Understanding Card Damage
Every card that comes to us has some form of physical damage — that's the reason it's here. Before any work begins, it helps to understand what's actually happening to the card, not just what it looks like on the surface.
The categories below cover most of what we see: creases, indents, dents and edge damage, warping, and surface wear. Each behaves differently, and each responds differently to restoration.
A crease forms when a card bends further than its stock can flex, and folds instead. On the front or back, that's strain on the paper fibres themselves; across a holo surface, it's the foil layer stretching or separating at the fold line. Where the crease sits changes how it responds: one on the plain cardstock back often behaves differently to one running through a holo pattern.
Some creases correct extremely well. Others reduce substantially without disappearing completely. How a specific crease responds depends on its depth, its location, and the card's own stock, and that becomes clear once we're actually working on it, not before.
An indent is compressed card stock, usually from another card's corner or edge pressing into it under weight over time. It's a different kind of damage to a crease: the fibres are compressed rather than folded.
Restoration works to lift that compression back toward the card's original thickness. On many indents, the card ends up flat to the touch, though a faint trace can still be visible under close inspection or raking light.
True dents and chipped or worn edges are a smaller part of what we see, and it's an area where we have less direct experience than creases, indents, warping and surface wear. We'll assess a card like this on its own merits, and tell you honestly if we don't believe restoration can meaningfully improve it, before any work begins.
Warping is a card curving or bowing away from flat, usually from humidity, heat, or years of being stored or sleeved a particular way. Some gentle curvature is common in older cardstock and isn't automatically something that needs correcting.
Where warping is significant, restoration brings the card back toward flat gradually, using controlled pressure and environment rather than a single hard press, which risks introducing a new crease. We don't make claims about how a specific grading company treats a given degree of curvature — that assessment belongs to them, not us.
Surface wear covers dust, grime, fingerprints and light residue built up from handling and storage. Restoration cleans what can be safely removed, which is often enough to give a card's surface back its natural clarity.
We generally don't attempt to remove scratching, particularly on the back of a card, since working on it risks doing more damage to the surface than it removes.
Understanding what type of damage a card actually has is the first step in knowing whether restoration is likely to help, and by how much.