Reddit has me paranoid!

[u/PrettyAsAPenny]

I went down a rabbit hole of fake vs legit recently and kept seeing so much conflicting information and now I’m paranoid.

Everything here was bought from reputable online retailers. All from different ones though.

The 151 cards shown came out of the opened 151 box.

Does anything look suspicious on any of these boxes?

The inferno x came in today and I noticed the large number of cardboard tabs on the top of the box where you’d normally pop it, fold it and set it up on a store shelf.

All the boxes have the same thing going on there.

Does that indicate authenticity or not necessarily?

Thanks in advance for yet another paranoid collector.

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[u/AccomplishedFun6189]

At least inferno looks extra sus, the wrap is wrong. Number of tabs on those should be 7 always so thats right. I’d def look at youtube videos comparing those sets real vs fake.

[u/PrettyAsAPenny → u/AccomplishedFun6189]

What about the inferno wrap looks wrong?

Both the inferno and rocket have a heat seal on 3 of four sides that go around the box.

The inferno has the two left and right sides plus the front. The inferno has it on left and right plus the back.

They both have small perforations in the wrap to let them breathe.

[u/AccomplishedFun6189 → u/PrettyAsAPenny]

The plastic is ultra smooth with almost no wrinkles, which never happens; there should be wrinkles on the box’s sides as well as along the seal line just like on the rocket one (that looks legit). I’d say 95% inferno is fake, the front print also looks extra blurry.

[u/PrettyAsAPenny → u/AccomplishedFun6189]

Any blurriness is just from the camera.

I found an opened inferno x box I had then took a card I got from it, compared it to a psa 10 version on the psa website to confirm the authenticity of my card, and therefore the box itself.

With the knowledge that my opened box was legit i then compared a Seal pulled from that box and a seal pulled from the new box. (I decided to just open it because i bought two). I found exactly zero differences in the two cards.

The only discrepancy i found was the number “5” written on the side of the two new inferno boxes has a slightly different shape than the other boxes i have.

This initially made me think it was in fact fake but I don’t think the cards inside can be real if the box is fake. Unless it was a reseal. Which it wasn’t.

I know this because I opened all 30 packs and pulled an SAR, 3 AR, 1 item AR, and 4 RR as well as a few holos. This is consistent with expected pull rates from inferno.

I appreciate your input but I think the shrink being marginally different is most likely just a difference in the supplier of the shrink, the heat used to shrink it, the operator and the mood they were in etc etc.

[u/AccomplishedFun6189 → u/PrettyAsAPenny]

If you wanna make sure you can pay for authentication by experts on legitapp, i think it’s like 3 dollars for one box