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How can you tell if a pokemon card is fake or not?

Piplup-Luv

Piplups Are Awesome
I'm in ths group of people who play the pokemon TCG but since fake cards aren't aloud I really need to know how to tell a fake card from a real one.

Please help
 

Lucario11

Aura Guardian
In general, text and pictures will be thinner, with noticeably lower-quality colors. In the older cards, the pokedex description could be a dead giveaway. Take a look at this example:
fakecards.jpg

Notice how on the left-hand card, the energy symbols are shaded to show depth, as compared to the ones on the right-hand card.
 

Palamon

Silence is Purple
Adding onto that...sometimes the text could be thicker and more to the bottom.
 

FireTypeLover

Mr. Soul Stealer
Well, I noticed that the X sign is different for Level X's. Which is terrible because that means my Floatzel GL Level X is fake. (Well, I knew that for a long time, but still) Oh well, I'm never going to do an official TCG battle, so I'll just keep it as my only Level X.

Plus the Energy symbols look weird, like Lucario11 said.
 

2D Thom

Im a tombsone
What i do is slightly try to rip them. I pried a real and fake Pokemon card to only notice a thick, black layer in the middle of the real Pokemon card (almost like a super thin sandwich). The fake one on the other the other hand, looked like some sort of car-bored. So when you slightly rip on a one that feels durable, its real. But if you rip a more delicate one, its fake. you also gotta watch out for typos, uneven cuts, little specs on the card and crazy stuff. Like a have the fake Latios card. First of all, it was called, Lation (even though that name sounds cool than Latios) and i had a move called Luster Purge. Yes, well guess what? That move did 120 damage and required a grass, electric and Fighting energy. That's crazy! So yeah, that's it. hope this helps! Oh i forgot to mention the the back of the card is more lighter and the energy symbols are more bigger on the fakes.
 
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Crystalmew9

Ultimate Mew Fan
I go by the shinyness of the card. Also the coloration is important; compare the back of one card to another, and fake cards are either darker or lighter, I forget.
 
My friend had this fake pikachu card so i burned it at a bonfire and my friend was happy o.0
and you could already tell it was fake because the text was more in bold than usual. plus the pokedex entry wasn't from any pokemon game. plus he told me he remembers buying it at a flea market along with other fake pokemon cards for only 3 dollars. then he found out they where fake when some of the art wasnt completly accurate (pokemon were miscoloured, like pikachu being green) so yeah at his birthday party we decided to burn them all at a bonfire, and we started screaming really loud. plus i am a girl, so dont ask me why i was at a b-day party with alot of boys. o.0
 
I have two fake cards. You can tell because you can see through them a little bit. Real cards you can't. However, this was ten years ago so things may have changed.
 

alonza513

New Member
Use the light test to detect fake Pokémon cards. If you hold your card up to a window or light source and see the design on the back clearly, chances are you're holding a fake Pokémon card.

Check for unusual backgrounds or images. Early sets of Japanese Pokémon have the Pocket Monsters graphic on the back, but you'll find many fakes substitute the English Pokémon backing instead.
 

Alex0511

What the FFFNYAAAAH?
Fakes rip really easily as well.
 

Mitzeh

Well-Known Member
i recently bought some uber cheap cards at a market (i know stupid but hey i decided to trust the 80+ year old Scottish man who was selling them)

anyhoo stupidly i didn't look at the packaging for 1 and failed to realise it said '2098 world championships decks' on the back there was spelling mistakes spelling 'every' as 'euery'

my first sign of them being fake was my machoke card which was named machole, fearing the inevitable i turned towards the serebii.net cardex

after looking the cards up on the card dex i realised just how stupid i ended up being as the information was WAAAYYY off, all the cards from 2 of the 3 items i bought had hp ranging from 100-800 and retreat values 6 times greater then what was featured on the cardex.

the booster pack i bought was the closest to legit bunch of fakes i found with 9 out of 10 cards matching the images and information in the cardex except for 1 which had a completely different attack then the site scan.

quality goes some of the fakes are really well made using good card stock(fakes being a slight thinner grade of paper compared to a legitimate card which is closer to a business card thickness) and printing techniques to emulate the originals save for a few which had noticeable blurring on text and images and slightly lighter/darker colours from a duplicate in another pack they were pretty impressively made.


so the moral of this story is if the packaging has windows (cut out sections to see the top cards) check the hp if its in the high 100-800 range the pack is fake, also check for spelling errors

i hope my experence will help you all in avoiding paying for counterfiet cards.

Thanks :)


EDIT: I Mentioned urls being fake i have discovered that i was wrong turns out what i thought was a fake url was infact a legitimate one used for earlier sets 'go-pokemon' the newer boosters use the official site pokemon.com so i apologise if i have mislead anyone
 
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matthew1996

Active Member
Fake cards... the good old days when buyin a pack from an asian store for 2$AUS and having every pokemon with 1hp consecutively to 50hp <3, and also the billions and trillions of spelling mistakes :D
 

PrismaticPrincessAnna

I'll do my Lilliest
I buy NZ$2 pack cards hehe..
They sometimes have mistakes and that..

Like my Altaria card
It says 'Evolve from loudred' with a Swablu pic on it.. LOL :D
 

XX-SHADOW-XX

Sir Aaron's Lucario
hey, my Charizard card my mum bought for me is fake. you can see they photo copied it as the back shines through and it is a shiney but you can see the shine spots where the photo copied it. =-(
 

epic mew

Zorark + mew = death
Take a card with the same artwork and compare it with a fake card, for example mewtwo shiny Blue mewtwo instead of purple FAKE green mewtwo insted? REAL its kinda hard but you can try to identify.
 
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