Spotting fakes, part II

Here's a quick quiz. Look at the picture below for ten seconds. Which card looks highly suspicious?

Did you see it? Newer players might miss it, but most old school players and collectors knows that the beta Volcanic Island don't have the small white dot in the lower corner. Almost all beta cards have this dot, but a few cards that changed (or were added) since the Alpha printing lack the dot. Volcanic Island is one of them.

The last few weeks there have been something of a mass hysteria in the magic community, as sophisticated new fakes recently hit the market. Chas Andres posted an article at StarCityGames about the new fakes, as did Quiet Speculation and a few other notable sources. I wont go into much details about the new batch of fakes, as you can read the info you need from Chas's article. The issue is that they are very well done and manufactured in a larger scale than previous fakes. The known batch contain 55 different cards, mostly standard and modern staples, but also a few revised duals and fetches thrown in. Nothing really new under the sun here, but I think it's time for a little more advanced follow up on my old post on how to spot fakes to avoid getting caught up in paranoia.

The first fake card I encountered was a beta Lotus back in 1998. I was hanging out at an old laser-tag place in Gothenburg when I saw it in a binder. The player who owned it assured me it was a fake one, but I hadn't seen anything like it before. I traded a Chronicles Concordant Crossroads for it, to have it as a show-off or proxie in the future. It was darker and thicker than a real card, but not very noticeable at a glance.

The second time I encountered fakes was about half a year later. It was a Time Walk and a Time Twister that had been printed out on hight quality paper and glued on to a real card. These were very easy to spot with touch alone, but looked good in a binder. I got them as throw-ins in a trade (this was around the time that the first proxie tournaments started). As a side-note, I would not trade for a fake card today, other than to possibly have it as a reference. Very little good could ever come from a demand for fake cards.

Real Lotus, weighing 1.74 grams.

Fakes have since become better and better, but it's still fairly easy to find some hints that a card is not what it should be, and that you should be cautious trading for it. Even if a faker have a great scanner and printer, the exact printing pattern is not something they can easily reproduce. Even if they have paper that feels right, and even may hold the bend test, the weight may be slightly off, and a proper light-test should tell the difference. The new Chinese fakes are at this point pretty easy to spot with sight alone, but I assume that the kerning problems and offset copyright lines will be fixed if they make a new batch. I'm sure that they read the same articles about how to spot them as everyone else, and that they will attempt to fix the easily-to-spot problems with their counterfeits in the next batch (if they're not shut down before that). The in-depth tests I'll show today won't be that easy to fake however.

First, once again, it's really hard to fake play tear in a convincing way. Be extra mindful of mint cards. Second, it's really hard to fake alpha cards or foils. Foils are hard because of the additional foil layer, an alpha cards because of partly the round corners, and partly because anyone who buys a high end alpha rare for a thousand dollars will test it. It's much easier to fake modern mythics, as they are usually in better conditions and wont be scrutinized in the same way.

So, the tests! Let's start with the weight test. A non-foiled magic card weighs about 1.74 grams (that's 42.6 millionths of a firkin-weight for all you non-metric readers). A scale that can measure this can be bought a high-end kitchen store for about $150, or a well sorted record player store for about $15. If a card weighs significantly less or more than your other cards, that's a warning sign. A heavier card may indicate re-backing, and a lighter card may indicate a professionally printed fake. There are beta cards that are real and weighs a few decimals below 1.70 grams, but it's unusual.

This is a warning flag

The scales can be hard to find cheap though, so lets go for the loupe (or magnifying glass). A loupe will set you back around $10, but it's probably the best tool in your arsenal for spotting fakes. It takes some practice to recognize printing patters, but the loupe is also great for spotting re-backs.

Inspecting Moxen.

Lets talk shortly about the printing patterns. Magic cards are not printed with dots or lines, but with figures that resembles circles. Also, any black color in a magic card (e.g. rules text) will be solid black without patterns, as black is one of the four main color that make up all the other colors on the card. Below is a comparison between a (real) Bayou and a fake Badlands. The fake Badlands is by far the best fake I've seen (at least as I managed to recognize as fake). The lighting on the cards are a little different due to my bad camera and some cut and paste. If you zoom in on the picture it is however visible that the patterns aren't as distinct on the Badlands as on the Bayou, and that the black color is a little "smudged" on that card.

Fake to the right.

If we use a proper camera and zoom in on the Bayou, we can see the correct pattern more clearly:

Notice the lack of pattern in the black mana symbols.

The one thing that made me sure that the Badlands was fake was however the light test and the edges. After stroking them over, it was somewhat visible that it was two cards glued together. Apparently the front was removed from a common (real) card with a razor, and then a very high quality printout was pasted on the real back. What was a little scary was that the card in question weighted within the margin of error (1.75 grams) and passed the black-light test. Here is a very close zoom of the edges (Badlands is the lower card) compared to a real card (above):

Notice the line that goes through the edge on the lower card.

Next up is the practical light test. Get a strong flash-light, and check that the same amount of light goes through the card as another card you know is real with similar art.

Freespace light-testing the 1.67 gram Mind Twist compared with a 1.74 gram Mind Twist.

Light-testing the Badlands compared to a real Tundra. The Badlands lets through significantly less light.

Finally, we have the black-light test. All real cards (save alternative 4th Edition) will illuminate under a Black Light. It doesn't necessarily mean that they are real, but it is an easy and quick way to spot a fake.

Real alpha and beta Lotus both illuminating nicely. The flower petals almost look foiled.

So, if you want to take some extra precaution, get a loupe and bring with you when you trade for high-end cards. If you want to go one step beyond, get a strong flash-light, a black-light and a scale. However, don't panic. There are fake cards out there, but they are still fairly rare, and they can be spotted if you know where to look. There's no reason to sell all your cards in a sudden hysteria because some new fakes have hit the market recently; this is not a new phenomena. Also, don't buy fakes. Everyone saying that they want them because they want to be able to play with them at their kitchen table can make a proxie with a pen. Fakes hurt every aspect of the game, not just competitors and collectors. If no one knowingly buys them, there wont be a proper market.

We'll end today with a picture of Warp Artifacts on Copper Tablets to lighten up the mood:

"Who's the beatdown now, newb?"