Quote Originally Posted by Dzra View Post
Honestly, I didn't read most of what you wrote. I sort of have a headache and am not in the mood for a lot of what I suspect is rationalizing (I apologize if I'm incorrect). However, I will say that buying counterfeits is not actually moral according to a utilitarian ideal. You are buying cheap fakes for your own personal benefit. Not only does this not contribute to the group as a whole in any way, but it actively hurts the group. Buying counterfeits directly results in the printing of more counterfeits; the eventual result of which is that Magic the Gathering can no longer be supported by Wizards, SCG, and local gaming stores. Buying counterfeits benefits the buyer (short-term at least) in that they've gotten cards for cheap but is at the expense of everyone else who plays Magic. That is not utilitarianism.

I suppose you might prattle on about how counterfeits bring down the price of cards and how cheaper cards are better for everyone, kumbaya. That might be reasonable if that were the actual endgame. Unfortunately, the real endgame of excellent counterfeits permeating the market is that Magic disappears because it ceases to be profitable for Hasbro and gaming stores to support.
1. Doing something for your own personal benefit doesn't preclude the possibility of it being beneficial to the group. Given that economics is about the distribution of resources, if counterfeits improve the ability of the market to allocate resources to consumers (so long as the fake is a effective substitute for the real thing), then the net result is beneficial. Given that we're talking about a minority of cards that Wizards no longer prints, these counterfeits have the capacity to expand the market. It would have been better had they done it themselves, but here we are; the market is sorting it out.

2. There's no evidence to suggest that this will kill magic; I can't think of a single example of counterfeits causing the kind of market crash people are afraid of in this thread. Limited cannot be touched by definition, and is one of the biggest formats, if not the biggest. New cards take time and money to get right, especially with new anti-counterfeiting measures coming in this year. Meanwhile, the counterfeiters can't even get 20 year old cards right, using public domain fonts. Modern, legacy, and EDH will be affected, but Wizards makes no direct profit from the secondary market anyway. Your LGS might be affected, though I don't know of any LGS that doesn't do the bulk of its trade in limited and standard anyway.

3. If we don't get new cards into circulation, legacy is stuffed as a format. The price bubble will eventually burst when SCG moves over to modern, which will almost certainly happen at some stage, unless something goes catastrophically wrong with modern within the next year or two. When that happens, we lose the bulk of the tournament scene, card value, and the format becomes an oddity played in small groups at your LGS.