How to judge the condition of a Pilot Trading Card

The problem: no two collectors used the same word

Sports and game cards have PSA, BGS and others. You post a card, a stranger grades it on a numeric scale, and it comes back sealed in plastic. That industry exists because those cards have population reports, price guides, and buyers who pay more for a 9 than an 8.

Pilot Trading Cards have none of it. They are given away, or traded. Some do change hands on eBay, but there is no price guide, no census, and no grading company offers a service for them. Paying to encapsulate a card a captain handed you would cost more than almost any of them will ever be worth, and it would seal away the one thing that made it yours.

The real gap was smaller and more annoying than grading: there were no words. One collector's "good condition" is another's "pretty beat up". Describe a card in a trade and the person on the other end pictures something else. Sort your own collection and you are guessing against your own past judgement. Everyone was improvising, and improvisation does not survive contact with a stranger.

What we did about it

We built the vocabulary the hobby was missing, and put it in the app so it has somewhere to live.

We did not start from scratch. Most collectors have already met a condition scale through game cards: TCGplayer runs Near Mint, Lightly Played, Moderately Played, Heavily Played, Damaged, and judges a card on three things. Structure, whether it is physically sound. Playability, whether it can still be used in a game. Authentication, whether it can be verified as genuine.

Only one of those three drops out. A Pilot Trading Card is never played, so playability means nothing here. Structure applies exactly as it does anywhere.

Authentication matters more than you would expect. Fakes exist, and they cluster on the older and scarcer cards: the first Delta sets, the early Northwest and connections cards. They are printed badly, with dull colors, missing gloss, irregular borders and pixelation in the solid areas, and they are sold as genuine.

But authenticity cannot be folded into a condition grade, because a counterfeit can be pristine. A perfect fake is Mint and worthless. So condition answers one question, authenticity answers a different one, and our scale deliberately answers only the first. That leaves structure and appearance, which is why the right answer for these cards is a shorter scale rather than a borrowed one. Three decisions followed.

• Keep a shape people already know. Five levels, because that is what collectors have already learned from trading game cards. A sixth would have bought precision nobody asked for.
• Change the verb. Every level describes wear, not play. "Lightly Played" describes a card that has been shuffled; these are carried, stored and handed over.
• Let people decline. Not specified is the default and stays that way until you choose otherwise. Forcing a rating out of someone who has not looked closely produces worse data than allowing none.

This is the first vocabulary these cards have had, and PTC Binder is the only app where you can record it against the cards themselves, across the whole catalog.

The solution: five levels

The badges below are the ones you will see in the app, so a card you judge here is a card you can record without translating anything. Use them here, in a trade, or in a message to another collector. The point is that two people describing the same card reach the same word.

Judging a card in five seconds

You do not need a loupe or a light box. Hold the card at an angle under ordinary light and look in this order, because this is the order cards actually fail.

1. Corners. They go first, always. Sharp, softened, rounded, or gone.
2. Edges. Look for whitening, the pale line where the print layer has worn back to the core.
3. Surface. Tilt it. Scratches and scuffs hide when the card faces you straight on.
4. Shape. Sight down the card edge-on. A bend that has not creased is still Heavy wear; a bend that has creased is Damaged.

If you find yourself between two levels, pick the lower one. It costs you nothing and it is the habit that makes a trade go well.

Condition when you trade

The scale earns its keep the moment a card changes hands. Three things make that painless.

• Photograph both sides. Backs pick up more wear than fronts and are the thing people forget to show.
• Describe what you see, not what you would grade it. "Soft top-left corner, slight edge whitening" survives a disagreement. "LW" does not.
• Be strict with yours and generous with theirs. Every experienced trader does this, and it is why they stay experienced traders.

What condition is not

It is not a price. This hobby has no established market, no price guide and no accepted valuation, and a condition label is a description rather than a number that multiplies into a figure. The beginner's guide covers what drives interest in a card, which is mostly scarcity and story rather than grade.

It is not authenticity either, and that one is worth saying out loud. A fake card can be in Mint condition, and the scale above will describe it perfectly happily. If you are buying an older Delta or Northwest card rather than being handed one, check it before you judge it. The Pilot Card Guys keep a reference of known fakes with the tells laid out side by side.

It also is not storage. Judging a card is describing damage that already happened; storing it properly is stopping the next bit.