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Comment by ohithereyou | Hacker News Reader

The problem of rising card prices in Magic: The Gathering, especially for cards on the reserve list[1] has lead to increasingly good reproductions of these cards[2]. Some are so good that, in protective sleeves that are commonly used, you wouldn't notice from across the table, and in some cases, you wouldn't notice without a light test or jeweler's loupe.

So the solution to WoTC refusing to reprint these cards is for people to do it for them.

[1] https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Reserved_List, despite the fact that WoTC claims they don't consider the secondary market

[2] Calling them reproductions is being charitable. At best, they're replacements when people use them in decks and are honest about them, and at worst, they're counterfeit when people try to pass them off to others as legitimate for a profit.

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As the quality of counterfeits improves, I wonder: would you care if your opponent openly used counterfeits? Is the most important part of your enjoyment of M:tG that you and your opponent actually bought or chanced upon the real cards, or is your enjoyment primarily about the gameplay and deck building? If the latter, I wouldn't care where and how my opponents got their cards, as long as they looked good enough and weren't distractingly badly printed.

I understand WoTC going after counterfeits, because it's their business. But players? Who cares how much money your opponent actually spent, as long as you're both enjoying the game? This is WoTC's problem, but it shouldn't be the players'.

As a player I would care because now I'm at a disadvantage unless I also give in and use counterfeit cards. At that point there is no point in any buying any real cards!

There is a reason - DCI (the entity that sanctions organized play of Magic: The Gathering) requires genuine, WoTC produced cards. So if you care about playing competitively with the DCI then you need to buy real cards.

Doesn't that just transfer the disadvantage to your buying power?

But you're always at a disadvantage against someone with a lot of money to spend on genuine cards.

Allowing anyone to use counterfeits tends to level the playing field: just print the cards you want yourself (or buy them cheap, hopefully not at the same price as the real deal!). This also means M:tG turns into something more about skill ("I know how to build an effective deck and play well with it") than about money. I know which game I'd want to play ;)

You’ll always be at a disadvantage if you’re trying to play competitive constructed without a budget. But that’s not what most MTG gameplay is. I agree constructed staples are priced too highly, but most gameplay is friendly matches, and drafting, where the game tends to be more about fun than either skill or money. You’re also forgetting one element of skill that isn’t always restricted by money, brewing. A budget swans deck has won a tournament.

The most expensive cards like the Lotus aren't legal in most formats. A format is like a league with specific rules.

The Vintage/type 1 format does allow lotuses, in quantities of one. Most non-wizards Vintage tournaments allow a set number of proxy cards, usually around 7-10 because of the Power Nine (Lotus and eight other ridiculous cards).

For most players the issue is recurring costs of new decks from rotation/metagame, or buying landbases if they play Modern/Legacy. Reprinting issues aren't limited to reserved cards.

>Lotus and eight other ridiculous cards

Well, Lotus, 7 other ridiculous cards, and then Timetwister.

Play a game in which 4x Timetwister is allowed. See how broken it can be.

It's not "take an extra turn" good, but Jesus does it solve a lot of problems. P9 inclusion warranted IMO.

Twister's definitely not as good. I play storm though, so it's still a bonkers card.

Add Time Walk to the list of cards that are wildly overrated on the P9. A considerable portion of the time it is just a zero mana cycler. Sol Ring is infinitely more powerful.

I've never cared if my opponent openly used non-genuine cards.

It's common when prototyping decks, before buying the singles, to have several cards proxied (WoTC calls these play test cards) - replaced by a representation of the card but not the actual card. There are several ways to do this - sharpie on another Magic card, a small piece of paper sleeved over a bulk common so that it's clear what the card is, or specific, sleeved playing cards.

The format I typically play, Commander, is generally a casual format. My rule (and the rule of the playgroup I'm in) is that any number of cards can be proxied as long as the card clearly indicates what it is and is not designed to deceive such that we can clearly see the board state.

Another format I play, Cube Draft, is like a living card game - there is a pre-determined set of cards that are drafted from. The cube I have is considered a "Power Cube", in that it contains several powerful and expensive cards. It is an all-proxy cube. Every card, except for basic lands which are added later, is a sheet of paper that is laser printed to contain an image of the card it represents, slipped in a sleeve in front of a bulk common.

We used to just take lands and write the names of cards we didn’t have on them in marker when playtesting or playing for fun.

There's a bit of a Naked Emperor situation going on right now. Since Chinese manufacturers can make passable proxies (counterfeits), most people don't notice them from across the table and under two sleeves. Among people who do notice, most of them don't care. Among people who do notice and care, there's still a bit of nervousness about the whole thing because they know that if everyone using (knowingly or unknowingly, e.g. because they were sold one) proxies got called out, they'd be afraid of the number of people who'd be disqualified and it would undermine a lot of faith in the secondary market.

The truth of the matter is, a lot more people are playing counterfeits at tournaments than everyone'd be ready to admit. Hell, a pro player got disqualified recently for playing with one, despite pros getting their cards from sponsors.

I was able to make very good counterfeits in the late 90s (I actually never sold any, just a bunch of friends had a competition to see who could make the best fake):

1) Erase the surface of a real MtG card (using one of those erasers that were roughly the consistency of thick gelatin it could be done in about an hour).

2) Scan the card to be duplicated

3) Split out the black channel using photoshop

4) Pattern fill the missing black channel in photoshop. Hand fixup any obvious bad details

5) Print the color on a dye-sublimation printer

6) Print the black on a laser printer

7) Put a thin plastic coating on top

Step #7 was the trickiest manual step, but could be omitted if the card was going to be in sleeves.

I was never able to get the right "feel" by making my own two-ply cardboard, but somewhat surprisingly the closest I got was my first attempt of two index cards rubber-cemented together.

Note also that Revised-edition cards lacked any full bleed, and the text backgrounds were quite simple. It might be harder today.

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