Fake cards
General forum
Posted on March 30, 2017, 12:22 p.m. by Remos
Hello, I ordered few cards just now and I'd bet my hat that two of the cards, Avatar of the Resolutes both, are fake.
Is there any way to really check if the card is fake or not. I know this is a bit silly, because the card in question is around ~.50, but it still bothers me.
One on the left is a card I drew myself from a booster, one on the left is what I just received. Scan (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6S68TlGcxd6MEh3LVZDYVhDNFU/view?usp=sharing) is 1200 dpi, you can clearly see there's vertical stripes on the artwork, green borders are blurry and the bottom texts are dotted. I even took a scan of 8 other randomly picked cards from different sets and none of those have such dotted text on them.
Blurring can sometimes occur due to "double printing" but like cklise said, the effort to make the holos at the bottom probably isn't worth it for 1 to 2 dollar cards. It's possible some of the issues are just from printing errors. Here is a decent article from Wizards about it.
March 30, 2017 12:51 p.m.
Do the rip test.
Rip the card in half, look for the blue line.
March 30, 2017 1:21 p.m.
I'd have to agree with above; it's really, really unlikely that anyone would fake a card of that price to that degree, with the holofoil stamp. On the other hand, knowing Wizards' printing issues, it's pretty likely it's just a bad print of a card. I've gotten several AER cards with this kind of fading and striping, usually out of one bad pack. You can also see errors in printing on a lot of new MM17 foils where the title text is super bolded. It happens a lot.
You can do the light test mentioned here: https://pucatrade.com/articles/2015/counterfeit
March 30, 2017 1:48 p.m. Edited.
I guess you guys are right, they are just such a bad prints... Thanks for the tip abby315!
March 30, 2017 2:11 p.m.
Postmortal_Pop says... #8
The reasonable side of me says it's probably just print errors like the above posts.
Although, the criminal side of me would say that trash rares are the perfect place to practice the counterfeiting game. At <$1 no one will be inspecting it too closely. Once you've managed to hit a reasonable quality you can move on to the real rares.
March 30, 2017 8:50 p.m.
kellerke83 says... #10
What kind of scanner are you using...its incredible.
March 31, 2017 2:45 p.m.
It is Epson XP-247, kellerke83. And that is pretty much what I would've said, Postmortal_Pop
cklise says... #2
If that's the hologram down at the bottom of the card, there's no way the card is fake, especially not on a card of that price.
March 30, 2017 12:42 p.m.