In a similar vein: my hobby is that I'm a Magic: the Gathering tournament judge. I also play and have a decent-sized collection, and courtesy of working at larg

In a similar vein: my hobby is that I'm a Magic: the Gathering tournament judge. I also play and have a decent-sized collection, and courtesy of working at large tournaments I get to know a lot of the big vendors. For the last year or two there have been waves of concern in the broader community about runs of counterfeit cards allegedly being printed in China; some of the cards they target are old and rare and quite valuable (up to hundreds of dollars per card for the genuine article), while others are just more recent tournament-staple cards. I've encountered a few people in tournaments with counterfeit cards who had no idea until confronted about it. But to me, they stick out pretty obviously, and to the vendors -- who handle thousands of cards each day -- they're instantly recognizable. And that's taking into account the fact that there have historically been pretty wide variations in the quality of the genuine print runs. Short of "handle a lot of cards to get a feel for how they should be", though, I don't know what to tell people who come to me worried about accidentally buying counterfeits.