My Fake 'Magic: The Gathering' Cards Fooled Almost Everyone

My first customer approaches.

"Psst," I say. "You looking for some cards on the cheap?"

He looks through my binder full of plastic-protected merchandise.

"A single beta Taiga?" he says. "Which counts as forest and mountains?"

"Damn straight. One tap, and you add red mana or green mana to your pool. Your choice. And this is affected by spells that hit forest or mountain, don't forget that."

"How much?"

I look to see if anyone else is watching, then go closer to him and whisper: "$400."

"Fuck off."

"Wait, hold on. Check the mint eval on this. Centering? Nine. Edges? Nine. Corners? Nine. Surface? Fuckin' nine-point-five, you're not going to get that anywhere, and if you don't buy it, trust me, you're going to see this card played against you by the competition instead. C'mon. What do you say?"

He agrees to the sale. The next customer agrees as well, this one to a nine-point-five-condition Antiquities Mishra's Workshop, which adds a whopping three colorless mana to your pool. This ain't Wizards Of The Coast ditch weed I'm selling: This is pure collectible-card-game cocaine. But with the next sale comes trouble.

"$350?" she says. "This is bullshit. You can't get an Unlimited Edition Ancestral Recall for under a grand, anywhere. What's wrong with it?"

I look nervous, and then, just as she starts to turn away, I sheepishly offer a confession: "Okay fine. I grabbed a backpack out of a car last week. And I just want to unload them quick, okay?"

"Ahhh," she says. "Okay." For a player desperate enough, fenced goods are an acceptable resort to stoop to. She buys the card. But I make my way to the exit, just in case her next visit is to security.

The truth is, I didn't steal the card out of anyone's car. I printed it myself, and back in my apartment are 500 identical fakes just like it. I'll let you decide which crime is worse.

So I started doing research. I learned the difference between bright white cardstock and digital cardstock paper, the different types of inks, the different options for lamination available to me. Once I'd learned all I could, I returned to the copy place and gave it another shot. The result was ... again, absolutely horrible.

I needed a professional printer -- and that was all I needed. This wasn't like counterfeit money where you need to worry about watermarks, or counterfeit art where the forger themselves needs to be nearly a scholar of the artist they forge. Magic: The Gathering cards are mass-produced cards that are only valuable because of a forced scarcity by the official distributor. Any idiot could make a fake of one of these with a good print shop if they have access to the art.

When I work, I build the image up in layers. It can be sometimes difficult to find high-quality scans of cards, but you can scan a less-rare card for the backgrounds, put in the text yourself in Photoshop, and then it's really just the main image you need to worry about. Around the time I was doing this, Ebay was only a couple years old, but it became SUPER easy to find high-quality scans of cards online to put into a template.

So I put together my digital file and turned to professional printing companies. I had a long list of specifications for the "fan cards" that I wanted to print, and I figured these were the same sort of guys who made real cards, so they should do a good job. But as soon as I sent them my tentative descriptions of my order, I got a crushing email reply. "We only print original designs owned by the requesting client or public domain designs," they said. A reputable printing company won't even photocopy an encyclopedia page for you. They live and die by copyright law.

That left me one option: a disreputable printing company. I won't tell you which one; I'll just say I found it on the internet, and it's based in Asia. My initial inquiry got a broken-English reply and the amount they would charge me, so I figured this company was a bit more lax when it came to copyright. Then I emailed my PDFs, and they sent me a bill that was $200 more than the estimate. "You motherfuckers know exactly what I'm doing, and you're just trying to get your cut," I muttered to myself. But it was worth it.

Here are scans of two cards. One of these is a real card, and one of them is a fake that I made. I won't tell you which one is real and which one is fake. That's the fun of it.

When I sell a card, I take out my jeweler's loupe and tell the buyer to look at the rosettes. The rosettes on my card are, in all likelihood, flawed and disorderly, which should mark it as a fake. But I simply point out the existence of the rosettes themselves to the buyer, and this convinces them the card is legit.

Secondly, knowledgeable buyers know of something called "the light test." When you hold a flashlight to a Magic card, the light shines through strongly in a way it does not with fakes:

To get around this, I carry a flashlight with two settings, low and high. I shine the regular light through the buyer's sample real card. Then I shine the high beam through my fake. The two lights look identical.

Sometimes, if I had a card that was worth a higher amount and I didn't think I would find a buyer at that price point, I would purposely damage it a bit. It's easy enough: Rough it up a bit on the sidewalk, chew an edge, blast it with some heat and light for a week. I had one card that would have been around $300 mint, but after I couldn't find a buyer, I scuffed it up a bit and brought it to a tournament and sold it for only $90. Nobody suspects a non-mint card to be a fake. Why purposefully lower the price point by damaging a fake that would be mint if left untouched, right?

One time, a cop saw me doing a sale in a parking lot. I had a backpack on and was accepting money for something, so she very reasonably thought she'd stumbled on a drug deal. She approached us, told us to puts our hands out and drop the bag. I told her, "Be careful, officer, most of those are near-mint Beta edition." She looked inside, saw a bunch of cards, burst out laughing, and told us to move along. She said I was a good kid for not getting into drugs.

If a tournament believes a card is fake, they're supposed to rip it apart on the spot. This is the ultimate test: Real cards will reveal a blue thread within the paper; bad fakes won't or will have a thread that plain looks wrong.

Of course, the major flaw in this test is that it's the equivalent of drowning someone to see if they're a witch -- it would be a real shame if that Mox Emerald you had a nagging suspicion about turned out to be real after all. I avoid this by not selling to dealers in comic and gaming stores, though most stores are pretty reluctant to rip up someone else's property based on their own suspicion.

I do go to stores, though. Besides tournaments, that's the best way to meet buyers. I loiter, I eavesdrop. I hear someone talking about a card, I start a conversation (we nerds like talking with other nerds about nerd stuff), and then I drop, "oh, by the way, I might have some cards you'd want. Check them out?"

So where do I draw the line?

Well, after years of this, it occurred to me that the world has moved on a little, and there are other huge card markets for me to explore. So my next printer's order was for a small run of 800 Pokemon cards.

I headed over to a Pokemon tournament, and I sold two cards to an avid collector in his 20s. Then another buyer came up to me, cash in his hand. He was maybe 12 years old. I looked up and saw there was a whole group behind him who'd heard about the cheap cards for sale, and all of them looked like they were still losing baby teeth.

"Uh, actually, my other cards got put in the wash accidentally," I said. "I've got nothing else to sell today."

I tossed the rest of that order in the trash. Even crooks have limits.

Ryan Menezes is an editor and interviewer here at Cracked. Follow him on Twitter for bits cut from this article and other stuff no one should see.

For more insider perspectives, read 4 Useful Things Forging Documents Taught Me About Your World and I Get Paid To Write Fake Reviews For Amazon.

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