Many of the Pokemon playtest cards were likely printed in 2024

I remember reading a story about a painter who was forging works in the style of an artist that had been dead for 40 years.

The police found it very difficult to investigate because no-one wanted to have paintings they had spent money on to be discovered to be fakes.

The forger was given community service, changed his name to match the artist and served his sentence by painting and signing a mural.

From what I understand in the topic the original Pokemon card inventor is involved in this as is a renowned card grading company (knowingly or not I leave out of the question).

So if this stirs up a large controversy, it might actually make the fakes, especially the signed ones, collectibles as well. Probably never the value they first had, but I hope the wistle blower can recover some of his losses.

The poster acknowledges this: "I will lose thousands".

https://www.elitefourum.com/t/many-of-the-pokemon-playtest-c...

If you're spending thousands of dollars on collectible pokemon cards, you probably aren't strapped for cash.

What a homie. Judging from their profile picture they are also a fan of "The Untalkative Bunny". What a nice person.

I remember reading a story about a (now) well-known MTG player. It was about their experience at one of their first tournaments, and had this detail about how during the tourney he got some pointers from Kai Budde (I think) on drafting - and in particular on print sheets.

My memory is fuzzy, but it was something like "Kai looked at a few of the boosters in a practice draft, and then was able to tell us (something) about the cards that should be in the remaining packs just by reasoning about print sheets."

I'm sure I'm getting the details wrong here - I'm not positive that it was Kai, and I don't have a good enough mental model of print sheets to know what was possible back then. And I think these skills aren't relevant today (?)

But I thought it was a fascinating detail. It's always fun to hear about the wrinkles that serious players of a game pick up on in order to find an edge.

(I've searched for the story a few times and haven't been able to find it; I just don't remember enough about it now)

edit: some discussion below, but I think the story here is approximately "Kai memorized all possible print runs, which was feasible to do back then, and was therefore able to back out which cards had probably been drafted and who was probably holding them" or something like that. Nothing about reasoning about runs across boosters!

Most of MtG’s secondary market value is protected by how difficult it is (or how costly it is) for cheap printers to match Cartamundi’s (and other global printers) offset printing processes. The number of counterfeit tests (green dot, black layer, Deckmaster, etc) that are simple and useful for basic users to determine counterfeits all trace back to the printing processes WotC uses.

I am amazed by how much value is protected by such a small technological detail

That theory doesn't make too much sense; if they were both in on the scam and aware of the printer metadata, surely they would have asked for a different version before signing their name to it.

IMO it's more likely that "grading" is just a joke.

It sounds like they suspect someone who helped design the original Pokemon trading card game - Takumi Akabane. A prominent investor claims to have gotten the cards directly from him and doesn't care if they're fake as a result.

Maybe the original designer wants to make a few more dollars.

Easier to assume the person grading this just didn't do a great job.

I mean grading is a scam all its own so them teaming up with other scammers wouldn't surprise me at all.

In a game where there are rules about deck content, but scarcity around the existence of cards, I don’t see the ethical problem with counterfeiting a card for personal use.

If you add a fifth ace to a deck in the middle of a poker game, that’s cheating. If poker decks were printed without aces but aces were allowed, then why should anyone care how you got these four aces, as long as they were shuffled fairly into the deck? Just play the damn game.

> I'm slightly surprised that examination of the CMY pattern in the color wouldn't have been sufficient to identify a fake.

If I'm understanding the post correctly, these counterfeit cards were claimed to be from an early playtest which would in fact have been printed on normal consumer/office grade printers and not using a commercial large scale printing process. Some of the fakes are noted to actually have two sets of dots, one set from the original printer and another from whatever was used to make the fakes.

I remember my son really wanting a copy of The Nightmare before Christmas which Disney wasn't selling at the time because, at least then, they regularly let movies go out of print.

I found a "used" copy on AMZN which was obviously a fake with inkjet printing on the box and the disc, metadata on the disc indicating it was a DVD+R, etc.

Served Disney right.

I've asked chatgpt to explain to me the pokemon card craze, and it gives a long answer, but I still don't understand the videos of people shoving shopping carts full of big boxes of Pokemon cards...

Not sure but I'd expect it's handled at the printer firmware level and not controllable from the OS. It would be pretty weird to let the user modify such a "feature" without even having to disassemble their printer.

It looks like CGC - one of the big card graders - has touted their ability to grade some very early Pokemon The Card Game playing cards (even alpha test cards printed in very low numbers). Here is their grading scale on their site https://www.cgccards.com/news/article/13347/

People have purchased these CGC cards on ebay assuming they were legit based on the above certifications. It looks like total cards is something like 6 test decks of 26 cards of the alpha prototype - so the rarest example is fairly small, but I think it goes up as they got to later pre-release versions. Furthermore, there are some cards that were signed by Akabane (a co-creator of the game) and those have the presence of the yellow dots - meaning those are most likely not legit pre-production cards. One of those signed cards was sold for $200k I believe - https://www.cgccards.uk/news/article/13661/

So total financial impact of this directly in low millions?

This reddit thread has more reddit style conversation about it w/ some data mixed in https://www.reddit.com/r/PokeInvesting/comments/1ibjlch/poke...

> TIL printer dots!

Are these dots why some printers refuse to print b&w when you have no yellow left?

I think the problem is that people didn't know comics would be valuable. If you knew that, then just buy a bunch of the comics and store them safely. It's probably a lot less work, won't get stuck with fakes if you can't sell them, and it's 100% legal.

I suppose it'd be easier for someone to buy one of each of the comics, rather than an industrial size printing press used to print comics and hold onto it for 70 years.

I dont think ink, on it's own, has a 70 year shelf life either.

And, aside from having the setup to print stuff with, you still need the source material (presumably printing plates or whatever) which is where the actual forging comes in. Assuming it was printing plates lets say, you'd need to copy them to a microscopic level along with every dot on a matching comic book.

That's probably quite hard.

The one factor that might be hard for them to control is "aging". Sure, the paper will likely have aged the same, but maybe the ink ages differently on paper than on a bottle. (In both potential ways: The ink in the bottle may go bad, or it may age less than on paper.) I am really not qualified to even speculate.

But one thing I want to note is that this scenario does not strike me as too different from "what if I had bought or mined 100 bitcoin while they were still cents each", which would actually have required significantly less effort and even foresight.

I don't think anyone originally thought that comic books for kids sold at newspaper stands would ever become collector's items with such a massive value, so it would probably have been rather bizarre for someone to do what you suggested, especially since the many factors that you mentioned alone mean that some explicit planning for this scenario is likely required for things to actually fall into place that way. I'm eager to be proven wrong, of course.

It depends on if they get too greedy. One or two would probably slip in.

But once you get too many, something would be noticed. Everything would match, but the ink wouldn't have been on paper long enough, that kind of thing.

And the space and requirements to keep everything in wait - would be more hassle and expense than just stockpiling copies of every comic ever made.

Brother printers don't do it iirc, and they're the only good brand anyway.

Yes, it's very cool that I can print some protest leaflets or political posters, and have the police at my door the next day because "my" printer betrayed me thanks to a literal corporate-state conspiracy.

Surprised there is no researcher dumping the SPI flash, patching some conditional jumps and doing a write-up.

What is missing in the context here is that the cards mentioned in this article are not actually real. They never existed, and therefore they are not "counterfeits" of a real one, they are just made up. Someone just claimed to know someone that had playtest cards from back in the day. They are not a commercial product.

See here for a bit more background: https://www.cgccards.com/news/article/13347/

If you are willing to pull out a loupe you don’t really need ML. You can just look at the rosette patterns.

For Mtg cards, the green dot test is very easy to learn, and I’m not familiar with any fakes that pass it.

(Edit: arguably you have to worry about rebacking with the green dot test, but rebacking is typically pretty fishy looking.)

> There’s usually something wrong with the registration or colors.

That can be selection bias too.

Maybe the counterfeits where there is nothing wrong with the registration of colours are just not recognised as counterfeits.

Similarly how seemingly every hacker you can hear about in the news are bad at opsec. Because you wouldn't hear about them if they weren't.

I built one of these several years ago for MtG cards. Trained a neural network with a binary classifier on a cheap $20 USB microscope looking at examples of the backs of real cards vs. fake cards.

https://youtu.be/6_kKR7YgPF4

Sadly never got around to shipping it, because it worked really well. Ported it to the web, but never figured out the billing issue, and so it died during the delivery phase. From time-to-time, I still wonder if I should resurrect this project, because I think it could help a lot of people.

Yeah this is sorely lacking in context, even the title seems to expect the audience to already be familiar with whatever this is.

In the thread a few prototype cards that turned up before the current ones[1] are checked and they do have 1996 dates in the dots. So at least some printers at the time did have them.

But there’s also a batch identified as “high quality” that don’t have dots on the front printing, which if genuine would point to some printers not doing it at the time.

[1] There were like, 3, and the thread has a spreadsheet showing that well over a thousand prototypes were graded in the last few months. Not sus at all.

One way to check could be to insert the serial number into various printer manufacturer's warranty check pages to see if anything pops up. Some companies (like Lexmark) require a model number first (which was not present for the example), but others (like Brother) will accept just a serial.

It seems unlikely the printer would choose 2024 if set incorrectly though.