There's been a big buzz about some new counterfeits from China. I'm sure most of you have allready noticed, for those who have not: http://imgur.com/a/hLuw2
According to some people from Facebook group, these have been reported by dealers in North Carolina and seem very real. Practically indistinguishable. What is your opinion on this matter? People from the US are reporting that they have allready seen this fakes and that they are extremely good, only the blue line inside the card seems fake (which doesn't matter anyway, like any judge is going to rip in half your Tundra to verify its authenticity).
These cards haven't arrived to Europe yet, as far as I know. Is there anybody on this forum who has seen them and could give us an objective insight on how good those fakes are? Anybody who has allready tested them? I contacted the chinese company and they offered me free samples for shipping costs ($28), but I ain't gonna drown 28 bucks just to satisfy my curiosity. Maybe if more curious people were interested, we could order those free samples together (I'd put like $5 maximum in it, so it'd take 6 people to order it).
Worst case scenario proposed by few facebook drama queens is this could destroy the legacy & vintage card market completely.
Discuss
I remember about one year ago, In Beijing, there is someone who sold tons of fake cards to a local store at the same price as real cards, which sparked panic among players and sellers. It is hard to distinguish them from the real one unless you put those fake cards in the bright light.
I cannot open your link, so I am not quite sure if we are talking about the same thing.
Team Blood, Beijing.
Currently play: Sneaky Show/ Lands
They are on ebay:
http://www.ebay.com/sch/ramseydevon/...p2047675.l2562
Check the sold listings, its scary :/
Well this is the website of the company selling the allegedly high quality fakes that have been all over the net.
http://22v.en.alibaba.com/
And this is the contact info for the guy who offered me this $28 samples. Just download Trade Manager at alibaba.com, install it and contact him via it. If you get your hands on it, please share your findings about the quality. So far it has only been rumors.
To me, this signals the impending end of the reserved list. Why? Because otherwise there is the possibility of a massive panic sell-off / collapse of the Legacy / Modern / Vintage card market. WotC can either twiddle their thumbs on this issue and doing nothing, or they can figure out some way to re-introduce "authenticated" Dual Lands and so forth with the new Font and foil symbol.
From what I've heard, these cards pass the majority of authenticity tests, e.g. bending, and there is no way that players are going to stand for a judge ripping their Duals in half to check if there's a Blue layer or not.
I never really believed that Magic cards were impossible to fake. I work for the Institute for Traffic Safety so I've seen the fake Id's China is producing. They're fucking ridiculous! Making a fake Magic card seems way easier to me, so it was just a matter of time...
I think this means the reserved list has totally failed. These scammers are basically making the money Wizards would have made if they reprinted high demand staples. If prices end up dropping (since you can't tell the real thing from the fake) all the hoarders that supported the reserved list stand to lose a ton of cash.
And it's easy for me to say right now that I'd never knowingly buy a fake card, but in college when I was super broke I might have.
It's shitty.
If this guy was just printing Reserved List stuff, then I'd say that he's simply fulfilling a demand that Wizards refuses to do. However, that is obviously not the case as he's printing a lot of non-Reserved List stuff. How good are these fakes anyway? The text on the MM Tarmogoyf looks fake, so I wonder how authentic these cards really appear.
actually it looks like they both have the copyright but the one on the left had a printing error?
additionally it looks like the font is different. <---- is probably why WOTC created their own font for the new borders.
the one on the left seems to match the picture on gatherer more closely however since i am not holding them nor do i have a MM tarmogoyf to compare it to then Its hard to tell.
Play 4 Card Blind!
Currently Playing
Legacy: Dark Depths
EDH: 5-Color Hermit Druid
Currently Brewing: [Deck] Sadistic Sacrament / Chalice NO Eldrazi
why cards are so expensive...hoarders
The one on the right's fake, Elias. Note the space between the letters -- it's using a justified leading, which is causing the letters to be more spaced out. Wizards' font on the real card is ragged right, which leads to the text less completely filling the card (note how the lines of text on the real thing aren't all the same length), and a more-natural spacing of the letters in words.
(Edit: The fact that we've got already 2.5 answers regarding this should show how confusing this is going to be going forward. I'm actually tempted to pick up some of these counterfeits simply so I have a template to compare.)
Still, this is unsettling. It doesn't take a lot of these kinds of events to really destabilize a market, particularly on one as soft as Legacy staples.
I suspect the reason we haven't seen mass counterfeits had to do with economies of scale -- it'd be hard to make enough money to justify the venture when you could be copying movies, for example -- but if we've reached the point where it makes economic sense to counterfeit Magic cards, then I can almost guarantee that we'll see indistinguishable fakes in the near future. It's not like there's much security in the original cards; once you've copied the actual card itself and gotten the card's dimensions, texture and flexibility right, you're pretty much done.
The proper plural must be "hall of fames." You wouldn't say Halls & Oate, now, would you?
Welcome in March 2012 everyone! http://blog.magiccardmarket.eu/count...ds-from-china/
I'm surprised it took nearly 2 years for a thread appearing here.
Humphrey is always correct.
Beats the hell out of a Proxy Ed white-bordered Plains sitting in for Tundra at the EDH table. vOv
Stuff like this is like… becoming harder and harder for me to just flatly say who's wrong and why. The Internet's mere existence takes the concept of IP and completely fucks it up, or makes many aspects of controlling and/or practically owning it next to impossible. Look at the way the Supreme Court case against taping TV shows went; eventually one has to go "yeah, times have changed, technology is pretty sweet, and it's stupid not to use it in certain ways."
I'm not sure if this is anything remotely akin to, like, the myriad of chess boards and pieces that exist? Crappy plastic chess sets vs. $100+ marble things vs. something like I dunno, tyrannosaurus bone chess sets or w/e… but ultimately none of these impact the game itself. Of course, Chess and a slew of other games are public domain, which doesn't help matters. How many years does it take for Magic to pass into public domain? I will probably be dead or infirm or something.
Anyway, the reprint list is a butthole. Whateeeever.
The hoarders were the cancer killing Legacy anyway. They deserve no sympathy for trying to play Magic like a stock market. The bubble has to burst at some point.
Considering how Wizards changed the font and and added the hologram thing on money cards for M15 cards onwards, it becomes more and more clear that fakers seem to have reached a level where Wizards feel threatened to the point were they had to take action.
It's only a matter of time until perfect fakes without font or color mistakes find their way into the market. Since they're now good enough to pass stuff like the UV-Test, it's impossible to distinguish the real thing from the fake as long as they didn't fuck up somewhere (and at some point, they WILL realize that putting efford into good fakes is going to make them more money). As prateta said - what's the judge going to do? Rip your Underground Sea apart to see if it's blue inside? And even then, most judges wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyway since they have no training in it.
Abolishing the Reserve List seems like a real possibility now if the fake cards actually have an impact on the market. It would be foolish to think that Wizards would allow to let such profit slip through their fingers.
"Oh, hey, look, have a Legacy Masters in store for you with the guarantee that they are real thanks to the holo stamp!"
They already have new art and everything in place due to MODO cube.
The main question is how they could do this PR stunt without mentioning the threat of fakes to the secondary market - the backlash and loss of trust would be huge. But I guess Maro would cook up some bullshit and the mindless masses would gulp it down and ask for more anyway.
Uh no they aren't going to print moxes. They are going to print modern masters Tarmogoyfs, Voices of Resurgence and other standard / modern garbage because it's absolutely easier to sell in pack mint condition as real.
To all you people who fawned over the hideous MM framed Goyfs ... SUCK IT!
If they abolished the Reserved List and started reprinting duals and stuff, I don't care why they felt they needed to do it, I would buy those boosters before the box could even hit the floor.
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