This is something that's pretty well known in the magic the gathering community. Some of us who trade in older cards to play certain formats have jeweler's loupes to check this stuff.
you don't want it causing a complication with prize money or etc if you try to play in a regional tournament and get dqed by this I assume
Is there a legitimate reason not to, or is it just a money grab?
I really don't understand why no legislation is targeting this market that is exactly like loot boxes.
maybe a counterfeit that's also from the 90s would have a similarly interesting story, but one from last week is much less interesting than the possibility of a beta card from the first set of a game inherently, and so less collectible.
There's tournaments for _all kinds_ of games that don't require loot-box purchases to compete, it's not exactly an unknown problem.
It doesn't solve the problem, but I thought I saw something about tournaments allowing proxies for a card that's present but in unplayable condition.
MTG tournaments become a test of playing skill, deck building skill, and the skill to have enough money to buy important limited production cards. It is what it is, but sometimes it feels gross.
Reproductions can be fine, but anyone can do them on the cheap.
Personally, having used printed paper inserted over top of a real card, I'd rather stick with real cards. Otherwise, I'd just go digital in this day and age.
(And I can also vouch at the quality of proxies that I bought for dirt cheap, so that I could keep my real cards at home. I bought from a few different companies, and some are very good, some not so much.)
When it comes to trading, you don’t want to accidentally pay a premium for something you won’t be able to resell. Lots of players view trading as, more or less, leasing cards. Valuable cards typically have fairly stable prices (though there are notable exceptions). Buy for a dollar sell for somewhere between 0.75 and 1.25.
(I personally think that if you want to force everyone to pay for product, play sealed or draft. Then everyone's on an even playing field budget wise, and it's more interesting than just net-decking. I'm sympathetic to the fact that WoTC needs to make money, I'm not sympathetic to their approach of chasing whales and making large chunks of the game basically inaccessible by their definition of 'legitimate play')
There's cheaper strategies in most formats though that you can still get wins with, Red Aggro decks are usually pretty cheap to build and have a decent win rate. You'll rarely place highly in tournaments with it but that's true for most people and most decks.