5 ms·

I remember trying to print out fake magic cards in the late 90s (I picked a non-valuable card). I used two passes: a dye-sub printer with a laser for the black

I remember trying to print out fake magic cards in the late 90s (I picked a non-valuable card). I used two passes: a dye-sub printer with a laser for the black text. It looked great to the naked-eye, but trivial to see the difference due to differing print technology under a microscope. I'm slightly surprised that examination of the CMY pattern in the color wouldn't have been sufficient to identify a fake. [edit] Just re-read the post and realized these were identified as fake just from the picture posted online. That makes a lot more sense.

PaulHoule 2y ago
I remember my son really wanting a copy of The Nightmare before Christmas which Disney wasn't selling at the time because, at least then, they regularly let movies go out of print. I found a "used" copy on AMZN which was obviously a fake with inkjet printing on the box and the disc, metadata on the disc indicating it was a DVD+R, etc. Served Disney right.
- aidenn0 2y ago
  I've gotten new movies on DVD-Rs from Amazon before. Also clearly pirated since they just played the movie when you put it in rather than a forced showing of the FBI warnings &c.
hinkley 2y ago
In a game where there are rules about deck content, but scarcity around the existence of cards, I don’t see the ethical problem with counterfeiting a card for personal use. If you add a fifth ace to a deck in the middle of a poker game, that’s cheating. If poker decks were printed without aces but aces were allowed, then why should anyone care how you got these four aces, as long as they were shuffled fairly into the deck? Just play the damn game.
- RHSeeger 2y ago
  Because part of playing the game for "bring your own deck" competitions is the time/effort/money that went into acquiring the cards. It's as much about "making the best deck you can with the cards you can get your hands on" as it is about just making the best deck you can.
  - thesuitonym 2y ago
    But that effectively just makes it a game about measuring how much disposable income you have. To put it another way, any 15 year old kid can put in the time and effort to assemble a great deck, but may not have the money. Should that kid not be allowed to compete on that basis alone?
    - RHSeeger 2y ago
      There are different kinds of tournaments. Some of them are setup so the really rare cards aren't even allowed, some put a limit to one (for, like, a black lotus), some disallow them, some are only the current cards, and some you get a set of random cards when you start. There's all kinds of different tournaments, and the ones where you're allowed to use those rare cards work under the assumption they're valid. To be honest, I haven't been to a MtG tournament in decades, so take that all with a grain of salt. But it should be _relatively_ accurate.
    - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
      Yup, in video games it's called pay to win nowadays, and it's the exploitative nature of collectible card games with their booster packs etc. I mean I don't mind so much, I had a MTG period some years ago (we'd play during work breaks) and got two of the same card (one of the Planeswalkers), which appreciated in value to about €35 at the time; I sold them online and recouped a lot of the money I had put into the hobby. That said, I will have a look to see how much that card is worth nowadays <_<. edit: phew, just a little less than it was ~10 years ago.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    Someone else made a subtle assertion that the sponsors of the event expect commerce to occur at the event. I don't have any reason to doubt that's the case.
- derefr 2y ago
  My understanding is that the inherent rarity of some cards is actually part of the game's balancing. If everyone can have every card (or worse, multiples of every card), then some vaguely game-breaking cards, or combinations of cards — that normally don't matter / aren't theory-crafted, because of their rarity — would suddenly be everywhere, in every tournament deck, creating a "dominant strategy" for the game, in turn necessitating those cards be banned. Even though those cards/combos would have been perfectly fine and fun and not-broken, had they stayed rare. (Or at least, that's how MtG was originally designed to be balanced; I think this may have changed with MtG Online.)
  - Ekaros 2y ago
    And then it was discovered that it is effective tactic to make money. You could sell all cards in the set for 50 or alternatively you could sell bunch of packs mostly filled with filler for 150 and get people buy quite lot of them to chase the limited set of strong and competitive cards.
    - zo1 2y ago
      Isn't this the "real world" equivalent of "Loot Boxes"? Shouldn't it be somehow regulated as gambling even?
      - Ekaros 2y ago
        It absolutely is and it absolutely should be. Secondary market is very real and some cards in certain products are expensive there. Something like the "The One Ring" one out of one unique card in MTG is clearly a type of lottery. That card had expected secondary market value in hundreds of thousands if not millions. To me if we are going to regulate loot boxes, trading cards should be regulated as well. Or at least minors should be banned from buying them.
  - reverendsteveii 2y ago
    That's usually balanced more by banning or restricting a card than by rarity. It may have been part of Garfield's early design to use card rarity to limit the meta but it simply doesn't work (instead of limiting the cards it would limit the competitive players to those who can afford the cards). Instead there are multiple formats with different sets of permissible cards, from the most permissible (vintage, which gives access to any card that has ever been printed and is not banned or restricted to 1 copy per deck) to the least (standard, which only gives access to cards from the most recently-printed sets). The deeper the card pool, the more expensive the format as those cards are not reprinted due to their gamebreaking power.
- reverendsteveii 2y ago
  > I don’t see the ethical problem with counterfeiting a card for personal use. Neither does most of the community. We call it proxying. Of course it's not allowed in sanctioned play because the purpose of sanctioned play is to sell cards, but I've never been around a table in someone's basement who cared that the sol ring I just played is actually a mountain with "sol ring" scribbled on it in sharpie as long as there was no way of telling it from the other cards in the deck, it would be legal for a real sol ring to be in that deck and I played it according to the rules governing sol ring. There are different formats to magic and the one with the most extensive, and therefore expensive, list of permissible cards has competitive decks that run into the tens of thousands of dollars invested (https://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/vintage#paper https://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/vintage#paper). If you had to buy all of that every time you felt like playtesting a new deck people simply wouldn't do it.
  - sidewndr46 2y ago
    I never played anywhere that allowed fakes but most players were ok with you taking a otherwise worthless card (hello Lapras my old friend) and marking the face to count as something else in Pokemon or otherwise. Actual fakes were problematic as you can tell the back of the card apart generally.
    - matsemann 2y ago
      What we used to do when I was a kid (before online stores were common to use, and had ~4 hours to the closest store selling magic cards so only got a new pack once a fortnight) was to use plastic sleeves for the whole deck. Then you can't really ser from the back if it's a printout or a real card.
      - Etheryte 2y ago
        Yeah I can't really imagine not using sleeves, any cards left unsleeved got worn out incredibly quickly.
    - cptcobalt 2y ago
- aidenn0 2y ago
  > In a game where there are rules about deck content, but scarcity around the existence of cards, I don’t see the ethical problem with counterfeiting a card for personal use. Where there are high prices of cards, any convincing counterfeit would be poor optics. Game play with non-convincing counterfeits is accepted in many places (i.e. proxies).
  - hananova 2y ago
    The problem is that there are many places where non-convincing counterfeits are NOT accepted, which is (at least part of) the reason why there are so many convincing counterfeits now.
    - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
      In the case of Pokemon or MTG, it's very important that the back of the cards look the same across the years and generations, so that the opponent can't see what the other player is playing. Of course, with MTG people often use card sleeves so it's a bit moot.
      - aidenn0 2y ago
        Writing the name of the card you want it to be in sharpie on the front of a real (but cheap) card trivially solves this problem for cases where card sleeves are not in use.
- zoeysmithe 2y ago
  Yep this. We should be fighting 'pay to win' systems like this. Afterall the wealthy person who can afford these rare cards will have a natural advantage. Imagine if dnd was sold in a way that only a few player's handbooks had fireball and if you had it, you could cast it. Its a shame these systems caught on instead of more ethical systems. I hope Gen Z ends up burying this consumerist junk.
  - mcphage 2y ago
    Pokemon is significantly better at this than other trading card games (like Magic): - The rarest cards in every set are usually just alternate art versions of other, more common cards from the set. - They release products with more powerful cards that have become popular recently, to increase the supply. - They release good decks based on what is popular in tournaments at a good price ($25-$40, iirc). - They release copies of tournament winning decks at a really good price (like, $15 for the whole deck). These are proxy cards—they have a different back, they, don't have foil, the printing isn't as high quality. But if you wanted to try out a good deck, they're incredibly cheap. TCGs are inherently predatory, but Pokemon seems to realize it's played mostly by kids.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    Not just wealthy, but also the charismatic. The couple of weeks when I knew about baseball cards and they were still something anyone cared about, I realized that one of the kids I knew was trying to sweet-talk everyone into trading them one card we had for a few cards he had. I had no idea what the meaning of the trade was, I just knew that I was probably being tricked, based on the vibes he was putting out. And that was the last time I was interested in loot boxes.
- uses 2y ago
  You definitely don't want actual counterfeits to exist in the game at all. Even if they're for personal use, they'll end up getting into the supply, and someone gets screwed over because they don't know any better. Instead we use "proxies" which aren't meant to be passed off as the real thing, but represent it in-game. They usually have a different art, or a different card back, or some other obvious difference from the real deal.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    That would still be irrelevant for the game, it would only be relevant for the traders. The game would still work exactly the same if the model were that you would go to WotC with a specified deck, and they would print it for you, at a standard cost per card, or even if they cost more for more powerful cards. It would kill the trading, of course, but that's entirely unrelated to the actual MtG game.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  Oh for sure, if it's about the game then using "counterfeits" is not a problem at all; many proprietary card games (like Uno) can be played using regular playing cards which are a literal dime a dozen or cheaper. But this isn't about the actual card game though, but the collector's market where grading companies sign off on the authenticity and quality of in this case 30 year old playtesting cards. I feel bad for the people that did get scammed, on the one side they should've known better because these were too good to be true, but on the other they put their trust in the grading company. I hope the grading company gets serious repercussions for letting this pass, surely they of all people should know about the printer dots to determine counterfeits and age?
wolrah 2y ago
> I'm slightly surprised that examination of the CMY pattern in the color wouldn't have been sufficient to identify a fake. If I'm understanding the post correctly, these counterfeit cards were claimed to be from an early playtest which would in fact have been printed on normal consumer/office grade printers and not using a commercial large scale printing process. Some of the fakes are noted to actually have two sets of dots, one set from the original printer and another from whatever was used to make the fakes.

PaulHoule 2y ago

I remember my son really wanting a copy of The Nightmare before Christmas which Disney wasn't selling at the time because, at least then, they regularly let movies go out of print. I found a "used" copy on AMZN which was obviously a fake with inkjet printing on the box and the disc, metadata on the disc indicating it was a DVD+R, etc. Served Disney right.

aidenn0 2y ago
I've gotten new movies on DVD-Rs from Amazon before. Also clearly pirated since they just played the movie when you put it in rather than a forced showing of the FBI warnings &c.

hinkley 2y ago

In a game where there are rules about deck content, but scarcity around the existence of cards, I don’t see the ethical problem with counterfeiting a card for personal use. If you add a fifth ace to a deck in the middle of a poker game, that’s cheating. If poker decks were printed without aces but aces were allowed, then why should anyone care how you got these four aces, as long as they were shuffled fairly into the deck? Just play the damn game.

RHSeeger 2y ago
Because part of playing the game for "bring your own deck" competitions is the time/effort/money that went into acquiring the cards. It's as much about "making the best deck you can with the cards you can get your hands on" as it is about just making the best deck you can.
- thesuitonym 2y ago
  But that effectively just makes it a game about measuring how much disposable income you have. To put it another way, any 15 year old kid can put in the time and effort to assemble a great deck, but may not have the money. Should that kid not be allowed to compete on that basis alone?
  - RHSeeger 2y ago
    There are different kinds of tournaments. Some of them are setup so the really rare cards aren't even allowed, some put a limit to one (for, like, a black lotus), some disallow them, some are only the current cards, and some you get a set of random cards when you start. There's all kinds of different tournaments, and the ones where you're allowed to use those rare cards work under the assumption they're valid. To be honest, I haven't been to a MtG tournament in decades, so take that all with a grain of salt. But it should be _relatively_ accurate.
  - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    Yup, in video games it's called pay to win nowadays, and it's the exploitative nature of collectible card games with their booster packs etc. I mean I don't mind so much, I had a MTG period some years ago (we'd play during work breaks) and got two of the same card (one of the Planeswalkers), which appreciated in value to about €35 at the time; I sold them online and recouped a lot of the money I had put into the hobby. That said, I will have a look to see how much that card is worth nowadays <_<. edit: phew, just a little less than it was ~10 years ago.
- hinkley 2y ago
  Someone else made a subtle assertion that the sponsors of the event expect commerce to occur at the event. I don't have any reason to doubt that's the case.
derefr 2y ago
My understanding is that the inherent rarity of some cards is actually part of the game's balancing. If everyone can have every card (or worse, multiples of every card), then some vaguely game-breaking cards, or combinations of cards — that normally don't matter / aren't theory-crafted, because of their rarity — would suddenly be everywhere, in every tournament deck, creating a "dominant strategy" for the game, in turn necessitating those cards be banned. Even though those cards/combos would have been perfectly fine and fun and not-broken, had they stayed rare. (Or at least, that's how MtG was originally designed to be balanced; I think this may have changed with MtG Online.)
- Ekaros 2y ago
  And then it was discovered that it is effective tactic to make money. You could sell all cards in the set for 50 or alternatively you could sell bunch of packs mostly filled with filler for 150 and get people buy quite lot of them to chase the limited set of strong and competitive cards.
  - zo1 2y ago
    Isn't this the "real world" equivalent of "Loot Boxes"? Shouldn't it be somehow regulated as gambling even?
    - Ekaros 2y ago
      It absolutely is and it absolutely should be. Secondary market is very real and some cards in certain products are expensive there. Something like the "The One Ring" one out of one unique card in MTG is clearly a type of lottery. That card had expected secondary market value in hundreds of thousands if not millions. To me if we are going to regulate loot boxes, trading cards should be regulated as well. Or at least minors should be banned from buying them.
- reverendsteveii 2y ago
  That's usually balanced more by banning or restricting a card than by rarity. It may have been part of Garfield's early design to use card rarity to limit the meta but it simply doesn't work (instead of limiting the cards it would limit the competitive players to those who can afford the cards). Instead there are multiple formats with different sets of permissible cards, from the most permissible (vintage, which gives access to any card that has ever been printed and is not banned or restricted to 1 copy per deck) to the least (standard, which only gives access to cards from the most recently-printed sets). The deeper the card pool, the more expensive the format as those cards are not reprinted due to their gamebreaking power.
reverendsteveii 2y ago
> I don’t see the ethical problem with counterfeiting a card for personal use. Neither does most of the community. We call it proxying. Of course it's not allowed in sanctioned play because the purpose of sanctioned play is to sell cards, but I've never been around a table in someone's basement who cared that the sol ring I just played is actually a mountain with "sol ring" scribbled on it in sharpie as long as there was no way of telling it from the other cards in the deck, it would be legal for a real sol ring to be in that deck and I played it according to the rules governing sol ring. There are different formats to magic and the one with the most extensive, and therefore expensive, list of permissible cards has competitive decks that run into the tens of thousands of dollars invested (https://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/vintage#paper https://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/vintage#paper). If you had to buy all of that every time you felt like playtesting a new deck people simply wouldn't do it.
- sidewndr46 2y ago
  I never played anywhere that allowed fakes but most players were ok with you taking a otherwise worthless card (hello Lapras my old friend) and marking the face to count as something else in Pokemon or otherwise. Actual fakes were problematic as you can tell the back of the card apart generally.
  - matsemann 2y ago
    What we used to do when I was a kid (before online stores were common to use, and had ~4 hours to the closest store selling magic cards so only got a new pack once a fortnight) was to use plastic sleeves for the whole deck. Then you can't really ser from the back if it's a printout or a real card.
    - Etheryte 2y ago
      Yeah I can't really imagine not using sleeves, any cards left unsleeved got worn out incredibly quickly.
  - cptcobalt 2y ago
aidenn0 2y ago
> In a game where there are rules about deck content, but scarcity around the existence of cards, I don’t see the ethical problem with counterfeiting a card for personal use. Where there are high prices of cards, any convincing counterfeit would be poor optics. Game play with non-convincing counterfeits is accepted in many places (i.e. proxies).
- hananova 2y ago
  The problem is that there are many places where non-convincing counterfeits are NOT accepted, which is (at least part of) the reason why there are so many convincing counterfeits now.
  - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    In the case of Pokemon or MTG, it's very important that the back of the cards look the same across the years and generations, so that the opponent can't see what the other player is playing. Of course, with MTG people often use card sleeves so it's a bit moot.
    - aidenn0 2y ago
      Writing the name of the card you want it to be in sharpie on the front of a real (but cheap) card trivially solves this problem for cases where card sleeves are not in use.
zoeysmithe 2y ago
Yep this. We should be fighting 'pay to win' systems like this. Afterall the wealthy person who can afford these rare cards will have a natural advantage. Imagine if dnd was sold in a way that only a few player's handbooks had fireball and if you had it, you could cast it. Its a shame these systems caught on instead of more ethical systems. I hope Gen Z ends up burying this consumerist junk.
- mcphage 2y ago
  Pokemon is significantly better at this than other trading card games (like Magic): - The rarest cards in every set are usually just alternate art versions of other, more common cards from the set. - They release products with more powerful cards that have become popular recently, to increase the supply. - They release good decks based on what is popular in tournaments at a good price ($25-$40, iirc). - They release copies of tournament winning decks at a really good price (like, $15 for the whole deck). These are proxy cards—they have a different back, they, don't have foil, the printing isn't as high quality. But if you wanted to try out a good deck, they're incredibly cheap. TCGs are inherently predatory, but Pokemon seems to realize it's played mostly by kids.
- hinkley 2y ago
  Not just wealthy, but also the charismatic. The couple of weeks when I knew about baseball cards and they were still something anyone cared about, I realized that one of the kids I knew was trying to sweet-talk everyone into trading them one card we had for a few cards he had. I had no idea what the meaning of the trade was, I just knew that I was probably being tricked, based on the vibes he was putting out. And that was the last time I was interested in loot boxes.
uses 2y ago
You definitely don't want actual counterfeits to exist in the game at all. Even if they're for personal use, they'll end up getting into the supply, and someone gets screwed over because they don't know any better. Instead we use "proxies" which aren't meant to be passed off as the real thing, but represent it in-game. They usually have a different art, or a different card back, or some other obvious difference from the real deal.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  That would still be irrelevant for the game, it would only be relevant for the traders. The game would still work exactly the same if the model were that you would go to WotC with a specified deck, and they would print it for you, at a standard cost per card, or even if they cost more for more powerful cards. It would kill the trading, of course, but that's entirely unrelated to the actual MtG game.
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
Oh for sure, if it's about the game then using "counterfeits" is not a problem at all; many proprietary card games (like Uno) can be played using regular playing cards which are a literal dime a dozen or cheaper. But this isn't about the actual card game though, but the collector's market where grading companies sign off on the authenticity and quality of in this case 30 year old playtesting cards. I feel bad for the people that did get scammed, on the one side they should've known better because these were too good to be true, but on the other they put their trust in the grading company. I hope the grading company gets serious repercussions for letting this pass, surely they of all people should know about the printer dots to determine counterfeits and age?

wolrah 2y ago

> I'm slightly surprised that examination of the CMY pattern in the color wouldn't have been sufficient to identify a fake. If I'm understanding the post correctly, these counterfeit cards were claimed to be from an early playtest which would in fact have been printed on normal consumer/office grade printers and not using a commercial large scale printing process. Some of the fakes are noted to actually have two sets of dots, one set from the original printer and another from whatever was used to make the fakes.