@Chillypuwn we went in knowing that he would likely he able to spot all of them. There don't really exist convincing counterfeits yet, for the reasons we outlined in the video 👍
@@CardmarketMagic Actually there are some very realistic MTG "proxy" cards. But you have to know the right people. To print something close to the right thing you need the proper printing presses, correct dies (colors), card-stock, stamps (for newer cards) as well as temperature/environment controls. And then you need very high quality scans, or if you can get your hands on them some of the original plates. (Yes some of these still exist in the wild, but your not suppose to know about that...) You will also have much greater success if you target sets such as Karns of Tarkir that are infamous for their awful quality controls. (Or certain promo sets that were printed by manufacturers with bad quality controls.) The video above was extremely basic and did not go into the details between the different card stocks used, printing "dot patterns etc." and much more. Also, regarding the weight, that is not always accurate as it depends on the age of the card. The longer a card has existed, the more likely it will be that it has additional weight. Due to the materials the card is made from, it absorbs moisture over time, adding to the overall weight of the card. (This is one VERY easy way to spot fake Alpha/Beta/Unlimited cards, as real ones have usually gained weight of the years, unless they were stored in a sealed humidity-controlled environment, which almost no one does.) On another note. if you want to pass counterfeit cards, aim for low valuer value cards in the 5-10 price range. These are rarely checked. High-value cards like dual lands are always checked. So don't bother with those.
@@chessazertyarno You have to learn about the little "unique" aspects to each card and set. The dots test is primarily for specific older sets. (This does not work for all cards.) It also doesn't take into consideration certain misprints.
The trick is that we know that there are actually no real undetectable counterfeits, so we could go in confident that he'd get them all right 😅 but we didn't assume he'd find it so easy
It's almost a law in journalism, if the title of any article/video contains a question, most certainly the answer will be no, 99.9% of the time that's true.
@@chazz30000 it was once his job to identify fakes. He was just certain they would be like this. It's actually almost impossible to find fakes that would be indistinguishable from real cards because anyone putting that kind of money into counterfeiting something would put it into something more profitable than TCG
It's a liiiiiiiittle bit of an easy setup - presenting a real and a fake at the same time means he knows there's a fake in every presentation. That said, the ease and speed with which he found the fakes gives me no doubt that he'd nail a harder test with one card at a time, no guaranteed fakes. Incredible expertise.
Fully understanding this was basically an advertisement/guarantee about fake cards, I think it was awesome! Pretty cool to see how quickly he identified the fakes.
We are a company, so basically every video we do about cards is an ad 😅 but mostly, it's just us trying to come up with fun concepts for videos about the game we love :) no boss told us to do this, we just thought it would be fun
@@CardmarketMagic I really apreciate the creativity and effort you put in your videos! Your paper magic videos are too much fun. Next time I save some money for mtg, I'm gonna buy cards from you.
@@CardmarketMagic maybe, but this is the sort of video where someone can very easily and correctly guess without even clicking it that he's going to catch every single counterfeit, because if you did this video and he missed one, that'd be his butt out the door instantly
@@AStandsForFrench i'm not gonna lie i've made mistakes at every job i've worked and never been fired. hopefully cardmarket is similar, or else that is very cruel haha.
Yeah great advertisement......Cause Cardmarket is definetly gonna upload a video of them not detecting fake cards on their own youtube channel..........You people are so gullible.
It's actually impossible to find fakes that can get past any professional ;) it's one of those paradoxes where, at the point you'd be spending enough to make a decent TCG counterfeit, it would always be more profitable to counterfeit something else once you've crossed that financial threshold. We did the video because we thought it was fun and because we knew Tarik would probably get them all right, we just didn't assume he would do it so easily 😅
@@CardmarketMagic The bigger issue is that not every single card is gonna pass through a pro's hands. You are correct that there are no counterfeits that can pass total muster, but there is not always total muster.
@Bobert Joe you are right. The problem is people making fakes meant to fool the average player, not the experts. That's why most fakes are for cards that are 40-140€ cards. Because people are less likely to have them verified. Hopefully, this video creates some awareness so that people know how to check the cards they are buying if they feel off :)
As a shop worker and buyer/trader of magic cards, I appreciate the consumer education. I do wish someone had mentioned the false positive rate. WOTC has cut corners in the past 3-5 years, using more print facilities and materials. In some cases, legitimate cards do not meet all the usual heuristics and tests for fakes, meaning real cards can be tested as fake. This has created a lot of paranoia and confusion in the community. Something can fail a test and still be within normal print variance, but requires a lot of experience and scrutiny to confirm.
i had a Sorin Markov that i was 100% sure was fake. the card was extremely glossy, thin and all around very weird more like a company card then a mtg card. wrote with big letters FAKE on the back so it couldn't be sold or traded anymore. turns out its real XD it was just made in a company in Belgium that uses a different machine. my years of mtg instinct spotted the difference in printer/printing method but it was a genuine card from a factory in Belgium that printed cards for fat packs. since then i use a more broader variety to test cards, light, feel, weight, ink etc.
As others have pointed out, it's no secret that the answer is going to be no. The real joy and purpose of watching the video is seeing how Tarik works it out, and getting a little behind the scenes on the tests used! Very entertaining video, and very informative as well! Thank you so much!!
I think that almost 100% of the people who are watching the video can tell the fake scalding tarn and Charizard just because the way the foiling is captured on video. In person probably would be closer to the real thing, but in the video they looked way off. Really interesting to know.
I love how this was a way to promote and prove your anti-counterfeit policy... But man, was it was fun learning about these little details and watching a pro show just how good he is. As someone who has worked with detailed work on photographs before, I was able to pick up on some of the tricks but it's fascinating to see how some of my old work applies to TCG cards as well. Absolutely amazing.
We think he might have gotten lucky with the exact weight difference, but Tarik has indeed done this so many times that it would not be impossible that he can just tell
@@CardmarketMagic i think he didnt mention the precise amount at first, only after he weighed it. i was more talking about him noticing a difference at all (and i added the amount to emphasize how hard that has to be)
Ha! Now I know how to counterfeit magic cards! All I need to do is steal all of Wizard's printers, ink supply, cardstock, and card files! Super simple!
To be fair if u had all that right gear and just printed exact replicas of very rare cards and sold them u could make a quick profit but it ne short lived as u would inflate the market
Ah yes refering to when bandai had operations of yugioh back in 99 that lead to the whole lawsuit. Back to topic i had fun watching this video thank you for this.
Happy to hear cardmarket is doing something against sellers of fake cards. 3 years ago I bought a few cards for like 60€ on cardmarket from a seller. All where fake. Cardmarket told me to send them back to the seller and I received a refund. The seller excused himself and said it was a mistake. I doubt they'd mistakingly send 3 fake cards from different edition. After a month or so his profile was back on cardmarket and you could buy cards from them again. I was pretty surprised he was allowed to sell again.
If a fake can't be determined without using a loupe, then what's stopping people from using it in tourneys? They're virtually indistinguishable from real ones.
The red 'L' isn't on every card. There are other traits of the green dot you should also ompare. The right side of the black border should appear flat, and the left side should have 4 bumps.
I have nothing against counterfeit cards, as long as youre not trying to pass them off as real. I frequently purchase fake cards from China because I dont want to spend tons of money on the real thing. I would much rather have real looking cards and save money...while also having artwork that I like. I ALWAYS MARK MY FAKES with a silver sharpie on the back side of them.
yea thats teh diff between proxies and counterfeits. IMO proxies are fair game especially if you are playing with friends, just so long as you aren't making a CEDH deck to play against my shitty rakdos lord of riots...
@@swellmate12 That's how i look at it. Card's that are marked as proxies are called proxies. Cards that aren't marked as proxies are counterfeits. I also buy tons of fakes that look good from the front but are obviously proxies from the back. So playing them is good, selling them im impossible.
There's a big difference when you KNOW one of them is fake than when you don't. It's easier to fool someone without the assumption that one must be fake. This goes with everything, not just cards. But in theory, if you play with a deck using some "fake" cards, no one will likely notice or care enough to check. I know that playing with the cards vs buying/selling the cards are different animals altogether, but still, the point remains that if expectation precludes the event, then focus typically wins out over passive experience.
I'm sure there's some way of creating an undetectable counterfeit card. But, you said it: by the time you do so, you're spending so much money on the counterfeit that it's not worth doing it anymore if you're trying to make a profit.
There is this strange paradox where, by the time you have enough money to spend on it that it would make a convincing TCG, you will always spend that money on a more profitable type of counterfeits. Magic cards are just not as easy to sell as many other products you can convincingly counterfeit
Without sounding like an endorsement of the practice, but I can't help but wonder if this view is at least supported by current technical limitations - as opposed to some kind of mythical sounding hard limit.
You need exactly replicated cardstock, i dustrial dotmatrix printers, extremely high resolution scans of the originals, counterfeint holographic tape stock, and run the whole operation in secret because you are violating copyright. Is it feasable? Easily,.people have printed paper money indistinguishable from the real article, with a lot more copy protection. Is anyone going to do it? Not outside some vanity project.
As a card shop employee and the go to guy for spotting fakes, it was vindicating to be able to detect some of them through the screen (Except the ones that got spoiled for the audience of course, or that were impossible to intuit without handling the cards) I love seeking out counterfeit cards. It's amazing how much you can intuit by feel after handling thousands of cards.
It's actually super interesting to look at faked collectables, because obviously many people do try, but they are also some of the very hardest things to fake simply because (with a few exceptions) there are many examples in circulation which can be compared. Obviously the fakers are only trying to fool the foolish... But it's really interesting to look at the things that they choose to care about. I think that most people wouldn't ever EVER notice the weight difference. And yet most of the cards you showed were actually close enough in weight that it wasn't obvious. Clearly some of these guys have made a good effort to match the card stock. But that actually makes sense because card stock is something that people who handle cards all the time do actually notice. Maybe not down to the tenth of a gram, but the texture and shine and how it bends is really familiar to us, so the fakers have found something that feels right otherwise they won't get ANYWHERE. Things like the red dots on the back are interesting too because that is something that we know about, and there's no specific reason why you couldn't recreate that. They are small, but they are also just ink and not a specific security feature, so they could reasonably be placed into a fake if you know about them and adjust your files. They don't even necessarily have to be a perfect match, just be close enough, because simply seeing the dots will make people feel confident. I get the feeling that this sort of thing is almost a hobby in itself to a certain kind of person, in the same way that a certain kind of person has a weird interest in forging paintings or whatever else. It's not something that you do as a full time job, it's more something that you do to see if you can get away with it because its an interesting hobby. Clearly you can't be using a professional print shop, and you also can't really ask anyone else exactly how to fake things, so it's just trial and error and then seeing if you can pass off a couple of cards and make some money... But honestly not as much money as you spent trying to perfect the process.
Red dot is a good test but its not 100% decisive on it's own, there are legit cards that fail it. You should deck the red dot, the clarity of the rosette pattern, mana cost and deckmaster printing. (Cost should be clear, deckmaster should be jagged) its also good to compare against a known real card from the same set. And of course with a scale. Haven't seen a fake that could pass on all fronts.
That red dot L is crazy. I checked one of my cards to see if they had it and lone behold they're there. Had to squint my eyes, but sure enough, all four accounted for.
Wow that's super impressive! He found out the fake within seconds each time! Even that last one, once he had the magnifying glass, he spotted it right away.
Right when they showed the Tropical Island and Underground Sea, I instantly said they were both fake Revised Dual Lands. I know this because have proxy dual lands in my commander decks, BUT I have also, at one point until recently, had bought an actual Tropical Island and Underground Sea, and immediately saw the differences. Even from the best of proxies that are out there, I could see the differences, to the best that my eyesight can give me
There’s a lot of negativity in the comments, some people always assume the worst from others. It was a fun video and it was different from your usual content, that’s always nice to see :)
Please more videos with Tarik! He is a great expert that could share a lot of stuff about the different generations of genuine and fake cards! Or spotting resealed packs and boxes, misprints etc. This is a very interesting subject that can broaden this channels (and companys) reach in the collector community, which generates most of your revenue, one might imagine.
"One of these is two: one real, one counterfiet" is literally the worst test/exercise you could have come up with! That's way too much preliminary information to give him to work with. Much better would be to give him 12 unrelated cards (no baseline to compare against) and say something sneaky like "at least one of them is counterfeit" and then have him run the gauntlet on that set of 12.
Pro tip, if your phone camera has an optical zoom you don’t even need a magnifying glass or jeweler’s loupe to do a green dot test; modern phone cameras are crazy good.
I wouldn't know how to identify counterfeit cards from other games, but I can 100% guarantee I can spot MtG counterfeits. I've seen a lot of them before and I know everything there is to know about them.
Putting the cards next to the real ones makes it FAR easier to catch fakes, even if you don't tell them which is fake. You also need a few false negatives. Give him one of the real cards with poor quality control and see what he says. Some of the RTR 'blurry ink' cards or something.
Should have gotten 12 different cards, different number of real/fake and presented them one at a time. Having a real card right next to a fake one it's super easy to identify which card is fake.
The question isn't if you can sneak them past him. It's if someone is actually checking every single card closely. The guy I get mine from... you aren't gonna tell without magnification
Ikr. I have a few proxies with much better printing quality then MTG has been putting out lately. And they dont turn into foil pringles if they are foil.
Back in college, I used to make proxies by sanding the front of a card until it was blank, then spraying it with primer and running it through an inkjet printer with the help of a little double-sided tape. It worked great, though the ink tended to bleed a little so everything was just a bit fuzzy. Was super handy for being able to tell my proxies from the real deal without unsleeving them. Also they felt _really_ weird unsleeved. The texture was all wrong, and they were weirdly heavy and stiff due to the thick layer of primer.
I wish cardmarket has a service, where the seller sells the card first to CM and then to the customer. I would feel safer or even consider then buying expensive card going for 500 EUR +
Not so long ago I bought an Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger on cardmarket and was worried for the first time for a counterfeit, but then I remembered a quick solution for this. If the edges of the mana symbols in the cost are razorsharp it is a real one, otherwise they are blurry as a counterfeit
Having him see the real card and the counterfeit at the same time makes it so easy to spot the fake. I could do it myself. It's much more difficult without a reference, and in reality you will often not have a real version of an expensive card on hand to compare to a potential fake. L premise
I received a card that was a counterfeit and confirmed by a local game store. Card market refused to accept the card for further investigation. Claimed I closed the transaction when it autoclosed. The weight was off (1.6 g), feel (shine did not match scuffing level on edges), and front face print pattern. Thankfully, the remaining power and more expensive cards I bought were authenticated, so the loss on the one Grim Monolith was a drop compared to the rest, but I wish the claim would have been taken seriously and just checked.
i'd love to see him do this process with a batch of cards, where he doesn't know how many are fake and how many are real and see how he goes about determining if they're fake. also have them all sleeved ;)
We are a company 😅 every video we publish about magic cards is technically an ad. But, like every video, this is just Jamin and I coming up with another goofy idea we thought would be fun to publish on UA-cam. No bosses told us to do this and this is not meant to convince people that our support team is great at spotting counterfeits. It's simply that people out there think counterfeits are way better than they actually tend to be 😅
Am hoping they turn this into a series of sorts. They could bring in different experts, like one for clothing or one for food, and have them detect counterfeits. Probably wouldn't go with the theme of the channel, but would be quite entertaining.
There is a difference between a proxy and a counterfeit. Proxies are meant to replace game pieces. Counterfeits are meant to steal money from people by misleading them into purchasing fake product
Even though I didn't think he wasn't going to be able to identify everything, the tips really made this video it didn't really feel like just an ad or something
Although technically every video we make is an ad (we are a company after all), this whole video was just an idea Jamin & I thought would be fun :) there was no boss behind the scenes asking us to do this
I think I might have received a fake card when I bought cards at cardmarket last year, but since the card was included as an extra that I didn't pay for I didn't raise an issue. It was a WoW tcg hero card, which are supposed to be two-sided but this one was with a regular card back, which meant that half of its abilities were missing from the card.
I may be misremembering, but I swear I remember seeing cards like that from sealed product before. Either the hero didn't have an ability and had more stats or something, or the other side was printed on a secondary card that also had a normal back. Does the one side list a flip cost? There is also a chance they were misprints. Is it from Time Walker?
I have done that to my dual lands many times lol. People always look at them when i play them and state" THEY NEED TO BE LOCKED UP IN A SAFE!!!" i bought them to play not hide away. They are cards i am going to use and play with so they are always "Heavy Played" condition any way.
Damn, Tarik's a master at this, this is REALLY impressive and he's a HUGE flex for Cardmarket. As someone new to MTG, I was already recommended to buy off of Cardmarket, but now I just fully trust you folks, that's an eye for detail I wish every shop had. Tarik you're insane at this!
lol i noticed the pokemon right away. that bad foiling is always a dead give away when youve played long enough, the foil also has a weird waxy feel most times too.
I enjoy videos like this because they're genuinely interesting, but I always feel like making them is just teaching counterfeiters how to make better fakes. Just like I feel lock picking videos teach more criminals how to pick locks than they do locksmiths.
I love this! How about allowing people outside of Europe // the Euro zone to buy, sell, and trade on cardmarket? I have an inventory of over 100,000 cards available as a mid level speculator working out of a home office in the United States and loved dealing with Europe, not to mention having counterfeit detectors available.
11:03 Not necessarily. The issue has more to do with the programs used and the original source file being converted. It just so happens that the original print files were made using a program that’s only available on a 90s version of Mac OS. But if you get that version and set the angles of the rosette pattern to Cyan 15°, Magenta 75°, and Black 40° And most importantly, most counterfeiters don’t even use offset printing. They just use digital printing, which means the dots are gonna be all over the place
Video about Konami's lawsuit: ua-cam.com/video/jWLqZxI8dFc/v-deo.html
Cool video, but would you have posted if he could not spot a fake card? Doubt it as that would miscred your site.
@Chillypuwn we went in knowing that he would likely he able to spot all of them. There don't really exist convincing counterfeits yet, for the reasons we outlined in the video 👍
How would you know if double faced cards are fake because there is no L of red dots
@@CardmarketMagic Actually there are some very realistic MTG "proxy" cards. But you have to know the right people.
To print something close to the right thing you need the proper printing presses, correct dies (colors), card-stock, stamps (for newer cards) as well as temperature/environment controls. And then you need very high quality scans, or if you can get your hands on them some of the original plates. (Yes some of these still exist in the wild, but your not suppose to know about that...)
You will also have much greater success if you target sets such as Karns of Tarkir that are infamous for their awful quality controls. (Or certain promo sets that were printed by manufacturers with bad quality controls.)
The video above was extremely basic and did not go into the details between the different card stocks used, printing "dot patterns etc." and much more.
Also, regarding the weight, that is not always accurate as it depends on the age of the card.
The longer a card has existed, the more likely it will be that it has additional weight. Due to the materials the card is made from, it absorbs moisture over time, adding to the overall weight of the card.
(This is one VERY easy way to spot fake Alpha/Beta/Unlimited cards, as real ones have usually gained weight of the years, unless they were stored in a sealed humidity-controlled environment, which almost no one does.)
On another note. if you want to pass counterfeit cards, aim for low valuer value cards in the 5-10 price range. These are rarely checked.
High-value cards like dual lands are always checked. So don't bother with those.
@@chessazertyarno You have to learn about the little "unique" aspects to each card and set.
The dots test is primarily for specific older sets. (This does not work for all cards.)
It also doesn't take into consideration certain misprints.
Before watching this video I'm going to guess no. Otherwise I'm not sure you'd post it haha.
The trick is that we know that there are actually no real undetectable counterfeits, so we could go in confident that he'd get them all right 😅 but we didn't assume he'd find it so easy
It's almost a law in journalism, if the title of any article/video contains a question, most certainly the answer will be no, 99.9% of the time that's true.
Isn"t it amazing how he knew that the Pokemon cards will be different on the back before even flipping them?! It's almost like he knew beforehand!
@@chazz30000 it was once his job to identify fakes. He was just certain they would be like this. It's actually almost impossible to find fakes that would be indistinguishable from real cards because anyone putting that kind of money into counterfeiting something would put it into something more profitable than TCG
It's a liiiiiiiittle bit of an easy setup - presenting a real and a fake at the same time means he knows there's a fake in every presentation. That said, the ease and speed with which he found the fakes gives me no doubt that he'd nail a harder test with one card at a time, no guaranteed fakes. Incredible expertise.
He noticed a 0.1 gram difference. Dude's a goddamn monster of a pro.
Imagine if someone was this accurate at a supermarket...
"Sorry, this 6 pack of 30g crisps only weighs 179.9 grams"
After handling a lot of cards for a long time it becomes relatively easy to notice weight and texture differences
@@NoremacNeek oh no shit? Thanks for the info captain obvious!
@@juliotorres3147 it’s always nice to see assholes in the comments
Some off yall never bought drugs before I take it 🤣
Fully understanding this was basically an advertisement/guarantee about fake cards, I think it was awesome! Pretty cool to see how quickly he identified the fakes.
We are a company, so basically every video we do about cards is an ad 😅 but mostly, it's just us trying to come up with fun concepts for videos about the game we love :) no boss told us to do this, we just thought it would be fun
@@CardmarketMagic I really apreciate the creativity and effort you put in your videos! Your paper magic videos are too much fun. Next time I save some money for mtg, I'm gonna buy cards from you.
@@CardmarketMagic maybe, but this is the sort of video where someone can very easily and correctly guess without even clicking it that he's going to catch every single counterfeit, because if you did this video and he missed one, that'd be his butt out the door instantly
@AStandsForFrench No no, we would definitely still post it if he got one or nore wrong. Why wouldn't we? Tarik is one guy, not a whole team
@@AStandsForFrench i'm not gonna lie i've made mistakes at every job i've worked and never been fired. hopefully cardmarket is similar, or else that is very cruel haha.
Fun video! Great advertisement too! And probably a good warning for people trying to pass off counterfeits on your storefront.
Conspiracy theory: people tried to sell fakes already on there already and got caught.
Yeah great advertisement......Cause Cardmarket is definetly gonna upload a video of them not detecting fake cards on their own youtube channel..........You people are so gullible.
It's actually impossible to find fakes that can get past any professional ;) it's one of those paradoxes where, at the point you'd be spending enough to make a decent TCG counterfeit, it would always be more profitable to counterfeit something else once you've crossed that financial threshold. We did the video because we thought it was fun and because we knew Tarik would probably get them all right, we just didn't assume he would do it so easily 😅
@@CardmarketMagic The bigger issue is that not every single card is gonna pass through a pro's hands. You are correct that there are no counterfeits that can pass total muster, but there is not always total muster.
@Bobert Joe you are right. The problem is people making fakes meant to fool the average player, not the experts. That's why most fakes are for cards that are 40-140€ cards. Because people are less likely to have them verified. Hopefully, this video creates some awareness so that people know how to check the cards they are buying if they feel off :)
As a shop worker and buyer/trader of magic cards, I appreciate the consumer education. I do wish someone had mentioned the false positive rate. WOTC has cut corners in the past 3-5 years, using more print facilities and materials. In some cases, legitimate cards do not meet all the usual heuristics and tests for fakes, meaning real cards can be tested as fake. This has created a lot of paranoia and confusion in the community. Something can fail a test and still be within normal print variance, but requires a lot of experience and scrutiny to confirm.
i had a Sorin Markov that i was 100% sure was fake.
the card was extremely glossy, thin and all around very weird more like a company card then a mtg card.
wrote with big letters FAKE on the back so it couldn't be sold or traded anymore.
turns out its real XD it was just made in a company in Belgium that uses a different machine.
my years of mtg instinct spotted the difference in printer/printing method but it was a genuine card from a factory in Belgium that printed cards for fat packs.
since then i use a more broader variety to test cards, light, feel, weight, ink etc.
As others have pointed out, it's no secret that the answer is going to be no. The real joy and purpose of watching the video is seeing how Tarik works it out, and getting a little behind the scenes on the tests used! Very entertaining video, and very informative as well! Thank you so much!!
You get it :) we really enjoyed making the video and are thrilled that you like it
I think that almost 100% of the people who are watching the video can tell the fake scalding tarn and Charizard just because the way the foiling is captured on video. In person probably would be closer to the real thing, but in the video they looked way off. Really interesting to know.
Same with Mudballman. 1st Edition/Legendary Edition Silver stamp is a classic tell of fakes in Yu-Gi-Oh!
The camera definitely has an effect on the foil.
Yes haha, when looking back at the footage whilst editing, I realized the Charizard looked strikingly fake on camera. It wasn't so obvious in person
the scalding tarn cardname is vertically misaligned
@@CardmarketMagic I assumed at first they were both fake and you had picked one really bad one to make the other look less noticeable as a fake
I love how this was a way to promote and prove your anti-counterfeit policy...
But man, was it was fun learning about these little details and watching a pro show just how good he is. As someone who has worked with detailed work on photographs before, I was able to pick up on some of the tricks but it's fascinating to see how some of my old work applies to TCG cards as well. Absolutely amazing.
Tarik used to be such a nice guy at customer service. Nice to hear that he has other expertise as well... 🤗.
this dude: nah man, that card is 0.1g too heavy
me: wtf
Yeah that completely blew my mind! I get being able to tell if a light item is a few grams off but 0.1g? That's nuts!
We think he might have gotten lucky with the exact weight difference, but Tarik has indeed done this so many times that it would not be impossible that he can just tell
@@CardmarketMagic i think he didnt mention the precise amount at first, only after he weighed it.
i was more talking about him noticing a difference at all (and i added the amount to emphasize how hard that has to be)
I bought a Snapcaster Mage back when it was a good card and it turned out to be fake. Got my money back in no time. I can confirm, the system works. 😅
Ha! Now I know how to counterfeit magic cards! All I need to do is steal all of Wizard's printers, ink supply, cardstock, and card files! Super simple!
To be fair if u had all that right gear and just printed exact replicas of very rare cards and sold them u could make a quick profit but it ne short lived as u would inflate the market
I love how creative you guys are with the topics!
9:10 he asks "which one is fake" while casually flicking an unsuspecting, unsleeved dual land
Oh wow, somehow I missed Adam’s video on that. I’ll have to check it out later. Great video!
It's not out yet 😅 our editor on the YGO channel is sick, so that video will come out in a few days :)
I'd love to see you do this again, but next time could you do a close up of the discrepancy between the real and fake factors?
Ah yes refering to when bandai had operations of yugioh back in 99 that lead to the whole lawsuit. Back to topic i had fun watching this video thank you for this.
I think they were talking about UDE rather than Bandai. The Bandai cards looked completely different.
Ahh my apologize i have yet to read upon that one. But again than you for. videos like this one very informative
Happy to hear cardmarket is doing something against sellers of fake cards. 3 years ago I bought a few cards for like 60€ on cardmarket from a seller. All where fake. Cardmarket told me to send them back to the seller and I received a refund. The seller excused himself and said it was a mistake. I doubt they'd mistakingly send 3 fake cards from different edition. After a month or so his profile was back on cardmarket and you could buy cards from them again. I was pretty surprised he was allowed to sell again.
I love the look behind the scenes and the education of it. Great videos! Especially since you all seem to have fun and just really good energy.
Will you make more videos similar to the Red deck wins? It was really well made and interesting
I am currently working on one with Reid Duke :) they just take me very long to edit
@@CardmarketMagicthanks for da hustle 😤
@@CardmarketMagic Video on Jund? hype
Next time the police find me with a fine scale I weill tell them I am a trading card game counterfeit expert
nice video, cardmarket! good trust in your anti-counterfeit measures.
If a fake can't be determined without using a loupe, then what's stopping people from using it in tourneys? They're virtually indistinguishable from real ones.
Nothing stopping you. Go ahead.
That was a lot of fun! I'll have to watch the YGO video about the printer next.
This was very unique and awesome!
Fun video! I really enjoy these behind the scenes videos about how the company works.
I will say whilst Im lucky enough to never have a counterfit sent. shoutout to cardmarket customer support. they are legit great.
its amazing how fast he got those. Ulamog didn't even settle on the table before he knew it was fake.
The red 'L' isn't on every card. There are other traits of the green dot you should also ompare. The right side of the black border should appear flat, and the left side should have 4 bumps.
you can detect counterfeit cards by smell and even licking, if you know the cards from that era well. at least with magic cards
oh yeah, and the red L in the green dot is also a very good indicator for fakes. never lick your cards
He is so good at spotting fakes he knew about the differences on the back before even turning the card over...
I have nothing against counterfeit cards, as long as youre not trying to pass them off as real. I frequently purchase fake cards from China because I dont want to spend tons of money on the real thing. I would much rather have real looking cards and save money...while also having artwork that I like. I ALWAYS MARK MY FAKES with a silver sharpie on the back side of them.
yea thats teh diff between proxies and counterfeits. IMO proxies are fair game especially if you are playing with friends, just so long as you aren't making a CEDH deck to play against my shitty rakdos lord of riots...
Use MPC. Can you not fucking support a market that indirectly pollutes the market? Not everyone is going to be as goody2shoes as you.
@@swellmate12
That's how i look at it. Card's that are marked as proxies are called proxies. Cards that aren't marked as proxies are counterfeits.
I also buy tons of fakes that look good from the front but are obviously proxies from the back. So playing them is good, selling them im impossible.
@@swellmate12 i see nothing wrong with making a CEDH deck out of fakes
This guy notices a .1 grams difference, so, wow, he deserves a raise.
absolutely losing it at the fact they keep unsleeving the real ones RIGHT in front of Tarik with the fakes already out of sleeves!
We have each pair, unsleeved, together in a loose plastic pennysleeve👍
The green dot test is not always easy to perform. There are cards, where the red spots are invisible with a normal magnifying glass.
30x -21mm jewelry loop. cheap as chips.
The fact that a German expert in counterfeit detection looks like a Red Dead II character just makes so much sense, and I don’t know why
There's a big difference when you KNOW one of them is fake than when you don't. It's easier to fool someone without the assumption that one must be fake. This goes with everything, not just cards. But in theory, if you play with a deck using some "fake" cards, no one will likely notice or care enough to check. I know that playing with the cards vs buying/selling the cards are different animals altogether, but still, the point remains that if expectation precludes the event, then focus typically wins out over passive experience.
I'm sure there's some way of creating an undetectable counterfeit card. But, you said it: by the time you do so, you're spending so much money on the counterfeit that it's not worth doing it anymore if you're trying to make a profit.
There is this strange paradox where, by the time you have enough money to spend on it that it would make a convincing TCG, you will always spend that money on a more profitable type of counterfeits. Magic cards are just not as easy to sell as many other products you can convincingly counterfeit
If you could make a convincing counterfeit that can get past an expert, you would not be printing TCG cards. You would be printing dollar bills.
@@AbdielKavash exactly
Without sounding like an endorsement of the practice, but I can't help but wonder if this view is at least supported by current technical limitations - as opposed to some kind of mythical sounding hard limit.
You need exactly replicated cardstock, i dustrial dotmatrix printers, extremely high resolution scans of the originals, counterfeint holographic tape stock, and run the whole operation in secret because you are violating copyright.
Is it feasable? Easily,.people have printed paper money indistinguishable from the real article, with a lot more copy protection. Is anyone going to do it? Not outside some vanity project.
As a card shop employee and the go to guy for spotting fakes, it was vindicating to be able to detect some of them through the screen (Except the ones that got spoiled for the audience of course, or that were impossible to intuit without handling the cards) I love seeking out counterfeit cards. It's amazing how much you can intuit by feel after handling thousands of cards.
Without watching the video, the answer is going to be "No we can't". Otherwise they're just saying we might sell you fake cards.
It's a community marketplace as they said, so, Thoralf himself isn't sending you a fake card, but a person in Europe is and they didn't check it
That man has talent, knowledge and looks sharp af. A catch if I've ever seen one.
This is how you make an ad people wanna watch. amazing video concept
Thank you :)
It's actually super interesting to look at faked collectables, because obviously many people do try, but they are also some of the very hardest things to fake simply because (with a few exceptions) there are many examples in circulation which can be compared. Obviously the fakers are only trying to fool the foolish... But it's really interesting to look at the things that they choose to care about. I think that most people wouldn't ever EVER notice the weight difference. And yet most of the cards you showed were actually close enough in weight that it wasn't obvious. Clearly some of these guys have made a good effort to match the card stock.
But that actually makes sense because card stock is something that people who handle cards all the time do actually notice. Maybe not down to the tenth of a gram, but the texture and shine and how it bends is really familiar to us, so the fakers have found something that feels right otherwise they won't get ANYWHERE.
Things like the red dots on the back are interesting too because that is something that we know about, and there's no specific reason why you couldn't recreate that. They are small, but they are also just ink and not a specific security feature, so they could reasonably be placed into a fake if you know about them and adjust your files. They don't even necessarily have to be a perfect match, just be close enough, because simply seeing the dots will make people feel confident.
I get the feeling that this sort of thing is almost a hobby in itself to a certain kind of person, in the same way that a certain kind of person has a weird interest in forging paintings or whatever else. It's not something that you do as a full time job, it's more something that you do to see if you can get away with it because its an interesting hobby. Clearly you can't be using a professional print shop, and you also can't really ask anyone else exactly how to fake things, so it's just trial and error and then seeing if you can pass off a couple of cards and make some money... But honestly not as much money as you spent trying to perfect the process.
Would be more interesting to have a stack of 100 cards, with an unknown numbers of fake cards in it, and get him to pick out the fakes.
Red dot is a good test but its not 100% decisive on it's own, there are legit cards that fail it. You should deck the red dot, the clarity of the rosette pattern, mana cost and deckmaster printing. (Cost should be clear, deckmaster should be jagged) its also good to compare against a known real card from the same set. And of course with a scale. Haven't seen a fake that could pass on all fronts.
That red dot L is crazy. I checked one of my cards to see if they had it and lone behold they're there. Had to squint my eyes, but sure enough, all four accounted for.
I would have loved if he could tell the difference of a real double faced card vs a fake one, I get an hard time with those
Wow that's super impressive! He found out the fake within seconds each time! Even that last one, once he had the magnifying glass, he spotted it right away.
Right when they showed the Tropical Island and Underground Sea, I instantly said they were both fake Revised Dual Lands. I know this because have proxy dual lands in my commander decks, BUT I have also, at one point until recently, had bought an actual Tropical Island and Underground Sea, and immediately saw the differences. Even from the best of proxies that are out there, I could see the differences, to the best that my eyesight can give me
Man said "feels point 1 heavier" and nailed it. This guy is legit. Damn..
"I'm not Aaron Paul" lol. Clearly the best Paul brother - tied with Lena
0:27 Something just feels right about a disheveled Carl holding a banana
Banana is the best fruit by a landslide and I'm ready to argue with anyone about it 🤠😅
There’s a lot of negativity in the comments, some people always assume the worst from others. It was a fun video and it was different from your usual content, that’s always nice to see :)
That green dot thing is actually super interesting.
Please more videos with Tarik! He is a great expert that could share a lot of stuff about the different generations of genuine and fake cards! Or spotting resealed packs and boxes, misprints etc.
This is a very interesting subject that can broaden this channels (and companys) reach in the collector community, which generates most of your revenue, one might imagine.
"One of these is two: one real, one counterfiet" is literally the worst test/exercise you could have come up with! That's way too much preliminary information to give him to work with. Much better would be to give him 12 unrelated cards (no baseline to compare against) and say something sneaky like "at least one of them is counterfeit" and then have him run the gauntlet on that set of 12.
"millions of dollars on quality control"
my stacks of pringles foils say otherwise.
Pro tip, if your phone camera has an optical zoom you don’t even need a magnifying glass or jeweler’s loupe to do a green dot test; modern phone cameras are crazy good.
5:48 you could tell right away, because the fake one is missing that iconic curving!
You should get Tarik to make a video about some methods to spot fakes. I'm sure many people would love to see a deep dive into the topic
I wouldn't know how to identify counterfeit cards from other games, but I can 100% guarantee I can spot MtG counterfeits. I've seen a lot of them before and I know everything there is to know about them.
Putting the cards next to the real ones makes it FAR easier to catch fakes, even if you don't tell them which is fake.
You also need a few false negatives. Give him one of the real cards with poor quality control and see what he says. Some of the RTR 'blurry ink' cards or something.
I don't think I ever look at the cards I play close enough to notice these things..
Should have gotten 12 different cards, different number of real/fake and presented them one at a time. Having a real card right next to a fake one it's super easy to identify which card is fake.
The question isn't if you can sneak them past him. It's if someone is actually checking every single card closely.
The guy I get mine from... you aren't gonna tell without magnification
Ikr. I have a few proxies with much better printing quality then MTG has been putting out lately. And they dont turn into foil pringles if they are foil.
Back in college, I used to make proxies by sanding the front of a card until it was blank, then spraying it with primer and running it through an inkjet printer with the help of a little double-sided tape. It worked great, though the ink tended to bleed a little so everything was just a bit fuzzy. Was super handy for being able to tell my proxies from the real deal without unsleeving them. Also they felt _really_ weird unsleeved. The texture was all wrong, and they were weirdly heavy and stiff due to the thick layer of primer.
I wish cardmarket has a service, where the seller sells the card first to CM and then to the customer. I would feel safer or even consider then buying expensive card going for 500 EUR +
Cardmarket has thoroughly tested Cardmarket's counterfeit detection and concluded Cardmarket has the best counterfeit detection in the business.
Y’all shouldn’t have told him there’s fakes. Cause his senses will be on high alert……..that would’ve been the real test.
Not so long ago I bought an Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger on cardmarket and was worried for the first time for a counterfeit, but then I remembered a quick solution for this. If the edges of the mana symbols in the cost are razorsharp it is a real one, otherwise they are blurry as a counterfeit
Having him see the real card and the counterfeit at the same time makes it so easy to spot the fake. I could do it myself. It's much more difficult without a reference, and in reality you will often not have a real version of an expensive card on hand to compare to a potential fake. L premise
I received a card that was a counterfeit and confirmed by a local game store. Card market refused to accept the card for further investigation.
Claimed I closed the transaction when it autoclosed. The weight was off (1.6 g), feel (shine did not match scuffing level on edges), and front face print pattern.
Thankfully, the remaining power and more expensive cards I bought were authenticated, so the loss on the one Grim Monolith was a drop compared to the rest, but I wish the claim would have been taken seriously and just checked.
what a machine he is. "it feels 0.1g too heavy."
i'd love to see him do this process with a batch of cards, where he doesn't know how many are fake and how many are real and see how he goes about determining if they're fake. also have them all sleeved ;)
green dot test NEVER fails me
Seeing as this is an ad, there's no guarantee you didn't just tell him which are the fakes.
We are a company 😅 every video we publish about magic cards is technically an ad. But, like every video, this is just Jamin and I coming up with another goofy idea we thought would be fun to publish on UA-cam. No bosses told us to do this and this is not meant to convince people that our support team is great at spotting counterfeits. It's simply that people out there think counterfeits are way better than they actually tend to be 😅
Now counterfeiters know what to fix
Am hoping they turn this into a series of sorts. They could bring in different experts, like one for clothing or one for food, and have them detect counterfeits. Probably wouldn't go with the theme of the channel, but would be quite entertaining.
I think this would be more interesting if the expert was present with some real and fake cards rather than 1 is real the other fake.
Thanks for giving out so many tools to check our purchases !
"The card feels heavy"
>0.1 grams
Reminds me of "the trees look polish" incident. Absolutely insane
is not about fooling people in trades, its about playing the game without spending thousands of dollars
There is a difference between a proxy and a counterfeit. Proxies are meant to replace game pieces. Counterfeits are meant to steal money from people by misleading them into purchasing fake product
8:52 the link to Adam's video is missing and there is a typo in the video
Adam didn't finish the video on time 😅 there will be a link once he's uploaded it
Nice, I'm looking forward to it.
Btw very educational video 😁
Even though I didn't think he wasn't going to be able to identify everything, the tips really made this video it didn't really feel like just an ad or something
Although technically every video we make is an ad (we are a company after all), this whole video was just an idea Jamin & I thought would be fun :) there was no boss behind the scenes asking us to do this
@@CardmarketMagic that's why I enjoy this channel, you're honest but also enjoy what you're doing, always a great combo
“Feels 0.1 gram too heavy”
I think I might have received a fake card when I bought cards at cardmarket last year, but since the card was included as an extra that I didn't pay for I didn't raise an issue. It was a WoW tcg hero card, which are supposed to be two-sided but this one was with a regular card back, which meant that half of its abilities were missing from the card.
I may be misremembering, but I swear I remember seeing cards like that from sealed product before. Either the hero didn't have an ability and had more stats or something, or the other side was printed on a secondary card that also had a normal back. Does the one side list a flip cost? There is also a chance they were misprints. Is it from Time Walker?
@Erithan Abonngrace I think so. It is possible that it's a misprint
I have done that to my dual lands many times lol. People always look at them when i play them and state" THEY NEED TO BE LOCKED UP IN A SAFE!!!" i bought them to play not hide away. They are cards i am going to use and play with so they are always "Heavy Played" condition any way.
I think a better test would be give him a stack of 12 random cards and see if he could pick put the 6 fakes
Damn, Tarik's a master at this, this is REALLY impressive and he's a HUGE flex for Cardmarket. As someone new to MTG, I was already recommended to buy off of Cardmarket, but now I just fully trust you folks, that's an eye for detail I wish every shop had.
Tarik you're insane at this!
I always get sad when no Thoralf appearance, but this guy was super cool!
I could tell the yugioh card immediately from the way the light shined against the card and the font.
lol i noticed the pokemon right away. that bad foiling is always a dead give away when youve played long enough, the foil also has a weird waxy feel most times too.
Now we know all the Details needed for perfect fake. Got back to the Press!!! ^^
Glad I use Cardmarket a lot sometimes I even wait 3 days for the payment to be finalised.
I've been practicing sussing out fake Magic cards and I was able to spot the first two fakes just by eye :)
I enjoy videos like this because they're genuinely interesting, but I always feel like making them is just teaching counterfeiters how to make better fakes. Just like I feel lock picking videos teach more criminals how to pick locks than they do locksmiths.
I love this! How about allowing people outside of Europe // the Euro zone to buy, sell, and trade on cardmarket? I have an inventory of over 100,000 cards available as a mid level speculator working out of a home office in the United States and loved dealing with Europe, not to mention having counterfeit detectors available.
11:03 Not necessarily. The issue has more to do with the programs used and the original source file being converted.
It just so happens that the original print files were made using a program that’s only available on a 90s version of Mac OS. But if you get that version and set the angles of the rosette pattern to Cyan 15°, Magenta 75°, and Black 40°
And most importantly, most counterfeiters don’t even use offset printing. They just use digital printing, which means the dots are gonna be all over the place
Cardmarket with another gem of a video 😂