What condition is my card, really?

NM, LP, MP, HP — what each one means in practice, the three things that actually decide the grade, and why the back of the card matters more than the front.

Nearly every argument about the price of a single card is really an argument about its condition. Two people can look at the same card and see Near Mint and Moderately Played, because they are looking at different things. Here is what we look at, in the order we look at it.

Start with the back, not the front

The front of a card is the part you have been staring at, so it is the part your eye forgives. Turn it over. Whitening on the back edges shows up against the solid blue border far more clearly than it does against artwork, and it is the single most common reason a card people describe as "mint" comes back as Lightly Played.

Hold it at an angle under a light and look along each edge. If the white specks form a dotted line all the way round, that is shelf wear from a binder page and it caps the card at Lightly Played however clean the front is.

The three things that decide it

• Edges and corners. Whitening, fraying, and whether the corner comes to a point or a soft curve.
• Surface. Scratches, print lines, indentation, and on holos, the fine scuffing that only shows when you tilt the card under a light.
• Structure. Creases, bends and any fold that has broken the card layers. A crease is not a condition problem, it is a different card — it drops straight to Heavily Played or Damaged.

Centring is deliberately not on that list. It matters enormously for grading and barely at all for raw condition, because a badly centred card left the factory that way — it is a print variation, not wear.

What the labels mean here

Near Mint is pack fresh or close enough that you have to look for the difference. Lightly Played has minor edge wear or a single small mark and still looks right in a sleeve. Moderately Played has clear whitening, visible scratching or a soft corner. Heavily Played has significant wear or a crease, and is priced to be played with rather than displayed.

We grade conservatively, on purpose. A card described as Lightly Played that arrives looking Near Mint costs us nothing. The reverse costs us a customer.

One last thing about sleeves

If a card is worth more than about a fiver, sleeve it before you do anything else with it — before you photograph it, before you post about it, before you bring it in. The most expensive damage we see is not from years in a shoebox. It is from ten minutes on a table.