I am a long time lurker and I have a question about this Charizard that I may purchase. The price seems a bit low for the quality of the card and when I asked the seller about why the low price he said he needed the money.
I wanted to know your opinions on the authenticity of this card.
Also, if this is in the wrong section I am sorry and could someone please send it to the correct page.
Also the copyright symbols and “1999 wizards” lettering at the bottom seems that their printer had a hard time copying the fine details without looking blurry. This could be a really good fake though if they made it less red (or the correct shade of red anyways) and had lowered the resolution of the photos a bit more.
Just more reason we need grading companies for verification! Also, while it may be harder to tell a fake through online images, the holo in person would be obviously fake since it is not a holo and is simply printed onto the card from a scan. It would not change as lighting does. Don’t think this is a red flag here. True concerns would only be necessary once the holo pattern itself is physically recreated.
I hate to tell you that that’s sadly a thing already. There are really good fakes out there, with original holo patterns. We’ve had enough threads talking about fakes already, the sad reality right now is that eBay doesn’t care, Pokemon doesn’t care and apparently it’s not illegal until Pokemon themselves hold eBay and sellers accountable. The best you can do is give people selling fakes no attention, don’t buy from them and don’t buy cards with vague photos with prices that seem too good to be true.
So there are people who have physically recreated the holo pattern? Cards that will have shifting holo patterns as the light hitting them changes? I have seen the fakes that sometimes mention they aren’t real holos and that the pattern is printed directly onto the card. As seen in this thread it seems a bit real until you see multiple angles and notice that the stars as equally visible no matter the angle. I have also seen that SSB fake a few weeks ago that had the absolutely strange holo pattern not matching the original at all.
People seem to use real cards with real holos in the process & one notorious guy proudly accounced he’s working on reproducing actual patterns with a company himself. You can probably still tell when a card is fake in person, but there are SSB fakes with the right holos out there. It’s only a matter of time until one reaches Japan & people get hosed bidding on it with Yahoo’s bad picture quality. It’s like it is with the Illustrator already (with obvious exeptions ofc): If it’s not graded, it’s not real. No reason not to authenticate such cards at some point.
IMO
Fake cards will be the reason Pokemon fails and price drops one day. The fakes will get better and I doubt even the card grading companies will be able to tell the difference.
Instead of newer PSA numbers being desirable, the older ones will be looked at as authentic/real.
Fakes will never be believable up close. As of now it takes very little know-how to recognize a fake. If fakes do get better, grading companies can just implement better technology to detect fakes. As of now a human eye is enough.