Spotting fake cards
The key signs that expose fakes of Magic, Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, from the light test to the print pattern.
TCG-Completist
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The key signs that expose fakes of Magic, Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, from the light test to the print pattern.
Where cards are worth money, there are fakes. The good news: the vast majority of them fail a few simple checks straight away, because genuine cards use materials and printing methods that are hard to imitate cheaply. You need no special lab for this, just light, your fingers and, if in doubt, a second card that is guaranteed genuine for comparison.
Genuine cards of the major games have a thin, opaque black core between two paper layers. Hold the card up to a bright lamp and hardly any light should shine through. Many fakes are made of solid paper or cardboard. They let light through clearly. (Exception: some very old prints; there it's worth comparing with a genuine card of the same age.)
Genuine cards have a fine linen texture on the surface that shows as a matte pattern when tilted in the light. Fakes are often too smooth and too glossy, or the other way around, too rough. On a gentle (!) flex a real card springs back cleanly; cheap fakes crease or stay wavy.
With a simple loupe or your phone's zoom you can see the dot pattern of the print. Genuine cards show a clean, regular rosette dot grid; fakes often look washed out, have wrong colours or a coarse inkjet pattern. Pay special attention to small text like copyright lines, set symbols and the collector number. That's where fakes regularly fail on sharpness.
Compare the colour tone and border width with a genuine card from the same set. Fakes are frequently too dark, too pale, or have uneven borders and corners cut too sharp or too round. On Pokémon cards the yellow back detail and its alignment is a classic checkpoint.
The strongest check is the price. A card that costs 80 euros on Cardmarket but is offered somewhere “sealed” for 8 euros is almost certainly a fake or a proxy. This is exactly why a known market price as a reference is so valuable. TCG-Completist shows it for every card and makes outliers obvious at once.
If you buy deliberately via the Cardmarket links from sellers with ratings, the fake risk is low anyway. Be especially careful with single offers from abroad, “collection clearances” at dream prices and unsealed “boosters”.