You can buy a very convincing Black Lotus for $6 on aliexpress. I’ve thought about getting one and mounting it on the wall in a picture frame for fun.
I played Lorcana for a bit then realized you can get cards that look identical under a jewelers loupe for 1/10 of the price and I got out of it. A few months later the market price for all the cards cratered. I wonder why?
For many people not paying the artists is less fun, for nearly everyone paying 10x the price is not fun. Obviously a brillian game might overcome this but it can easily cause someone to move on.
This is a false dichotomy. You don't need to acquire the expensive cards to play the game. I enjoyed Star Wars: CCG back at the turn of the millennium even though I didn't have any Yoda, Vader, Luke, etc. cards. I think I had a Chewbacca, maybe? Yeah, I traded with a neighborhood kid for it, and later his mom called my mom to try to take back the trade.
right? Net Runner specifically allows proxy cards at events and even give you pdfs to print you own cards. Owning random expensive cards is no way to play a fair game.
I have a three Gaea's Cradles, been thinking about selling them and playing with proxies. Do you think now is the time? Especially with a possible recession/lay-offs?
A couple years back one of the original Pokemon TCG designers was outright printing off fakes of pre-release cards and peddling them with the help of a western company, and people only found out because they decoded printer patterns and found out they were printed with a recent printer.
A lot of the really expensive cards are also foils, which for the card stock they use for English cards ends up warping quite a bit over time. I knew multiple people who refused to buy foils ever because of this.
I used to be deep into the competitive MTG scene. It goes deeper than this. Everyone knew that foils caused warping, which would lead to different theories of the “best way” to foil your deck to get an edge, while also being plausibly deniable that you were essentially marking your deck with foils if someone called a judge on you.
At the high level MTG is as much about rules lawyering as it is about actual skilled play, if you’re curious to learn more about this aspect of the game go learn about the 1997 pro tour with Mike Long, who infamously took the win by mind games and causing his opponent to concede when Long had no path to victory.
I've only played at the lowest possible levels (at local card shops), so my experience is probably not super representative of the competitive scene. Pretty much everyone I played with was more concerned about keeping their cards in good condition than trying to angle-shoot their way to a free win (getting a few more bucks of store credit isn't enough motivation to ruin one's standing in what was essentially a social community).
I'm a bit more familiar with rules lawyering mostly because incidents where people got wins from it are somewhat common topics that people would bring up for fun. Someone might play a Griselbrand deck, and someone else would ask if they knew about the Borborygmos incident that led to the rule where naming a card doesn't require literally knowing the exact name, etc.
Happens to other collectibles too. There are some Games Workshop miniatures that are made in resin, and you can tell the clones appart because they use far better resin, which bends less. For some old plastic molds it's the same thing: You get much better cast out of bootlegs.
You can get plastic NFC cards. I bet there are companies that will print and program them.
It must be possible to have flexible paper-like cards because my city has one-time tickets with NFC. Game would be nicer with card stock and not rigid plastic.
Altered attempted something similar. QR codes that add a digital copy to your digital collection. The physical card is just a proxy of the digital one. To enter tournaments or trade a card you have to own/trade the digital one. There was an official print service to order physical copies of the digital cards.
Fakes don't actually hurt the game. Just print out whatever cards you want and play with them, nobody is hurt and you don't pay usury prices to a company literaly printing money.
The idea is more for collecters, get something hard to clone that supports public key crypto like the more recent NXT miifare cards. Program them with a unique number and key each and you could do remote verification that someone holds the card in question. Registries of card location etc. hell if you are clever you could invent a little database and state machine to load on the card to store it's values and logic in electronic access form.
Is hardware safe? I mean the circuit has to be correct to work kind of thing. I know embedded people do use AI to reverse engineer things/go through a lot of logs. I have also heard about AI designed chips but seems you have more regulations to go through for selling the resulting hardware.
I played Lorcana for a bit then realized you can get cards that look identical under a jewelers loupe for 1/10 of the price and I got out of it. A few months later the market price for all the cards cratered. I wonder why?