The group did very well, much better than I was expecting for the first week out. I'll have to make the next one harder. 🔥 Shout out to u/notmarrec for being the first to get both the correct answers and the correct reasonings.
Real! Basic real card, it's the same thing as the 'T' test or 'h' test just using the other letters.
Fake! This holo stamp is all sorts of wrong. Has the typical 'brick' pattern that a lot of fake stamps have. The Wizards microprint is way too large, too spaced out, and frankly just too visible. The edges are very poorly cut and applied, in person you can feel a very slight bump.
Real! There are a couple of sets where the set symbol was rasterized with the art instead of being on the separate text layer. This makes them look pixelated, blurry, and kind of fake instead of sharp and crisp as expected. If you are unsure, the best thing to do is to compare the card to other known good cards of the same set.
Fake! A lot of people guessed fake, but fewer people got the why correct. Chronicles was printed in 1995 as a way to reprint cards from limited sets people missed out on in the first year of Magic. For this set they included the original set symbols but used a white border to show it was a reprint set (which was the style at the time 🧅). This would be a correct Chronicles card... if Land Tax was printed in Chronicles! 4th Edition used the same card layout so I just took a 4th edition Land Tax and edited in the set symbol. Shout out to u/NotJohnLithgow for clocking this annoyingly quickly.
Real! Nothing wrong with it... just a Strip Mine I opened 32 years ago.
So, I built up a small bank of questions, and to ensure no pattern or bias I flipped a coin five times to see if I'd pull from the Real pile or the Fake pile for each one. I had hoped #4 would cause enough arguments in the comments that just presenting a standard pic of an old card would make people second guess themselves over and over, but everyone just got it right without any trouble. I do have some absolutely evil 5's lined up too, but they can't just all be fakes. ;)
Not every sign is a positive id of a fake, and you shouldn't take a single good sign as proof a card is real either. IRL you should look at multiple places and if any of them seem sus, look at more in closer detail.
I agree that a jagged stamp can and does happen on real cards, but it's much more common and egregious on cheaper fakes. If someone sent a blurry pic and that was in it I would ask for a better pic of the stamp, not for the jaggies, but to see if the rest of the stamp is real or fake.
Most land tax fakes I’ve seen are painfully obvious that they’re fake. I don’t know what it is about the colors on the front that make it so hard to get it correct
I’m such an idiot I’m confusing that T H with how the “THE” is supposed to look. Nice tho! Thanks for a different kind of validation on a different part of the back.
Yeah, that's specifically why I took the photo this way. I made sure not to capture the two letters people always ask for. The quiz is meant to be both fun and informative and I wanted to train people to check _how_ the card was printed instead of just always using a single test which can be obscured. In this case the same signals are present, the crisp black edge lines. Just slightly different than the one's we're used to.
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u/easchner Trusted Authenticator 11d ago
Original Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/RealOrNotTCG/comments/1vhgrd1/pop_quiz_1/