended. Know which philosophy your marketplace holds before you argue a print line.
Our own inspection habit (house practice, not a published standard): sleeve off, one light source, and tilt — surface wear, clouding and roller lines live at angles a flat look never catches. The published standards above are what you're looking for; the tilt is just how you find them.
Centering is where raw selling and grading disagree completely, and the disagreement is worth money in both directions.
Raw: TCGplayer's standard says a card “may have up to 70/30 centering without impacting condition” (checked 1 Aug 2026 — verify live)— beyond that it's treated as a miscut-class defect. Cardmarket mentions centering only in its Gem Mint glossary entry, a grade it doesn't even support. In a slab, the same millimetres gate everything. PSA's published front/back tolerances, grade by grade:
| PSA grade | Front | Reverse |
|---|---|---|
| GEM-MT 10 | ≈55/45 or better | 75/25 or better |
| MINT 9 | ≈60/40 or better | 90/10 or better |
| NM-MT 8 | ≈65/35 or better | 90/10 or better |
| NM 7 | ≈70/30 or better | 90/10 or better |
| EX-MT 6 | 80/20 or better | 90/10 or better |
| EX 5 | 85/15 or better | 90/10 or better |
| VG-EX 4 | 85/15 or better | 90/10 or better |
| VG 3 | 90/10 or better | 90/10 or better |
| GOOD 2 | 90/10 or better | 90/10 or better |
| FR 1.5 | ≈90/10 or better | ≈90/10 or better |
Transcribed from PSA's published grading standards (checked 1 Aug 2026 — verify live). PSA's own footnote applies: “At the grader's sole discretion, a small variance may be permitted on occasion based on the card's overall eye appeal.” PSA also publishes a 5% front-centering leeway for cards grading 7 or better, and half-point grades between PSA 2 and 9 with “a clear focus on centering”.
The other houses' top-grade gates (checked 1 Aug 2026 — verify live)
An honesty exhibit: even the standards disagree with themselves
Beckett published two different Pristine 10 back-centering figures on two live pages the day we checked — 60/40 on its grading-scale page, 55/45 on its Black Label chart (checked 1 Aug 2026 — verify live). Beckett also states plainly that its scale criteria “are not rules, only general guidelines.” Hold every table on this page, ours included, with that grip.
The asymmetry, plainly: a 65/35 card loses nothing raw and, by PSA's published tolerance, cannot be a Gem Mint 10. If you're buying raw to grade, centering is the first thing to check, because it's the one defect the raw price won't have punished yet — and the one no amount of careful handling can improve.
What the houses' published scales actually say — the parts a buyer of slabs should know by heart. (Whether grading is worth the fee, which company suits a UK collector, and what it costs lives in the buying guide — one truth in one place.)
PSA — the ladder and its qualifiers
Grades run GEM-MT 10, MINT 9, NM-MT 8, NM 7, EX-MT 6, EX 5, VG-EX 4, VG 3, GOOD 2, FR 1.5, PR 1, plus the non-numeric Authentic and Altered Authentic designations. A PSA 9 permits exactly one of three named minor flaws (a very slight wax stain on reverse, a minor printing imperfection, or slightly off white borders); a PSA 4 may show a light crease; an FR 1.5 must still be fully intact. Six qualifiers exist — MK, MC, OC, ST, PD, OF — and the published mechanic matters: a defect is either flagged with its qualifier or the numeric grade drops to what that defect allows. A “9 (OC)” is a 9 that centering alone would have made lower.
BGS — subgrades and the Black Label
Beckett scores four subgrades — centering, corners, edges, surface — and shows all four on the label; its pages describe the final grade only as an “accumulation” of those characteristics (the exact formula isn't published, whatever forum folklore says). Its label tiers as published: Black for “Perfect Pristine 10's”, Gold for Pristine 10 and Gem Mint 9.5, Silver for all other grades. A Pristine 10's surface must be devoid of scratches and metallic print lines; a Mint 9 tolerates one faint, unobtrusive metallic print line.
CGC — two kinds of 10
CGC's scale runs from Pristine 10 down to Poor 1 in half-point steps. The top distinction is the one to know: Pristine 10 requires 50/50 centering and flawless colour and registration; Gem Mint 10 is a 10 overall where one grading criterion falls short of Pristine. Two slabs, both saying “10”, priced apart by a word.
What the grade actually promises
PSA's guarantee frames grades as opinions it stands behind — and its standards page says part of grading is subjective and market-driven. Under an eligible claim PSA will buy the item at the value the earlier grade implied, or for certain cards refund the difference. CGC's guarantee covers overgrading against its own standards, promises inspection by at least two professionals, and states the grade is not guaranteed for cards under its green Qualified label. A grade is a professional opinion with money behind it — not a physical constant.
Where our exhibits bend
For sellers on our own market
List at the tier the standards support, not the tier hope supports — our trade flow lets buyers report a condition mismatch, and honest tiers are what keep the market's trust machinery boring. When a card sits between tiers, the house habit is the lower tier and a photo.
Our position, plainly: we have no affiliation with TCGplayer, Cardmarket, eBay, PSA, Beckett, CGC, TAG or CardRush; we sell no grading and take no commission from anyone named here. Standards get revised — if a quote above disagrees with the publisher's live page, the live page is right, and we'd like to know.
Where cards come from before they need inspecting: How a Card Is Made. Every way to buy one, graded or raw: the buying guide. And the Japanese shelves where condition is written into the product name itself: Ordering from Japan.