I recently came across a twitter post showing these cards off at collectible card shop, The user also mentioned how they were asking below
TCG player “market” value. (blocked the shop out for obvious reasons). People were chomping at the bit in the comments with interest.
These are pretty blatant proxies if I’m correct. The 1st ed stamps along with the consistency of the text is way off?
This lead me into a few thoughts and questions and just wanted some insight from experienced people who have been around or seen similar
Has this become more of a common occurrence with the increase in the hobby over the past couple years?
Is it a fair assumption that more card shops are popping up due to the demand across all hobbies, meaning potential for more of this to spread across potentially less experienced shops/staff taking in fakes in trade/purchases.
I’ll give the shop the benefit of the doubt that they aren’t aware of these being fake. Just wanted to stir some discussion on this.
Card shop should know what is fake and what isn’t if they are messing around with 1st edition WOTC holos. I give zero benefit of the doubt here. If they don’t know what they are doing, they shouldn’t be buying these cards when someone brings them in for sale.
People make mistakes and potentially this is a card shop that is heavy in other tcgs but does very little in Pokemon. I’d hope any shop buying these would at the very least immediately see that the first edition stamp is way off but with people unfamiliar with Pokemon I can see how it would happen and there’s always going to be some amount of fake cards flowing through the hobby.
If they are selling them significantly below market then that might be a sign that they know these are fake though.
Best case scenario the shop is informed and they either destroy or clearly mark the cards in some way.
Definitely fake but a lot of these stores today specialize in Sports cards or even Comics. I would not be surprised if they genuinely thought they were real. My closest store doesn’t know jack about Pokemon. Once had an employee argue with me, I asked if they had any WOTC Pokemon, he said all Pokemon are made/printed by WOTC.
