Hacker News Reader

Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

I remember trying to print out fake magic cards in the late 90s (I picked a non-valuable card). I used two passes: a dye-sub printer with a laser for the black text. It looked great to the naked-eye, but trivial to see the difference due to differing print technology under a microscope. I'm slightly surprised that examination of the CMY pattern in the color wouldn't have been sufficient to identify a fake.

[edit]

Just re-read the post and realized these were identified as fake just from the picture posted online. That makes a lot more sense.

View on HN

In a game where there are rules about deck content, but scarcity around the existence of cards, I don’t see the ethical problem with counterfeiting a card for personal use.

If you add a fifth ace to a deck in the middle of a poker game, that’s cheating. If poker decks were printed without aces but aces were allowed, then why should anyone care how you got these four aces, as long as they were shuffled fairly into the deck? Just play the damn game.

> I don’t see the ethical problem with counterfeiting a card for personal use.

Neither does most of the community. We call it proxying. Of course it's not allowed in sanctioned play because the purpose of sanctioned play is to sell cards, but I've never been around a table in someone's basement who cared that the sol ring I just played is actually a mountain with "sol ring" scribbled on it in sharpie as long as there was no way of telling it from the other cards in the deck, it would be legal for a real sol ring to be in that deck and I played it according to the rules governing sol ring. There are different formats to magic and the one with the most extensive, and therefore expensive, list of permissible cards has competitive decks that run into the tens of thousands of dollars invested (https://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/vintage#paper). If you had to buy all of that every time you felt like playtesting a new deck people simply wouldn't do it.

I never played anywhere that allowed fakes but most players were ok with you taking a otherwise worthless card (hello Lapras my old friend) and marking the face to count as something else in Pokemon or otherwise.

Actual fakes were problematic as you can tell the back of the card apart generally.

Card sleeves are now generally required, at least in Magic the Gathering, because of double sided cards.

I have a (casual, goofy) deck with some proxies and I earnestly cannot tell the difference when they're sleeved.

What we used to do when I was a kid (before online stores were common to use, and had ~4 hours to the closest store selling magic cards so only got a new pack once a fortnight) was to use plastic sleeves for the whole deck. Then you can't really ser from the back if it's a printout or a real card.

Yeah I can't really imagine not using sleeves, any cards left unsleeved got worn out incredibly quickly.

you're going to sleeve it anyways, unsleeved card backs are too easy to mark. I've never played against or with an unsleeved deck in a magic tournament, even a draft.

I'm actually working on an open source digital card game with this in mind.

My favorite digital card games feel half way like scams in that if you really need a rare card for a deck, you can easily spend 50 or 60$ on packs and come up short. It's impossible to just pay 10$ and get the single card I need.

I don't think I'll be able to match the production values of MTG( the cards don't even have art, which is a both a stylistic choice and my own limitations), but I want something self hostable anyone can play.

You may be interested in the excellent rules engine and frontend to MtG. All FOSS and with real cards and art. I can't imagine the "official" games ever being as good.

https://github.com/Card-Forge/forge

this is significant news for me. I don't have the money for cardboard crack or its digital equivalent, and I used to play a lot with apprentice but apprentice didn't actually have a rules engine it just logged every state change and who initiated it and then counted on the players to play correctly. A functioning rules engine and real card art for free might be enough to get me back into the hobby, or at least back to reading articles and goldfishing myself

edit: oh my god it's got an adventure/overworld mode like the old microprose mtg game from back in the 90s. My heart doth soar, thank you so much for pointing this out!

Outstanding!

I played with the Android build for a bit. Still not ideal since it's ultimately uses someone else's IP, but it's very cool.

I hope to get my own prototype up by this summer. The logic is all server side ( to prevent cheating), so you could even roll your own client.

I'm getting ahead of myself, but I imagine a bunch of related projects. Want to play from a Rust cli app, go ahead!

I look forward to playing your game and escaping the nonfree assets (and commercially driven rules changes).

I know that MtG scene in my city plays basically 100% on nicely done proxies ;)

Nobody has an issue with it. The courtesy is that it'd be nice for you to work towards a real deck if you play with it much, but it's not a hard rule or anything.

My understanding is that the inherent rarity of some cards is actually part of the game's balancing. If everyone can have every card (or worse, multiples of every card), then some vaguely game-breaking cards, or combinations of cards — that normally don't matter / aren't theory-crafted, because of their rarity — would suddenly be everywhere, in every tournament deck, creating a "dominant strategy" for the game, in turn necessitating those cards be banned. Even though those cards/combos would have been perfectly fine and fun and not-broken, had they stayed rare.

(Or at least, that's how MtG was originally designed to be balanced; I think this may have changed with MtG Online.)

That's usually balanced more by banning or restricting a card than by rarity. It may have been part of Garfield's early design to use card rarity to limit the meta but it simply doesn't work (instead of limiting the cards it would limit the competitive players to those who can afford the cards). Instead there are multiple formats with different sets of permissible cards, from the most permissible (vintage, which gives access to any card that has ever been printed and is not banned or restricted to 1 copy per deck) to the least (standard, which only gives access to cards from the most recently-printed sets). The deeper the card pool, the more expensive the format as those cards are not reprinted due to their gamebreaking power.

>It may have been part of Garfield's early design to use card rarity to limit the meta but it simply doesn't work

It works with how they imagined the game would sell: somebody in a game group convinced their friends to buy a few packs, they make decks, and play the game as a quick palette cleanser between longer board or roleplaying games. It's also the reason anteing cards was part of the original default ruleset: if people only made decks with a few packs of cards, the game would get stale. So ante meant the cards would rotate through the group and encourage them to alter their decks.

And then it was discovered that it is effective tactic to make money. You could sell all cards in the set for 50 or alternatively you could sell bunch of packs mostly filled with filler for 150 and get people buy quite lot of them to chase the limited set of strong and competitive cards.

Isn't this the "real world" equivalent of "Loot Boxes"? Shouldn't it be somehow regulated as gambling even?

It absolutely is and it absolutely should be. Secondary market is very real and some cards in certain products are expensive there. Something like the "The One Ring" one out of one unique card in MTG is clearly a type of lottery. That card had expected secondary market value in hundreds of thousands if not millions.

To me if we are going to regulate loot boxes, trading cards should be regulated as well. Or at least minors should be banned from buying them.

I thought this is governed by point-buy systems where you have a certain number of points to spend on your deck, and powerful cards just cost more points. Not an MtG player though, and I assume this also varies from play to play.

Now that people are having this discussion, I am remembering I have a family member that plays 40k, and they have both point buy systems and proxies, since the models are so damned expensive and change every four years.

Speaking of 40k, I'm curious if anyone has created a FOSS 40k-alike game, where every unit has a standard 3D-printable model that is itself a FOSS asset.

Not that that'd be too interesting on its own; but it'd almost certainly spawn a community of people creating and sharing derivative works of those standard models. Could be entire apps / package repositories / "character customization engines" built on snapping together standardized unit components like LEGOs and then printing the result.

Not sure about mainline 40k. But for Horus Heresy (official 40k spinoff of an earlier edition) there was an absurd amount of free or borderline free (think 5$ for a set of files to print an equivalent unit box that would have cost you $60 from GW, but you can print as many boxes as you want) community created content for resin printers. Not just units or vehicle models but also mix and match bits similar to what you're talking about (helmets, arms, legs, torsos, weapons, to customize both official and unofficial models). I remember being blown away by how many of the models were on par with or even better than what GW was offering for a fraction of the price. If you had or knew someone with a resin printer you could print 400-500$ armies for 20-30$ of resin. Most of the group I played with had at least half of their army printed out. And in a lot of ways it's "truer" from a hobbyist point of view because instead of buying a box of generic troops from GW and painting them according to their faction you could wildly customize beyond what the official troop boxes came with with printed bits and greebles. Some people came up with really creative and impressive stuff.

I always figured Lego was the way to go here. But Hasbro would never be dumb enough to license those properties.

It would be cool however if someone took a standard Lego set and rearranged the pieces into a number of units. So everyone knew if you wanted a DingleHopper you would buy this kit and get one DingleHopper and three Jiggamadoos, and trade those to your friend for a pair of Whatsits.

There are indeed formats which work this way (https://canadianhighlander.ca/points-list/), but unfortunately the most-played formats (Commander, Standard, Modern..) don't have any such restrictions which means the investment required for competitive play is prohibitively high.

On the other hand, the ridiculous costs mean it's very easy to find like-minded people to play casually with using bootleg cards.

Even canadian highlander is barely an example. That list is pretty small and for most decks it's only blocking a couple cards from being included. A typical deck is around 60% rares.

Oh for sure, if it's about the game then using "counterfeits" is not a problem at all; many proprietary card games (like Uno) can be played using regular playing cards which are a literal dime a dozen or cheaper.

But this isn't about the actual card game though, but the collector's market where grading companies sign off on the authenticity and quality of in this case 30 year old playtesting cards. I feel bad for the people that did get scammed, on the one side they should've known better because these were too good to be true, but on the other they put their trust in the grading company. I hope the grading company gets serious repercussions for letting this pass, surely they of all people should know about the printer dots to determine counterfeits and age?

You definitely don't want actual counterfeits to exist in the game at all. Even if they're for personal use, they'll end up getting into the supply, and someone gets screwed over because they don't know any better. Instead we use "proxies" which aren't meant to be passed off as the real thing, but represent it in-game. They usually have a different art, or a different card back, or some other obvious difference from the real deal.

That would still be irrelevant for the game, it would only be relevant for the traders. The game would still work exactly the same if the model were that you would go to WotC with a specified deck, and they would print it for you, at a standard cost per card, or even if they cost more for more powerful cards. It would kill the trading, of course, but that's entirely unrelated to the actual MtG game.

> In a game where there are rules about deck content, but scarcity around the existence of cards, I don’t see the ethical problem with counterfeiting a card for personal use.

Where there are high prices of cards, any convincing counterfeit would be poor optics. Game play with non-convincing counterfeits is accepted in many places (i.e. proxies).

The problem is that there are many places where non-convincing counterfeits are NOT accepted, which is (at least part of) the reason why there are so many convincing counterfeits now.

In the case of Pokemon or MTG, it's very important that the back of the cards look the same across the years and generations, so that the opponent can't see what the other player is playing. Of course, with MTG people often use card sleeves so it's a bit moot.

Writing the name of the card you want it to be in sharpie on the front of a real (but cheap) card trivially solves this problem for cases where card sleeves are not in use.

Yep this. We should be fighting 'pay to win' systems like this. Afterall the wealthy person who can afford these rare cards will have a natural advantage.

Imagine if dnd was sold in a way that only a few player's handbooks had fireball and if you had it, you could cast it.

Its a shame these systems caught on instead of more ethical systems. I hope Gen Z ends up burying this consumerist junk.

Pokemon is significantly better at this than other trading card games (like Magic):

- The rarest cards in every set are usually just alternate art versions of other, more common cards from the set.

- They release products with more powerful cards that have become popular recently, to increase the supply.

- They release good decks based on what is popular in tournaments at a good price ($25-$40, iirc).

- They release copies of tournament winning decks at a really good price (like, $15 for the whole deck). These are proxy cards—they have a different back, they, don't have foil, the printing isn't as high quality. But if you wanted to try out a good deck, they're incredibly cheap.

TCGs are inherently predatory, but Pokemon seems to realize it's played mostly by kids.

Not just wealthy, but also the charismatic. The couple of weeks when I knew about baseball cards and they were still something anyone cared about, I realized that one of the kids I knew was trying to sweet-talk everyone into trading them one card we had for a few cards he had.

I had no idea what the meaning of the trade was, I just knew that I was probably being tricked, based on the vibes he was putting out. And that was the last time I was interested in loot boxes.

Because part of playing the game for "bring your own deck" competitions is the time/effort/money that went into acquiring the cards. It's as much about "making the best deck you can with the cards you can get your hands on" as it is about just making the best deck you can.

But that effectively just makes it a game about measuring how much disposable income you have.

To put it another way, any 15 year old kid can put in the time and effort to assemble a great deck, but may not have the money. Should that kid not be allowed to compete on that basis alone?

There are different kinds of tournaments. Some of them are setup so the really rare cards aren't even allowed, some put a limit to one (for, like, a black lotus), some disallow them, some are only the current cards, and some you get a set of random cards when you start. There's all kinds of different tournaments, and the ones where you're allowed to use those rare cards work under the assumption they're valid.

To be honest, I haven't been to a MtG tournament in decades, so take that all with a grain of salt. But it should be _relatively_ accurate.

Yup, in video games it's called pay to win nowadays, and it's the exploitative nature of collectible card games with their booster packs etc.

I mean I don't mind so much, I had a MTG period some years ago (we'd play during work breaks) and got two of the same card (one of the Planeswalkers), which appreciated in value to about €35 at the time; I sold them online and recouped a lot of the money I had put into the hobby. That said, I will have a look to see how much that card is worth nowadays <_<.

edit: phew, just a little less than it was ~10 years ago.

Someone else made a subtle assertion that the sponsors of the event expect commerce to occur at the event. I don't have any reason to doubt that's the case.

> I'm slightly surprised that examination of the CMY pattern in the color wouldn't have been sufficient to identify a fake.

If I'm understanding the post correctly, these counterfeit cards were claimed to be from an early playtest which would in fact have been printed on normal consumer/office grade printers and not using a commercial large scale printing process. Some of the fakes are noted to actually have two sets of dots, one set from the original printer and another from whatever was used to make the fakes.

I remember my son really wanting a copy of The Nightmare before Christmas which Disney wasn't selling at the time because, at least then, they regularly let movies go out of print.

I found a "used" copy on AMZN which was obviously a fake with inkjet printing on the box and the disc, metadata on the disc indicating it was a DVD+R, etc.

Served Disney right.

I've gotten new movies on DVD-Rs from Amazon before. Also clearly pirated since they just played the movie when you put it in rather than a forced showing of the FBI warnings &c.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com