Strange counterfeit cards
Hi everyone,
Sorry if this post is on the wrong forum, I hope the admins will move it accordingly.
I'm writing because yesterday a friend of mine brought to my attention a strange situation that happened during a draft. It was amongst friends, not on a store, they were just drafting off a box they bought. After the draft, my friend realized he hadn't seen any good rares, asking around, no one had drafted any good cards. I guess it's *possible* for a booster box to have only crap rares but really unlikely.
A couple of days after the draft, he was putting the cards on his binder and when comparing them with others noticed the color was off. I saw a couple of those cards (a Jeskai Banner and a Become Immense) and this is what I could notice:
- The card design is perfect. The font, the spacing, the centering, the drawing is exactly the same than the real one.
- They had the blue cardboard layer in the sandwich.
- The translucency was identical to a real card.
- The color was different, one of the cards had a blue hue, really noticeable when comparing it with the original card. The other had a green hue.
- The corners were cut differently, the curve is different. If you align the card with a real one, it sticks out just a bit because it is “less rounded”.
- The cardboard stock is different. This is a bit subjective but when holding them they “feel” different.
My friend couldn't find any counterfeit rares amongst his cards, so this is the theory: because the hologram is hard to fake, they are re-packing bulk rares with fake commons/uncommons to make fake packs and sell.
I don't have a lot of experience with fakes but these seemed really well done. I definitely wouldn't notice them from the other side of the table and probably not even while holding them if I didn't have the real one to compare. It's weird to see done to a crappy common.
Have you seen anything like this before? Do you have any leads as to where it could have come from?
Thanks!