Not sure if anyone is interested in paper in this forum, but I wanted to pass along some recent info regarding the development of counterfeit cards.

When I was buying into Legacy a couple years ago, a Reddit on bootleg mtg cards was just started and you could look at pictures and detailed reviews of counterfeits. This was useful because I was new to the format and wanted to avoid buying/trading into fakes (which I never encountered, luckily). Commonly available fakes were obvious, even through sleeves at the time.

Fast forward a few years: my deck of legit cards was banned (subsequently sold), and my backup of free-to-play Duels has the plug pulled. I consider buying back into Legacy ANT and check in on the bootleg forum...

Not sure how to describe what I read, without it sounding like an advertisement! People are reporting back successfully using new fakes in sanctioned tournaments. This has big implications as these guys ARE playing Legacy for the same price as Standard. I doubt I would have bought legit cards my first time around if I saw this was going on.

The other update was that US citizens are now part of the supply chain. This is big because they get volume discounts with foreign printers. They filter out defective print runs, thereby increasing quality. Additionally, transactions are faster and cheaper due to reduced shipping constraints.

I think it this new market will soon force deck checks and/or alter the reserve list agreement. Also, it was enough to convince me to stay away from buying back into paper, at the moment.

Obviously, don't recommend illegal activity in this forum. What are your thoughts on this issue?

where can i buy those?

I treat Legacy and Vintage as non-existent formats in paper. It's much easier this way.

Most of my paper play these days is done via Chaos Draft. No need to buy into expensive nonsense, nothing gets banned, and you can sell back the money pulls to fuel more drafts if you're so inclined.

If you are crafty enough I'm sure you can make your own. That is if they don't measure thickness and corner radius cuts and **** like that before the event. I had a couple of Legacy decks that I lost in storage a few years ago. I had not really had a chance to go test them out and that sucked because I had, at least, a few hundred dollars tied up in them. Think I paid like $50 us a piece for a Fastbond or two (with the cool wizard artwork) to cornerstone in my rampy green deck and four Gavony Township's to go with them in a rampy GW deck I built.
.... sigh.

We all know that you can sneak into your momma's room late at night and steal 10 or 20 dollars from her purse and then catch the "D" bus downtown. Then you look for a Latino man names "Martinez", and we all know that Martinez's stuff is Da Bomb! - Tyrone Biggums

For more details on this stuff Google the mtg bootleg sub Reddit. People in that community are currently very open about techniques, and even answer questions one might have.

Basic supply and demand drive the proliferation. People are upset that their cards lose value with counterfeits flooding the market. However, Wizards may not actually care that much about policing legitimate supply. Wizards already made its profit off those old out-of-print products. A dollar spent on legacy or modern cards is a dollar not spent on currently-printed Standard products. So I don't think Wizards will do anything beyond token gestures to curb the counterfeiting of legacy and modern cards.

I tend to agree, and I think it may be healthy for the eternal formats. Taken to the extreme... I would like to see monthly Vintage tournaments pop up as an affordable option.

They tried adding the hologram. But the new counterfeits even do that decently well. I stopped playing paper magic when I saw how easy it was to obtain decent counterfeits for $0.20 to $1.00 each three years ago. It got to the point where my local shop just allowed them in modern Friday Night Magic.

God forbid people play a game for fun affordably right?

One could argue that they are not really counterfeit - just well-made proxies for the real thing.

And paying upwards of 20k$ for a beta lotus to riffle-shuffle in your deck is just... I lack the correct word.

I don't play paper Magic anymore.

The way I see it, wizards isn't in the single sales market, so I guess they couldn't care less about counterfeit cards. So if people pay the entry feel for a sanctioned tournament with counterfeit cards, wizards get their cut and for them its all good. If someone counterfeited standard cards, that could affect wotc's income and Maybe then they'd take measures, but I guess there's no real money to be made in that... So I guess nobody really cares enough to break the status quo.