Hey everyone! You may have noticed that we have made a slight change to our grading scale here at StarCityGames.com. The newest grade is MP (Moderately Played), and it is between Slightly Played and Heavily Played. Give me a moment of your time to explain the reason behind this change.
For some time now, we’ve internally separated our HP cards into two subgrades – HP cards that we sell on the website (which show wear, but are perfectly tournament legal and are not too too bad), and HP cards that we only sell in person at shows, and do not sell on the website (stuff with major creasing, tearing, extreme wear). We have changed the public grading scale to reflect our internal use!
To help with this change, we’ve also completely redesigned the FAQ page that describes our grading scale! You can find the page at http://sales.starcitygames.com/cardconditions.php – and it has nifty examples of each type of wear described, so you can mouse over the thumbnail and get a detailed image!
We feel this change will be beneficial in two ways:
1) When you are buying MP cards from StarCityGames.com, you will have a better idea of the condition range for that card. Previously, HP cards were a catch-all for cards that were worse than SP condition. With the new MP (Moderately Played) condition, you can see more of a concrete range of wear – including knowing you won’t be getting truly destroyed-looking cards.
2) We’ve also adjusted our buy list (http://sales.starcitygames.com/buylist/) to reflect the new MP condition. In the past, we generally gave 50% of NM values for HP cards. With the new grade, we pay a HIGHER percentage of NM prices for both SP and MP cards – which are the majority (99%+) of cards we get in from customers! So the MP condition will now allow you to get more money for your played cards, than ever before!
We thank you for your understanding during this change, and we feel that this move to NM/SP/MP/HP will allow us to sell higher-quality cards to you, our customers – while allowing us to pay you more for the majority of played cards you sell to us!
Ben Bleiweiss
General Manager of Acquisitions, StarCityGames.com