[Free Article] Insider: Spotting Fakes

[Confidant001]

The long and short of it is that there is new batch of fake cards from China which are extremely difficult to detect. That a company is now selling high quality fakes in such a large quantity has serious implications for the secondary market and buyer confidence. Quiet Speculation published an article that reviewed a lot of the common ways to spot fake cards and addresses the newest batch of fake cards from China.

Insider: Spotting Fakes
BY DAVID SCHUMANN – JANUARY 8, 2014
http://www.quietspeculation.com/2014/01/insider-spotting-fakes/

As someone who is still acquiring Vintage & eternal staples, its a really good read and something to keep a keen eye out for.

[John Cox]

Wizards put out a similar article a few years ago too http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/feature/209

[quicksilvervii]

There is an article on SCG that was just posted today:

http://www.starcitygames.com/article/27693_Counterfeit-Cards.html

[Prospero]

There is an article on SCG that was just posted today:

http://www.starcitygames.com/article/27693_Counterfeit-Cards.html

This article was an excellent read, and a very important one at that.  Thank you for the link. 

If you haven't read this article, I'd strong recommend doing so.

[AmbivalentDuck]

Interesting that this throws an often-discussed scenario into the spotlight: what does an infinite proxy world look like? Collectibility doesn't change, but it's no longer based in play value. It's just artificially scarce commodities with cheap, perfect-ish proxies available for play that no longer needs to damage the real cards. The problem is that this scenario defeats the future of the game: Hasbro pays to test and develop new cards on the assumption that they can sell the cardboard intermediary of that development effort well above the actual price of printed cardboard.

As far as Legacy and Vintage are concerned, this is great. Cards more than five years old make up the bulk of these decks. This actually returns us to yesteryear's price patterns: cards are high in price while in Standard, then plummet when they rotate out. Standard gets ugly holofoil treatment while Vintage and Legacy get inexpensive and don't require shuffling damage to something valued around the price of a midsize car.

But Standard is Wizards' cash cow with Modern supported in no small part to justify the absurdity of $100 cards in Standard that followed the introduction of the mythic rarity. If Modern ceases to provide price stability post-rotation, can Wizards convince people to shell out cash for expensive mythic rares even if holofoil prevents new counterfeits? Any printing that outclasses Dark Confidant or Tarmogoyf upends Legacy. Any reprinting of Dark Confidant or Tarmogoyf is undercut by counterfeiting. So without extreme power creep, can they combat this? I don't think so.

TL;DR: Wizards is probably screwed and will likely have to power-creep their way out of this counterfeiting mess.

[Smmenen]

There is an article on SCG that was just posted today:

http://www.starcitygames.com/article/27693_Counterfeit-Cards.html

I tweeted about this subject and some of the images early last week (bringing it to QS executive staff attention, for example).  There is also an enormous, and useful thread, on the Source about it. 

[MaximumCDawg]

The various interest groups all have a reason to dislike fakes, but unless you can deal with scarcity and people playing Magic like it was a stock exchange, you cannot control card prices enough to stop the incentive to fake cards.

It feels to me like there are several stakeholders here, all with different interests:

1. Limited budget players = Want cheap cards.  Don't recognize that their desire for those cards is in large part a function of scarcity to begin with.  Seem to be in favor of fake cards to "level the playing field" against Mr. Suitcase.

2. Unlimited budget players = Probably Legacy / Vintage players.  More torn than the Limited Budget Player, because while they have all the cards they need, they want their format to grow and have more people to play with.  Cost is a barrier to this for players; but fakes are a barrier for venues and organizers.

3. Local Game Stores = Likely universally against fakes because a drop in card values will hurt their bottom line for all of the reasons explained in the SCG article.

4. Large Retailers = We're talking Star City and Channel Fireball types here.  These guys will also take a hit from a crash in card prices.  The SCG article urging people not to panic is pretty self-serving, but it's not wrong.  If you like the SCG Open, then recognize that high card prices are the price of admission.

5. Small time Speculators = Here we're talking individuals like those who publish the "Brainstorm Brewery" podcast.  People who buy cards in bulk specifically to hold and turn around once they increase in price.  Due to the proliferation of articles about trade value, the line between some players and speculators is now blurred.  However, players who want to trade for value don't trade for 100 copies of something hoping to release it when the price increases.  These guys are, surprisingly, not injured too much by fakes.  As long as there is substantial fluctuation in the price of cards, they can still try to game the system.  The price would have to tank really hard for it to stop being worth it.

6. Collectors = The most united against fakes, I would imagine.  If you want to collect complete sets of all cards, this fake problem does nothing but run up your transaction costs by requiring more authentication of your collection.

I find this problem so interesting because, while it's clear that unlimited fakes are a Bad Thing, you have to ask how we got to this absurd bubble in the Magic world since 2008.  That's what is making it worth it for people to fake cards.  Remember when duals were like 20 - 40 bucks?  I do, and it wasn't very long ago.  Something has happened within the last decade that has exploded card value. I am firmly convinced that Magic cards are way, way overpriced at the moment -- across formats -- and that it is a bubble that will pop eventually.  If I were in it for the money, I would be selling out at this point.  
 
While you can go around trying to stomp down the counterfeiters, if you do not solve the underlying card price problem that is making it worthwhile to counterfeit, you will just play an endless game of Whack-a-Mole that you cannot win.  You need to correct the market forces making it worthwhile to counterfeit.  So, what is causing the card price inflation?  Seems to me that two things are at least correlated with the explosion in card prices:

1. More players and more tournaments increasing demand.  It's great that magic is more popular, but with that comes more demand, and with demand comes higher prices.  Since the prices are driven by what people will pay -- lunatics are still lining up to pay 60 for a fetch land -- you can't stop this problem without increasing supply.  This is why people are saying Wizards should dump the Reserve list.  You need to correct the supply problem, not for all cards, but for those that are reaching the cost of consumer electronics at least.  Otherwise, you let counterfeiters do this for you.  

Interestingly, at least with Modern, Wizards is doing exactly this.  Modern Masters was a good start.  Now there's a Modern event deck coming.  Even if a few bell-ringers in the set didn't drop in price, many other staples did.  It looks like WotC is very carefully moving in the direction of lowering availability problems, at least in newer formats.

2. The rise of the independent speculator.  I know there have been value-traders all throughout Magic history, but now we have whole sub-communities on reddit, QuietSpeculation, and the like all working on trading Magic cards like they were stocks.  My problem with these guys is that they function off a transaction cost they created.  When a few hundred speculators buy up all the copies of Fist of the Suns because it did well in Modern, they are buying enough to move the market price up and fullfill their own prophecy.  Card prices are inflated literally because a speculator convinced everyone else do follow him down the rabbit hole, and then the first speculator makes out like a bandit.  When you buy out all the Mind Seizes in town at retail because you know you can turn around and sell them for triple that on eBay, (loaded language incoming) what have you done other than steal something from a player and charge them for the theft?  

I find that I have to pay attention to the speculator websites very carefully, in addition to spoilers, because if I want to get playsets of interesting cards, I have to buy them at the beginning of these speculator run-ups.  Once a card value inflates, it is very, very, slow to come down absent extraordinary circumstances.

Are the speculators doing any useful work for the Magic community?  More or less no, though it varies.  I respect the fact that they make cards available online that otherwise might simply sit in a local game store's community.  Still, that is far more true of large retailers like SCG and CF than about Joe Buyslotsofcards.  You could make the case that lots of independent speculators help keep the big retailers honest by competing with them, and maybe that is true, but it strikes me that the big stores actually lead the pack in price setting most of the time.  So, seems like a hard sell.

How do you stop speculators from affecting prices?  I'm not sure you can, within the bounds of Magic.  The secondary market is here to stay.  There are, however, a myriad of state and federal laws dealing with sales of goods, futures trading, and securities law that might give an example of how people deal with this kind of speculation in the Real World.  Since there's no equivalent of the federal government in Magic to enforce it, though, I think these guys are here to stay.  Would a market crash ruin some of them and reset the rules of the game temporarily?  Yeah, but I'm not sure the damage is worth the benefit.
 
EDIT: One more thing.  Vintage players are probably the least affected by counterfeiting.  When we play, there is a level at which we are "taking our porsches out for a ride" already.  We're used to scrutinizing cards for fakes, and we have a high value attached to original cards or cards with history.  Of all of the formats, I would therefore expect the serious Vintage community to be least rocked by these problems.

[AmbivalentDuck]

Also relevant: it's very hard to fake 20 years of aging on a reprint of a Beta card. That and we already allow 10 proxies. Power has value that is almost unrelated to tourney play.

I've said this before, but I'm in favor of infi proxy despite having a collection that's probably worth tens of thousands of dollars. I bought up playsets of fetches/duals/FoWs/etc ~2001-2002. So when prices of EDH and Legacy singles spiked, I went from having a bunch of $6 cards to having a bunch of $100+ cards. I remember completing my playset of Lion's Eye Diamond at $1/each, just in case it was ever errata-ed. I remember being told that I was paying absurd prices when I put together my first Standard deck. $10 a Sneak Attack? What was I thinking?!?!?! Kids nowadays expect staples in the $20 range. The introduction of mythic rarity took competitive standard far outside of a college student's budget. The destruction of the secondary market is actually somewhat welcome. Vintage and Legacy can't grow. And it's not because of price. It's because the supply of staples is limited. The more the format grows, the more the staples not tied down in a collection explode in value. Vintage can't grow because there are too many graded staples and too many complete sets kept sealed away.

Also, Legacy staples are overvalued simply because they're Legacy staples. Ponder should never sell over 50 cents. It's been reprinted at common three times. Brainstorm, too. These prices aren't due to playability or collectibility. These prices are due to hoarding based on the expectation that these cards will forever increase in value. That makes them artificially scarce.

[MaximumCDawg]

The destruction of the secondary market is actually somewhat welcome.

I agree with you completely on the problem (underprinted old cards and overvalued new cards) but I disagree that you need to take a sledge hammer to the problem.  If you like the current tournament support of the game, you don't want a massive crash.  You'd be pulled back to 2000 in terms of popularity and accessibility. 

Like I said above, I think you need to combat price inflation gradually, understanding that you cannot win against the solo speculators.  This is what WotC appears to be doing, very slowly and carefully.

Before you called for armed revolution, Duck, let's see if we can't fix the problem over time.  It took like a decade for the bubble to get into this mess; it may take that long to slowly back out of it.

[AmbivalentDuck]

I'm not calling for anything. Weak enforcement of foreign copyright in China will have its consequences. I'm just saying that I don't mind not having people rage quit on Cockatrice because they can't afford my deck: full of cards I picked up for $5 each back in college.

[TheWhiteDragon]

I don't mind people being able to access Vintage en masse.  What I do mind is my $10K collection that I built up over years, piecing together expensive Vintage staples with my expendable portion of my paycheck, becoming a $10 pile of cardboard shit overnight.  It is a game yes, but I also like poker and you don't see me collecting bicycle playing cards.  If any magic player was to tolerate, and in some cases it seems here advocate for, counterfeits, then every player should just sell off their collection and rebuy the same fake collection for $50 right now.

What seems to be gravely missed here, and I have to call out Duck here, is that while Vintage may be least affected by counterfeits in the immediate, it is greatly affected in the long run.  Do you like metagame shifts?  Did you like Lodestone golem, cavern of souls, Jace the Mind Sculptor, or any recent printing that altered the Vintage landscape?  If not, then you can be happy playing the same vintage decks for eternity.  Maybe you'd prefer the game to be frozen in 2013 for the rest of time. If you like a growing and changing format....well, you can kiss that goodbye when WotC ditches magic when it no longer becomes profitable as they can't sell a booster pack for less than you can buy an entire playset of an entire edition from China.  You see, without profitability, WotC stops making new sets.  If they can't sell Standard or Modern cards due to counterfeiting, then they pack up and make the next movie version of Monopoly instead.  You say it affects Vintage least, but only if you view Vintage as a static format that does not change with new sets.  How similar does Vintage look today compared to 1995? 2000? 2005?  Every couple of years, new mechanics and printings make the format become a whole new beast.  The only way I can see anyone advocating counterfeits is if they want to make the one "best" deck and live without fear of new innovation being possible to ever knock them off the hill.  Have fun with that.  I like deck building and innovating.  My favorite deck at the moment is Dark Depths...with Stage and Hexmage being very recent printings.  Well, these kinds of decks and innovations vanish without new sets.  Tourney venues disappear without revenues.  MTGO will go away when people never get into the game because they don't see magic cardslingers in a hobby shop and first get exposed to the game.  When WotC pulls the plug because it's not worth their cost to print or develop new sets, then all of Magic, including Vintage, dies out eventually.  Yes, you'll be able to play your Gush doomsday deck at the kitchen table with your buddies for the next 40 years....but that's about it - and don't expect to sit across from any new deck builds anytime either.

[Smmenen]

I don't mind people being able to access Vintage en masse.  What I do mind is my $10K collection that I built up over years, piecing together expensive Vintage staples with my expendable portion of my paycheck, becoming a $10 pile of cardboard shit overnight. 

I would celebrate that, if it happened for the right reasons -- and I have Alpha and Beta power.   If it happened because the game has collapsed, that would suck.  But if it happened because of reprints, that would be awesome. 

[MaximumCDawg]

Don't you agree that you have to reduce card value gradually, though, to avoid a secondary market panic that would cause trouble for Wizards and tournament support?  I think that's where WotC's head's at, and why they're treading so carefully on reprinting staples.

[AmbivalentDuck]

Holofoil authenticity stamps will protect standard and the profitability of future printings. Eternal prices can crash without changing that. And yes, treating artificially scarce cardboard that was certain to one day go out of copyright as an investment was retarded.

Your sacrifice had no meaning. You could have sharpied a Plains and instead opted for a fiat currency.

[fsecco]

I don't mind people being able to access Vintage en masse.  What I do mind is my $10K collection that I built up over years, piecing together expensive Vintage staples with my expendable portion of my paycheck, becoming a $10 pile of cardboard shit overnight. 

I would celebrate that, if it happened for the right reasons -- and I have Alpha and Beta power.   If it happened because the game has collapsed, that would suck.  But if it happened because of reprints, that would be awesome. 

Couldn't agree more, Stephen.

I also own full power (unlimited), all duals, FoW and whatnot, and would gladly accept reprints. Specially since the reprints of P9 would have new drawings and frames, so it would keep the collectible value of my oldies.

[TheWhiteDragon]

Holofoil authenticity stamps will protect standard and the profitability of future printings. Eternal prices can crash without changing that. And yes, treating artificially scarce cardboard that was certain to one day go out of copyright as an investment was retarded.

Your sacrifice had no meaning. You could have sharpied a Plains and instead opted for a fiat currency.

The why would anyone buy ANY cards, if we could all just invest in basic plains and sharpie up any deck we wanted?  The problem is, the game has been made as a collectable, not just a game.  Duck, smem, and others seem to just want to play the game...like a pack of bicycle playing cards.  I want to play the game, but also want to collect...for value...like art or vintage sports cards.  In fact, I ONLY play on MWS these days.  I have no magic community or playgroup nearby, no vintage tourneys within 4 hrs, and don't frequent card shops anymore.  But I still have a collection.  Why?  Because they are a collectable.  They have value on a secondary market much like ANY collectable.  AWPQR Babe Ruth is not as valuable as my ACTUAL Babe Ruth rookie card.  Reprints are fine but won't drastically dent the value of original cards if done right.  Treating counterfeits as okay completely devalues cards because they pretend to BE the real thing.  I am all for unlimited proxy actually...because your sharpied plains has no weight on my REAL black lotus from a collectability standpoint.  Sure, some people buy cards to play in tourneys, but many buy to collect or simply because they want the real thing. If everyone could proxy to play in tourneys, they'd STILL buy real cards as a collectable.  Counterfeits, however, increase the supply of my REAL cards...because you can't distinguish them from my REAL cards...making it completely worthless.  Substitutes for cards that open accessibility is completely fine and good for the game.  FAKE versions of original cards is NOT okay, because it doesn't open up accessibility any more than sharpies do, but they DO crash the value of my collection.  Big difference.

[AmbivalentDuck]

Sanctioned tournament play.

That said, you can most definitely play kitchen table games with printed cardstock. Some people get angry when they've invested a few paychecks into a deck and you bring $4 worth of cardstock, though. They had to convince themselves that the investment was worth it and it makes them angry to see evidence that the investment was meaningless.

[quicksilvervii]

Looks like there is another wave on the way, due to ship on the 19th:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ql-q0INFZI

Sounds like power is next, and the initial runs were used as a 'test' run.  It's not surprising that they sent earlier shipments out in order to gauge how to improve their product.

[KrauserKrauser]

Wizards needs to find a way to stop this and hella fast.

They depend on the secondary market to ensure their cards have after market value and this will straight up annihilate the markets if left unchecked.

Props to this guy for gathering this information, I just have low confidence that Wizards will be able to effectively act on it.

Even then, this is just the first of what will likely be many more such instances and they will need a more comprehensive plan to deal with the vorcious demand for fakes that this has uncovered.

Why anyone would actively support fakes, I can't understand.  You think that the counterfeiters are going to stop at just Vintage / Legacy staples?  Fat Chance, not when every standard card over $10 would still offer them crazy margins and be even easier to move unnoticed.

[quicksilvervii]

Wizards needs to find a way to stop this and hella fast.

They depend on the secondary market to ensure their cards have after market value and this will straight up annihilate the markets if left unchecked.

Props to this guy for gathering this information, I just have low confidence that Wizards will be able to effectively act on it.

Even then, this is just the first of what will likely be many more such instances and they will need a more comprehensive plan to deal with the vorcious demand for fakes that this has uncovered.

Why anyone would actively support fakes, I can't understand.  You think that the counterfeiters are going to stop at just Vintage / Legacy staples?  Fat Chance, not when every standard card over $10 would still offer them crazy margins and be even easier to move unnoticed.

Modern and Standard are the ones that are most targeted by this as things stand.

[MaximumCDawg]

Secondary market prices are in a bubble and need to go down.  But not like this.  This could be catastrophic for tourny support.

[WhiteLotus]

There is no way that Wizards is going to just let this happen if it can really hurt their business plan.
If this really starts to be an issue for them, they'll make a move to put it to an end and go back to business as usual. But I think this can actually be good in a sense that they'll be forced to face the fact that something has to change or this is just going to happen over and over again. Same way Prohibition never stopped people from buying Alcohol, just cutting the tax revenue for the Government.
All we can hope for is that after seeing MMasters success, they are now working on some big projects to increase supply while not decreasing to much the value of staples, but bringing it back under the threshold that makes it profitable to make counterfeits.

[AmbivalentDuck]

How can Wizards stop it? Chinese fakes of Veblen goods have been a thing for decades and hit more powerful companies. The main thing Hasbro has going for it is that they have plants in China that manufacture other product lines. As such, the Chinese government may actually give a damn for fear of losing those plants. May.

The main thing these counterfeits are doing is reminding people that we're buying printed cardboard whose origin is hard to authenticate and whose main value comes from social enforcement of Wizards's copyright.

[TheWhiteDragon]

How can Wizards stop it? Chinese fakes of Veblen goods have been a thing for decades and hit more powerful companies. The main thing Hasbro has going for it is that they have plants in China that manufacture other product lines. As such, the Chinese government may actually give a damn for fear of losing those plants. May.

The main thing these counterfeits are doing is reminding people that we're buying printed cardboard whose origin is hard to authenticate and whose main value comes from social enforcement of Wizards's copyright.

That's basically stating that investing in anything tangible and counterfeitable is worthless.  Art, baseball cards, etc...in fact, ANY collectable is a worthless investment because people can and should make fraudulent replicas, right Duck?

And if sanctioned tourney play is the ONLY reason to buy a product, then ther really is no reason to buy product.  I think everyone should just stop buying all cards altogether then.  Let's just wait for WotC to release spoilers of the new set, everyone sharpie proxies on bicycle playing cards, sleeve them up, and organize our own tourney's with cash prizes.  Who needs "sanctioned" afterall, or to pay for property for that matter.  Just window shop for what you like and make your own replicas.

[AmbivalentDuck]

That's basically stating that investing in anything tangible and counterfeitable is worthless.  Art, baseball cards, etc...in fact, ANY collectable is a worthless investment because people can and should make fraudulent replicas, right Duck?

Yes. When copyright expires and something passes into the public domain, it's typical and even helpful for others to begin to produce it if it has value. See: generic drugs. Art and other rare collectibles typically derive their value from authenticity. They are examined by experts and it is the certificate of authenticity that gives the collectible value. Only in MtG is value due in large part to utility: authentic cards are needed to play in sanctioned tournaments.

And if sanctioned tourney play is the ONLY reason to buy a product, then ther really is no reason to buy product.  I think everyone should just stop buying all cards altogether then.  Let's just wait for WotC to release spoilers of the new set, everyone sharpie proxies on bicycle playing cards, sleeve them up, and organize our own tourney's with cash prizes.

I ran weekly tournaments on Cockatrice for several months. It wasn't that much work, but I got flooded and had nobody to pass even temporary responsibility to.

Who needs "sanctioned" afterall, or to pay for property for that matter.  Just window shop for what you like and make your own replicas.

This is oft-debated. In the gilded age of oil and steel, things of practical value were produced from raw materials of less everyday value. Turning raw materials into cars, circuit boards, and beer has clear value to society AND costs money. It's not clear that goods whose scarcity derives primarily from copyright have similar value except insofar as copyright incentives people to create things that would not otherwise be created. The recording industries are finding this out the hard way. While they once provided distribution, more and more artists are recording and distributing independently thanks to the internet.

Arguably, the main services that Hasbro provides are the rules of the game, a banned/restricted list (and formats), ongoing creation of new game pieces. I think EDH and its success demonstrate that Hasbro's main contribution is canonical new game pieces. In that context, I see no reason (and neither does Hasbro!) why the success of Vintage and/or Legacy should affect their incentive to create new game pieces. What's really happening here is that a flood of Jaces and Goyfs undercuts Modern because buyers will be wary of investing in $100 mythics for standard that can reasonably be expected to be counterfeited by the time they're in the Modern format. Without the mythic rarity, Wizards can't sell as many boxes. Question is, wasn't MtG profitable before the introduction of mythic rarity?

[TheWhiteDragon]

I think the bigger issue is twofold.

1) Intellectual property has value.  The fruits of one's labor has value.  Why should it be right for you to invent something new and go through the pains of developing and producing something and then allow someone else to take your finished product and sell it profitably at a price you can't even produce it for? What's the incentive to make or sustain anything if we are to tolerate, and actually encourage, people to flat out steal intellectual property and profit at costs the inventor can't touch?  I'm not talking about knockoffs or things like proxies...I'm talking about actual, indistinguishable copies.  I, for example, fancy myself a writer.  I have published a novel and a book of poetry.  My time in creating a novel has value to me.  Is it okay for someone to take my book, word for word, and mass produce copies and sell it profitably at a cost I can't even afford to buy the blank paper for without giving me a penny of their profit?  That's basically what your saying when you say it's a good thing these counterfeiters are doing by making pricey cards accessible to the masses.

2) The secondary market of any product gives value to something that is more collectable than useful.  People buy cars because they do something useful...and only some are bought for a collectability factor.  Cards and other "collectables" are bought based on rarity and the reasonable assumption it will retain value.  Even if black lotus were to be reproduced on the scale of an M15 common, the value of my beta lotus would surely decrease, but it would retain large portion of it's value...because it is rare and original.  And that is perfectly acceptable.  Reserved list or not, people invest in collectables because they historically maintain and increase in value.  Unlike other collectibles, MtG has a risk that new printings might drop the cost inflated by the utility element of the game.  Every collector knows that, and that is totally acceptable.  If WotC decided to reprint all of Alpha to the scale of M15, I'd be okay...it's a risk I take, just like the stock market.  However FAKE cards that pretend to be identical to my original, that is NOT okay for collectors.  In fact, it makes investing in ANYTHING a worthless practice if illegal activity is welcomed to fraudulenty pose as authentic.  Proxies are totally fine...reprints are totally fine...fake copies pretending to be real is not at all fine.  There is a reason society has copyright laws.  And if there were no secondary market for MtG, as would be the case if fakes were tolerated, it wouldn't be worth my 3.99 to buy even a single pack of cards, let alone vintage staples.  The most I'd spend on entertainment where I'd be okay not getting any return is about $10 on a movie ticket or a monopoly board.  I'd NEVER dish out $4 for a pack of cards where I'd be required to buy many of those packs to make a deck if I knew I'd never be able to sell back the cards aftermarket to recover most or all of the cost. It's not even about profiting on a secondary market there.  It's about not spending more on the cards than the price of cardboard it's printed on if I couldn't sell them for what I paid to own them.  Nobody in their right mind would pay for a single pack of cards if they couldn't sell them back at cost (unless they are just so loaded they don't know what else to do with their money).  The alternative would be a deck of cards (or actually an entire SET, really) selling for less than a pack of bicycle playing cards.  And WotC would have no profit margin there, so no incentive to even make the game.

In short, not only are counterfeits flat out wrong on a moral level, but they would flat out kill magic. WotC would have no incentive to keep the game going...and any measure to prevent counterfeiters would be trumped anyway.  Nobody spends more on new tech to thwart counterfeits than the gov't does when dealing with money...and counterfeiters still succeed in making $100s that are easily passed to the untrained eye.  WotC wouldn't fight that battle, nor should they.  Magic would become the current cardpool, and never a set more.  

[AmbivalentDuck]

1) Intellectual property has value.  The fruits of one's labor has value.  Why should it be right for you to invent something new and go through the pains of developing and producing something and then allow someone else to take your finished product and sell it profitably at a price you can't even produce it for? What's the incentive to make or sustain anything if we are to tolerate, and actually encourage, people to flat out steal intellectual property and profit at costs the inventor can't touch?  I'm not talking about knockoffs or things like proxies...I'm talking about actual, indistinguishable copies.  I, for example, fancy myself a writer.  I have published a novel and a book of poetry.  My time in creating a novel has value to me.  Is it okay for someone to take my book, word for word, and mass produce copies and sell it profitably at a cost I can't even afford to buy the blank paper for without giving me a penny of their profit?  That's basically what your saying when you say it's a good thing these counterfeiters are doing by making pricey cards accessible to the masses.

You're making an emotional argument. How many years' monopoly are sufficient to incentivize you to produce your creative work? Society benefits most by first incentivizing and then taking away your monopoly so that others can make derivative works without hindrance.

2) rant...

In short, not only are counterfeits flat out wrong on a moral level, but they would flat out kill magic. WotC would have no incentive to keep the game going...and any measure to prevent counterfeiters would be trumped anyway.  Nobody spends more on new tech to thwart counterfeits than the gov't does when dealing with money...and counterfeiters still succeed in making $100s that are easily passed to the untrained eye.  WotC wouldn't fight that battle, nor should they.  Magic would become the current cardpool, and never a set more.

You realize that you're legally entitled to counterfeit the Mona Lisa to your heart's content? A Ford model T...same thing. Counterfeit 1st edition of Darwin's Origin of Species? Have fun.

You can say counterfeiting is morally wrong, but the fact is that copyright only exists to get creative works created in the first place.

[MaximumCDawg]

How is arguing the basis of patent and copyright and trademark law emotional?  He's just pointing out that in order to invent things, you typically need an outlay of labor or (more typical nowadays) money.  The monopoly helps recoup that.  In Magic, we're talking about the large expense they spend on Design and Development to ensure they print new cards and new sets.  Whatever else we might say about modern set design, I think we all prefer it to the wild and wacky days of Homelands on one end and Urza's Saga on the other. 

As for people bandying about how long a copyright lasts:

http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html

Currently copyrights made for hire last about a CENTURY.  You can have whatever moral debate you like about whether that's too long (and you'll be having the fight with Disney, mostly) but that's what it is.  That's what businesses anticipate when investing in something.

This is all just not relevant to the bigger problem.  A flood of cheaper counterfeits would crash secondary market prices without putting money into WotC's pockets.  Crashing secondary market prices would lower incentives to open packs, lower the incentive for stores to buy lots of boxes to flip for sales on the secondary market, lower the profits of big secondary market retailers, and all around reduce the cash flowing through the game.  This means an unknown number of lower tournament support for stores, lower investment in R&D at Wizards, etc.

Look, I agree card prices are out of control.  I largely blame speculators and the speculator culture endorsed by web sites like Quiet Speculation.  Heck, take a look at one recent article on the web site comparing anyone who gets in on a spec too late a "sheep" that will be "slaughtered."  Sheesh.  A well-funded speculator can control their own prices simply by buying out all major retailers online.  I also agree the way out of the problem is printing more copies of needed cards.  But this must be done BY WIZARDS.  It must be done in a way that ensures they can capture the revenue associated with the new printing and manage the brand carefully to avoid massive panic.  Cards should deflate gradually and carefully, not catastrophically.

[AmbivalentDuck]

How is arguing the basis of patent and copyright and trademark law emotional?

"Fruit of one's labor."
"pains of developing"
"steal intellectual property"

WhiteDragon seems to think that indefinite copyright is appropriate.

That aside...

This is all just not relevant to the bigger problem.  A flood of cheaper counterfeits would crash secondary market prices without putting money into WotC's pockets.  Crashing secondary market prices would lower incentives to open packs, lower the incentive for stores to buy lots of boxes to flip for sales on the secondary market, lower the profits of big secondary market retailers, and all around reduce the cash flowing through the game.  This means an unknown number of lower tournament support for stores, lower investment in R&D at Wizards, etc.

Counterfeits in Standard/Modern vs counterfeiting the Reserve List. It's not clear to me that any number of counterfeit Black Lotus's affect Wizards' bottom line.

[MaximumCDawg]

That may be, Duck, but how could you get a counterfeiter who made the decision to only hit reserve list staples?  If you're breaking US law for cash, it seems inevitable that you counterfeit whatever costs money.  Once the gates open, everything is up for grabs.