Freeing the Gloom (Patreon)

As you might have guessed from my post yesterday, that graded Beta Gloom was not going to stay in its graded case long. I needed a Gloom for my Premodern deck, and this was actually at a pretty good price, especially for its condition, but that meant I also had to free it from its case.

To give you the step by step, I started with a pair of tile cutters I have left over from a Covid tiling project I did.

I used this to clip around the edge of the case, starting at the top where it was furthest from the card. The worst case scenario is that you crack the case too quickly. Then case buckles and a large shard depresses into the card, ruining its surface! I also did all the clipping with a plastic bag around the card. The plastic shards are pretty sharp and fly pretty fast, so the plastic bag prevents a huge mess.

Once the sides of the case were done being clipped, this is what it looked like:

I basically clipped the entire top and most of the way down the right side. From here you need to pry the case open. I've seen people use flat head screwdrivers for this. The problem is one slip and the screwdriver goes flying across your card. Instead I use a small pry bar.

The left edge (I didn't take a good picture of this) is short enough to reach under the case without hitting the card. After working my way around the case, I was able to pry it open. The last step is to just cut open the little bag and the Gloom was finally free!

Besides some whitening along the top, the card is in really nice condition. The surface is super nice. And of course the blacks on Alpha/Beta cards always look beautiful. I've been meaning to write a comic about this for the longest time, but I've never come up with the right analogy for just how dark and beautiful these borders are!

Hope you liked this behind the scenes look on how I did this. Have you ever opened a graded card like this? I would be curious to know if you have a different method!