Introducing Ace Crossover Service – A look at Gym Challenge.

Pokémon trainers are in luck! It’s now possible to have your cards graded with the best accuracy and style. We offer a variety of benefits for collectors, including our leading grading scale giving accurate and reliable grades, extremely strong cases that will protect them from harm so they can be easily put on display, and of course, our fantastic label choices, the regal Standard, the vibrant Colour Match, or the fantastic Ace Labels.

“So what is crossover grading and why do I want to do it?”

There are many grading companies, but if you want to have the luxury styling and the expert grading opinion from Ace Grading, you will want to have your elsewhere graded cards professionally disassembled before having them go through our submission journey. The reason we offer this service is that we know it can be terrifying to try and open your own graded card cases at home.

We have invested in the correct equipment to be able to safely remove your card from its current holder so we can place it in a clear plastic sleeve and a semi-rigid card holder, and transport is safely through all of our procedures, from Research and I.D. through Grading all the way to Return Shipping.

All cards sent using this service will be removed from their original case, graded professionally, and ultrasonically sealed inside of our own case. This is to make sure that our graders have full visibility of your card, and are not looking at it through a case that may hide imperfections. This also allows us to further anonymize submissions sent on this service level, with every single card being disassembled before it gets to our grader, it is graded like any other card coming through Ace.

But… why? Why would you cross your cards over to Ace Grading?

Ace gives a determination on a card compared to the Ace Grading Scale, with the evidence available. We care about making sure our grading scale implementation has integrity for the long term, and we attempt to keep that as transparent as possible.

In this blog post we are going to look at a few of the cards from our very first Crossover submission, and talk about the grades they achieved.

This card is one of the most obvious examples of where the Ace Grading crossover service has found a large discrepancy in the previous grade to the Ace Grade.

This Arcanine has serious print defects that leave a big impression, situated in the lower right corner of the rear of the card. The severity of these print defects are not common, and we feel have a huge impact on the eye appeal of this card, and this is a part of the reason the surfaces were bought down to a subgrade of 5, which is consistent to our grading scale, as we believe the heavy encroaching into the rear artwork is degrading from a focal point. In this card we also have multiple print lines in the holo, which again affects the surface.

The corners for this card had moderate whitening, which means the card received a 7 in corners, as we believe this card’s corners to be “Near Mint” worthy. The edges are the best part of this card for subgrades, receiving an 8 due to some whitening on the lower rear left of the card, as well as the top and right sides of the rear having some minor damage. This card received no additional observations.

Next we have the Zapdos, which also had a significant drop in grade, however this time it’s not as easily visible to the naked eye, whilst in a plastic case, as to why the grade dropped.
The edges on this card are pretty good, receiving a 9, with only some issues on the rear bottom edge, however, the corners on the rear are a little more damaged, with all four having a small amount of damage giving this card the 8 for corners. The surface grade of an 8 comes from a print defect to the left of the rocket member picture, in the lower right of the card, a print line in the holo and multiple somewhat miscellaneous print lines in the rear of the card.

The thing that dragged this cards down is a very slight bend in the edge which is on the top edge, as denoted by RP8.

This card was previously graded an 8, and this card is very much an 8 all round, receiving an 8 in our Corners, Edges and Surfaces subgrades, with no additional observations.

The corners had a small amount of damage on all four corners of the rear, and the rear edges have some damage on the rear right and the rear left, top and bottom have a small amount of wear.
The surface suffers from print lines on the rear, and has a few small scratches in the holo as shown by FP1.

The Venusaur got the Ace 8 grade, with the subgrades of Corners 8, Edges 9 and Surfaces 8. The corner with the most noticeable damage is the lower rear left corner, however both rear right corners show some mild damage too. The edges received the 9 grade due to only having very low amounts of wear in the left and bottom edges of the rear, and the surfaces suffered from some small scratches and printlines in the holo, printlines on the rear and a sizeable print defect under the K of Pokemon on the rear, as denoted by RP3. Again, no additional observations were found about this card.

The Mewtwo received the Ace Mint 9 grade. Going into our first, and worst, subgrade, which is the corners, getting the 8 grade as all rear corners show some minor damage. Next, we move onto the edges which gained the 9 grade, due to some minor damage on the rear bottom edge. The surfaces also got a 9, with some very light scratches in the holo, and small miscellaneous print lines in the rear. This card also has no additional observations.

One of the main things that we have made extremely careful about our crossover service is anonymity within our grading. None of our graders will know a crossover submission from a regular card grading submission, as we treat both services exactly the same after the disassembly process. Ace Graders will have no knowledge of a card’s previous grade, grading company, or even that it is a disassembled card, though this information will obviously be stored for any customer service-related inquiries.

We are incredibly proud of our grading scale, and we believe that consistency is our main focus and selling point. We grade cards fairly, based solely on the condition, and that is the key point of a grading company. Though our grades do differ, in this example, to another grading company, we do believe that our 8 is a Near Mint condition card, our 9 is a Mint condition card, and our 10 is a Gem Mint condition card.

If you want to see more of this crossover submission, please see the video below!