Revised duals with a different feel?

[bruizar]

Send it to bgs/psa if you really want to know. Yes, it costs money, but knowing whether a card is real or not is worth money.

[rlesko]

Looks fine to me. I've never seen a fake thats good enough to even fool the naked eye of a knowledgeable person. That doesn't mean they don't exist, but its currently my belief that the fear of fake cards is disproportionate to the number / quality of fakes in circulation.

[non-inflammable]

i'm in the printing industry...

the cards look good, probably real, but the "feel" could've been caused by high humidity.

[non-inflammable]

I've never seen a fake thats good enough to even fool the naked eye of a knowledgeable person.

so i found a very good (revised badlands) fake at my LGS. it fooled everyone's naked eye with casual scrutiny.
my LGS paid cash for it...

it took me about a minute with a loupe and intense scrutiny to find enough warning signs to say it was fake.
it had a very slight plastic feel. the first "tell".
the only way to describe this would be to slide your thumb over a real card, then slide your thumb the same way over the fake.
the fake felt slightly plastic and your thumb moved "faster" as it traveled across the fake card.

the rosette actually looked pretty good and i couldn't find any big warning signs there (20 years printing experience)

the color on the front "art" was slightly off (tell?) with a yellow tint but that could just be a color issue on press.
the back art looked correct.

the HUGE "tell" for me was the "white" border of the card had a very slight percentage of cmyk "dots".
meaning the white areas around the edge of the card had ink in about a 2-3% saturation.
i could just see it with the loupe but not the naked eye.

i didn't do a black light test, but i will.

the store told me it passed the back lit test correctly, i didn't test it.

another "tell" was where the the face and the back of the card were "glued" together from two different pieces of material.
you could actually see a tiny line where they went together.

the card itself had slight wear and even a small dent or two so it wasn't in NM condition.
someone "put the wear" on the card to make it look legit.

the downside is that this card would fool most casual observance and the huge tell for me (dots in the white) can easily be corrected on the next press run.

i will get a pic posted (hopefully) of all the "tells"...

[ParkerLewis]

I have never seen a fake pass a 20x magnifying loupe rosette check. Comparing with a real card, I've never even see it getting it close to the real pattern, especially in the back (unless of course for rebacked cards). There's just not even the slightest hint of doubt possible, at least if you actually have a real 20x or more magnification (emphasis on real as Amazon is full of shitty "20x" or "30x" that are in fact 10x).

Also, with the same kind of loupe, you can also very clearly differentiate between genuine blue core and fake black core simply by looking at the spine/edge of the card. You will see the slight blue line of the blue core, but it will appear a bit "fuzzy", and "not going straight". While fake cards I've seen have a very "neat", almost perfect line (usually black). Actually, if you have (very ?) good vision, you can even see the difference with the naked eye.

[Ronald Deuce]

i will get a pic posted (hopefully) of all the "tells"...

Excellent post! That would be a tremendous service.

OP, one thing I've noticed is that MtG's quality control wasn't very good in the early days, but it's still not particularly great. I've gotten entire boosters of "smeared" cards, wacky color-balance cards, and things like that, mostly starting with Kaladesh. The fact that I only buy packs a few times a year should indicate that it isn't a statistically rare occurrence to get a "lemon" pack. I was playing casual and borrowing a deck about eight months ago, and when I pulled a Worldspine Wurm off the top of the deck, it flexed so far in my hand that I blurted out, "there's no way this is a real card." We pulled all four from the deck and started doing tests; the others were all the same. The coloration was different but within acceptable levels of variance, the printing process and kerning didn't raise any flags, and the thickness was normal. The only thing that raised a red flag was the flexibility of the card. We actually stacked all four of the guy's Worldspines and flexed them, and they flexed farther than a number of singletons: a verified Worldspine from somebody else (either the store or me; I don't remember), a basic land from RtR, and a bunch of random cards from the same guy's deck.

Of course, that raised a ton of questions (Why counterfeit Worldspines? If fake, did they sneak past the vendor? Was the vendor legit if he was selling a quad of a very suspicious card? etc., etc.), but when the owner of the cards took his concerns to another vendor, the verdict was that the cards were real, even though all the people who handled them (incl. a store employee) immediately felt the same flexibility problem. I can't argue with the other store owner's experience (he moves a good number of duals and, occasionally, power), but he said that it's not uncommon for cards to have a very different "feel." I'm still not convinced the Worldspines were real, but there's that.

The scans looked fine to me, but you should probably get the duals checked at a store or by a grading company if you're that concerned. Apple is right that there's only so much you can do to verify the cards on your own, and that there comes a point at which it probably doesn't matter insofar as being able to play with them is concerned.