Counterfeit MTG Cards

>I have some chinese fakes
So do I, but mine are good enough to fool inspectors at big tourneys.

>WotC pandering to market manipulators like SCG, Troll, Fireball,

How the hell does WoTC pander to those assholes?

where do u purchase them from, asking for a friend

Any of the reasonably good fakes will hold up to any and all tests EXCEPT the rip test, and no judge is going to demand that.

>Okay we think your Black Lotus is a fake
>It's not though
>We need to rip it in half to check
>Are you going to replace it for me when you find out it's real?

>EXCEPT the rip test

I checked one of my fakes (I have lots of dupes), they now make them with that blue thread inside.

>they now make them with that blue thread inside

At what point do these stop being considered fake?

I mean, if for all intents and purposes it is identical to one published by WotC, shouldn't it have the same value?

>shouldn't it have the same value?
Yes, but it should be the real ones getting cheaper, not the other way around.

>but it should be the real ones getting cheaper

Lols, like any nerd will ever accept depreciation of his cards.

you've never played yugioh obviously.

They should. In fact, if any of the Chinamen are producing this type of fake--which would not be all that surprising--they sure as shit are selling them for full price without telling anyone, instead for 2 bucks a pop.

I'm kind of excited at this point. Will Villa Zheng continue producing these quality fakes? And if he really goes and floods the market with so many copies of near-indistinguishable Power 9 cards, surely the value of the real power 9 will have to drop provoking massive backlash and loss from collectors. Is this how the bubble pops? Will we call this the Tragedy of the Nine in years to come?

I play lots of paper legacy and have staples for that but I want to be able to play vintage also. So I'm using my chinese beta power when I have a chance for paper vintage. Which is like twice in a year.

Calm your tits. That is not how counterfeits work. If a counterfeiter can produce P9 level cards that he can reliable sell as real, and this is a pretty big if, because so far no one has even claimed such a thing is possible, the last thing he would like to do is flood the market, since prices would crash, and then he would make considerably less money.

Villa Zheng and all the others sell you cards that can be used in tournaments without too much risk, and we do know this is already happening. On the other hand they need to sell the fakes openly, since their cards do not pass close inspection and therefore, he has to sell them cheap. But he also makes most of his money on Modern and Legacy cards, which are, duals aside, much more resilient to flooding. There are literally millions of real Tarmagoyfs and Lilianas out there. And, once again, he does not want to drive the price down too much, as people would start considering buying the real card. Think about it this way. You'd probably rather pay $3 for a VZ Goyf if the real one is $80. But what if they were $20?

Counterfeits never burst the bubble. They are, at worst, annoying to the owner of the IP, especially if their major selling point is exclusiveness. Hermes handbags are still ridiculously expensive, counterfeits notwithstanding. But what women that spend $10,000+ on a bag cannot stand is some other bitch with a $50 knockoff stealing her thunder.

>But what women that spend $10,000+ on a bag cannot stand is some other bitch with a $50 knockoff stealing her thunder.

It's alarming to me how with a few simple word changes, your average neckbeard becomes a high society woman in attitude...

In this case counterfeits don't even particularly harm Wizard's bottom line since they don't profit from the resale market. At worst they are looking at a small hit from kids buying copies instead of buying boxes to get that one card. Ultimately the only real losers are speculators

The market is going to be in trouble, but that doesn't bother me. I've only ever bought boosters and fake cards. The secondary market doesn't interest me, I refuse to jump into that pay 2 win shitfest.

>Ultimately the only real losers are speculators

No, this will ruin the game. You should not be happy.

How so?

The game did fine for years without speculators. In fact, without the whole mtgfinance idiots, counterfeiters would basically disappear. Notice how chinese counterfeits only became widespread after Modern prices became obscene.

>How the hell does WoTC pander to those assholes?
Master sets. The decision to stop printing core sets and having Master sets replace them basically. Not reprinting cards when price spikes happen.

Everyone clamors about Master sets being this fucking beacon of light that will save a format and bring down card prices and smash the secondary market's dick but it's only a temporary fix and Wizard's knows it because the entire fucking reason those dumb packs cost 10 dollars is because Wizards doesn't want players to feel bad about investing 500 dollars into a deck and it being only worth 100 dollars if reprint sets were 4 dollars a pack. That kind of thinking is bullshit because players value being able to fucking play with others more than reselling their fucking deck when they have no one to fucking play with because the game is too expensive to even bother with.

This is why the counterfeit market exists. It exists to allow people to play formats that are too expensive to enter. Legacy is dying because the reserved list exists. Certain cards on that list are needed for some decks so the further along we go, the more of those cards that are lost or damaged, the less we will see people play legacy because there aren't enough cards in circulation.

Modern is just a fucking wreck in a number of ways but reprints are needed to allow people to have an interest in entering the format. When no reprints happen the card prices inflate and it becomes less enticing.

That wasn't even true for any of the other Masters sets, no card ever spiked back up after a Modern Masters release except for the ones that didn't get printed because of all the fucking speculators. Goyf is an $80 card now and it's only going to keep on dropping.

where do I get the good fancy chinaman fakes
I don't even want to play in tourneys, I just want some fun stuff to use on the kitchen table and in edh

>I just want some fun stuff to use on the kitchen table and in edh
A shitty printer, printer paper, and ink sleeved in front of a basic land will get you several hundred proxies for less than 50 cents each. There is no reason to have counterfeits other than to use in tourneys or sell.

If they did not recover in price, why the fuck were they reprinted? According to your logic, Tarmogoyf should be $20 now, after 3 reprints.

But it is not. And if you actually bothered to check, you would see that prices drop right after a reprint, and then eventually go back again. Reprints are not a permanent hedge against inflation, but merely a temporary lowering of the price. The tendency to go up remains.

Lmao I cracked a cavern of souls and a blood moon in my draft on release and I've gained $10 just by holding onto the cards waiting for the temporary supply increase to drop

>Yugioh
>Nerds

Arbitrage. Basically there are two different price points for any card - the price of the authentic card, and the price of the fake. As fakes become more and more indistinguishable from the real card, the price will trend more and more towards the price of the fakes because each card is statistically more and more likely to be a counterfeit rather than an original.

This also puts wizards in a real bind, because their only option to try and restore consumer confidence is to ban the often-counterfeit cards and reprint new ones with anti-counterfeit technology (and for the cards on the reserved list they can't legally do that)

You also have to keep in mind that while the speculators lose from big money cards having their value sapped overnight, LGSs lose as well. It's the same thing that caused the Chronicles disaster that enforced the reserved list at all in the first place.

>Chronicles disaster
Could you elaborate? I didn't start until 8ed.

You're seriously overestimating the quality of the fakes. Only a very few cards will be a complete homerun from the black-core printers. They STILL get the colors wrong all the time and while they do pass the light test, most fail looking through a Jewelers loop.

The reason why this is important is because the bubble won't pop until the fakes are perfect. They will never be all perfect all the time. Even now they're not hitting it out of the park with staples like FoW. The BL 3.0 printing is solid. That is it. The 4.0 is miscolored. They fuck up good cards on different print runs.

Anyways, on the serious secondary market, the fakes

You can however get totally tournament legal-enough by properly roughing up your fakes. That skews a lot of the ways to check.

You can't fake 20 year old ink and paper.

There's never gonna be a true market because no reputable seller wants to knowingly sell a fake. Anything fake now can be easily spotted with a copy of the real card next to it and a little looking. The card coloration is off on so many of these that you don't even need to look at the blooms and all.

The "legitimacy" of fakes doesn't deflate the price of real cards. The fakes never make it to circulation. They do help deflate the cost in that people who play fakes don't drive up the demand for the real deal. But fakes aren't hitting circulation as legit cards for very long because the top tier stuff still gets a lot wrong.

...

Chronicles was a set wizards made in 1995 and could be considered to be the first "Masters" set - it was a reprint set of some of the best and coolest cards from the first two years of magic. They even had cards keep their original set symbol but had them white-bordered to differentiate between the original and the chronicles reprint.

And they printed the shit out of it.

They printed so much of Chronicles that it shattered the prices of cards, stores lost tens of thousands of dollars in inventory overnight. Some were forced to shut down. And at Gencon 1995 wizards found out just how ungodly terribly they fucked up. IIRC they were "asked" to buy up a ton of their own stock to keep the stores solvent. There were even threats of legal action.

Because this debacle was so huge and customer confidence was so fragile, wizards agreed to placate its buyers (the stores) by promising them certain untouchable cards. This promise is what eventually became The Reserved List.

The Chronicles "disaster" is mostly bullshit. The main problem was that the first few sets, Arabian, Antiquities and Legends, were really scarce. The game was very small back then, and when it exploded with Revised, cards from those previous sets were almost impossible to get, especially overseas.

Chronicles did not reprint any playable card beyond Erhnam, City of Brass and, to some degree, Urza Lands and Blood Moon. so that whole "best and coolest" is a complete fabrication. None of the really overpowered stuff was reprinted. The rest of the set was absolute jank, even by the standards of the day. But all those grognards that had been lucky enough to be around since the beginning hated Chronicles, because they could no longer rip people off with their Elder Dragon Legends and the like. Remember that back then the internet was basically non-existent and that the immense majority of players were casuals, so cards like Arcades Sabboth were a big deal. Basically, assholes were pissed off that they could not trade a piece of shit legendary creature for actually good cards. As far as the legal action and all that, it is also mostly made up bullshit. There were no SSC and the like back then. Who the fuck was going to sue them? And for what, exactly?

The situation today with Master sets has nothing to do with Chronicles. What happened back then is misrepresented in order to justify WotC's stance on reprints. Which had been implemented before Chronicles. Just take a look at what was in Unlimited but not in Revised. They were already creating artificial scarcity back then.

The fact of the matter is that the thing that almost killed the game back then was the whole stream of shit that The Dark, Fallen Empires, and Homelands were, combined with the fact that if you started playing in 1994-1995, people that had been playing a mere year or so earlier had access to cards that you hadn't.

If that happens, WotC will have no recourse but to abolish the reserved list and reprint everything. There's no point in kissing the secondary market's ass if they have been compromised to that degree.

Does aliexpress sell the 3.0 fakes?

The quality of china fakes is all over the fucking place. Stonemans prints themselves are ok, but most of his colors are WAY to light. The other guy ive found is slightly better on the stuff youd actually try to pass, but his bad stuff is way worse with the print quality being fucked and the colors being too dark. How is the quality with this Villa Zheng guy? Its easy enough to find these fuckers, but a whole other to actually figure out how good their stuff is.

10% seems a bit high. But its also one of those things that I don't think will ever really be found out, unless dumb shit happens like EVERY sanctioned event, even LGS level, starts deck checking EVERYONE. How many people are actually gonna admit to fakes, epically in places where the actually play? Witch is really the only place to with enough people to ask in the first place. It makes me wonder, with the inconsistent as fuck quality of the Chinese prints, how much the their money comes from people trying to play tourney, or people just wanting nice proxies to make cubes/dick around with friends.

Villa Zheng is also hit and miss. Some of his cards are damn near perfect, like Rev Duals and FoW. Others are not as good.

Also, bear in mind that fakes seem more obvious when you know they are. If you are in a tournament setting, double sleeved and across the table, most of his cards are damn near impossible to spot.

why don't you check mate ?

got 2 sets from Villa, kept about 80% of each of them, threw away the rest.
His quality ranges from mid to very good, but his legacy 3 set has had a lot of issues with the green cards having very very dulled colors
Worth it to buy from him tho, for the price of a set you get a buttload of good cards

Vintage and Legacy does not happen at my store. So I have some a Vintage and Legacy decks proxied up and I've told everyone including the store owner that they're all proxied.

I just want to play some Eternal even if it's not sanctioned. Still haven't gotten to play with them and it's been about a year.

Nobody checks my Modern stuff during sanctioned events. I'm willing to bet the vast majority of events nobody is checking; at events with judges the judges only deck check because they're training a guy and they need experience doing it.

I've never heard a story of some do-gooder starting a shitstorm over catching fakes. Everyone here talks tough about being able to identify fakes across the table and raining down hell on players but unless your store is the shittiest place on the planet or actually moves huge volumes of Eternal like Card Kingdom or CFB I can't imagine anybody giving a fuck.

Like if someone who wasn't a store owner gave me shit about having fakes I'd just look at them and say, "you want to play or what?"

how's his prices? Do any of the sets have the eldrazi titans or no?

Pretty much this. As someone who started playing in 4th Edition it was pretty wild to hear about cards that were printed no more than a year and a half ago were already going for hundreds of dollars (Alpha came out in August 1993 and 4th Edition was April 1995).

one of them has emrakul, and it's pretty good quality, i kept that one
IIRC it's 65$ + shipping for a single set, or 3$ a card if you want to send him your own list.
check his sets on youtube, the ones active right now are his Vintage, Legacy 2.0 and 3.0, and Modern 2.0 and 3.0.
you can get some good deals too, on my first order he discounted 10$ for me because i was a new client

too bad he can't replicate the M15 holo-foil on the bottom of the rares yet

Do you have to email him for a list of cards that he prints?

imgur.com/a/LUfXS

don't know if that's Villa or not.
Check his vids on Ytube, he has his mail in the description

That is Black Lotus, who has the same provider as VZ