Fakes
Counterfeit cards have been a part of Magic: The Gathering since not long after its inception. The first known / most notorious example is the infamous “Dark Beta” printing, which was produced on Carta Mundi’s own printing equipment by an employee after hours. We call it “Dark Beta” because the cards are, well, dark; an inking error made the cards distinguishable by their coloration.
In recent years, a stream of counterfeit cards has been arriving from Chinese printers. You can easily buy fakes on the internet and have them shipped to your house. These counterfeit cards are infiltrating the supply of legitimate cards and you need to protect yourself.
The good news? Spotting most counterfeits is easy with some practice. The bad news? We’ll get to that.
There are numerous guides for spotting fakes. They suggest various means for identifying illicit cards — the bend test, the light test, ultraviolet or black light tests, water tests. A lot of jeweler’s loupes have been sold in response to the public in response to the counterfeit card craze.
I want to simplify and supplement those guides. First, you do not need special equipment to spot fakes. You are equipped with eyes, which are more than sufficient.
Spare yourself some aggravation on the LED and loupe until counterfeiters perfect the art of using the correct mana symbols:
Step one to spotting counterfeits? Look at the mana symbols and compare them to a card you know to be genuine. Incorrect symbols are a sure sign that you’re dealing with fakes, and I have yet to see a fake that gets them correct. It is a tell that you can easily ignore but once you see a fake mana symbol, you cannot unsee it.
Step two (or step one for lands!) is to look at the expansion symbols. Expansion symbols are registered trademarks of Wizards of the Coast and perfect facsimiles are more difficult to find than you would think. Oftentimes expansion symbols on fakes are hilariously bad, like this Wasteland. Compare them to a genuine card from the expansion and you’ll quickly spot out a fake.
You definitely don’t have to be afraid to trade for Force of Wills, by the way. Here we can see counterfeiters doing a downright horrible job on the shading of the Alliances flag.
Step three is to check out the coloration of the expansion symbol. This is consistently inconsistent in fake cards and easy to identify without carrying an LED light, loupe, or member of the BGS grading service with you to FNM.
Step four is hard to capture in a picture, but get a good overhead light glare going and hold the card at an angle. Text should be distinguishable from the rest of the card for fakes, whereas bonafide Magic cards will have a uniform appearance under glare.
Those four simple steps are going to catch most counterfeits. They cost you zero dollars, require no additions to your voluminous GP / FNM baggage, and require minimal training. Loupes and LEDs are only going to get the worst fakes — improving paper and printing techniques used by counterfeiters have all but invalidated the “dot pattern” and blue light tests you might be familiar with. That’s okay; with some basic awareness and following this simple procedure you will catch just about every fake out there.
Fakes are no problem! Except when they are.
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Not one of these three easy tricks help with the most common and most vexing of counterfeits: Revised Dual Lands.
If you are buying or trading Revised Dual Lands, be advised that you are dealing with the single most attractive targets for counterfeiters. For one thing, Revised print quality was famously poor— a washed-out mess. For another, Revised dual lands have no mana cost, expansion symbol, or rarity coloration. Revised dual llands are also very expensive and highly liquid.
The Underground Sea counterfeit China shipped me had me very worried until I got it in a scanner and looked at the image. Spot the fake:
Then I pulled it out of the scanner and got worried again. The revised dual in the lower left of my photo above is fake — but when it isn’t being exposed to UV light from a scanner it’s more or less dead on.
This fake passes the bend, light, and water tests. It’s on the right paper with the right printing pattern. The kerning and font are exact matches, and the Revised tap symbol is perfect. Beveling under the font and around the card frame is accurate. Art credits are the same. The coloring might be a bit off, but Revised coloring is too inconsistent to prove anything — the Sea in the upper left is 100% genuine.
They even kept the “islands” error. We’re going to need a better test; you are going to suggest to check the coating of the card, and you are wrong.
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Let’s take a step back before we go forward — the most common meme by far is that you can spot a fake by the “glossiness” of the cards. If you read previous counterfeit articles you may be all set to rub your filthy hands and bodies with cards to certify them bona-fide.
This is a bad idea. For one thing, Magic cards that have actually touched most Magic players ought to be free.
But here’s the real problem: the “feel” of true Revised Duals is mostly the feel of cardboard that has lost much of their coating to the elements. They are pitted and rough because the coating has worn, exposing the cardboard.
You can “fix” lack of glossiness as a tell. Just do what we have been telling Magic players to do since the beginning: take a shower. Showering with your counterfeits and letting the room steam up will pit and melt the gloss enough to make the cards pass the hand test. Don’t use the “glossiness test” to certify a Revised Dual, unless it is still obviously glossy — you can rule those out.
There’s another problem: you also can’t use the gloss test for new or foreign cards.
The recent Modern Masters 2015 / 2 / Deux / Electric Boogaloo edition comes out of the pack in a thick gloss that feels right from the shores of Shenzhen. Event deck / supplemental product printings have always been printed using stock that feels more or less identical to that of the fakes; most false reports of fakes are because someone got an event deck Hallowed Fountain or similar. Foreign cards in particular are almost exactly the same coating as the counterfeits I used for this article — I have French and Japanese cards that feel just like the fakes.
Why? Probably environmental regulations. New cards out of a pack are covered in industrial coatings. The feel of a magic card is, broadly, the feel of a petrochemical against your skin. Coatings are pretty dirty to produce and have health impacts to the environment, workers, etc. The EU passed a major law in 2004 regulating the industry, and ongoing changes in the EPA are replicating many of those changes here in the United States.
I have little doubt that the highly glossy feel of Modern Masters 2 was a less-advertised aspect of Wizards’ commitment to going green — as reflected in their use of a similar coating in regulatory regimes with much stricter constraints on the use of plastics, petrochemicals, etc. At the very least it was different, and in a way that made genuine Magic cards even closer to fakes.
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If you are buying or trading for a dual land, consider putting it under a scanner. One thing Shenzhen has not figured out yet with fake duals is the reactivity of the coating they are using to light quickly exposes the fakes. A basic scan through a copying machine next to genuine cards from the same expansion / with the same border ought to be revealing.
Another thing you can try: weigh the things. Genuine magic cards and fakes are often a few grams off. A sensitive postage scale will do the trick if you’re trying this at scale at an event or something.
But that’s all I’ve got on fake duals, and quite frankly I don’t think it’s enough.
From my perspective? Counterfeits have made Revised Duals into radioactive investments. I think much of the lack of action in Revised Duals over the last year in terms of price movements can be attributed to the prevalence and quality of fakes. Just one man’s opinion, but I would reconsider stocking up on the things if you are some kind of ace speculator.
I know the Reserved List is a thing and I respect it deeply, but the fakes are getting very good. Wizards really ought to print genuine dual lands that feature more modern counterfeiting protections.
I realize that it is hard to maintain the statement “We won’t reprint these cards, ever!” when high-profile, expensive cards are removed from the list, but these fakes are really good. Too good, and getting better all the time.
Let me put this way: the fake Underground Sea was in a sleeve labeled “F” with a sharpie. To get a good scan, I had removed the perfect fits with the labeling from each of the fakes as well as my legitimate Seas.
When I pulled the scanner bed up after getting my images? I couldn’t tell.
I knew which one it was by position, but when I put them back into the sleeves I couldn’t help but think how impossible it would be able to tell from across the table or in a five minute deck check.. How I could easily, say, sell off one of my real ones and roll that $175 in buylist into a little shopping spree.
I sleeved the fake up and shuffled it into a deck. It took a good five minutes before I could routinely pick out the “F” Sea from the others with the perfect fit’s “F” flipped around to the back. I took a good long look at it, shaking me head at how hard it really is to tell.
And then I threw it in the fucking shredder, letting the blue-core paper cross-cut into the fucking trash.
