Upper Deck Entertainment Forums

I was pondering the other day, what exactly is the procedure for dealing with a counterfeit card if found in a player's deck during the course of a tournament? It makes a certain amount of sense to declare it an illegal card and therefore an illegal deck and move forward with that procedure (replace the card, game loss, move on).

But, I wanted to get others' opinions on this topic. Is there any interpretation where this rises to the level of cheating? If the infraction truly is an illegal deck, should this be changed? Is the current penalty enough of a deterrent to buying and using counterfeit cards?

Also, what do you all think of having a counterfeit card workshop for judges? Perhaps this could be a 15 minute presentation at GenCon where Upper Deck would bring real and counterfeit cards and show off the differences and how to spot them. I know that I've been asked by a player to check if some cards they had bought off eBay were counterfeit and I felt ill-prepared to make that call.

Thoughts?

Counterfeit cards were a bigger and more common issue in YGO than other UD games, but you are correct on the action that should be taken. It is an illegal card and they must replace it and start a new game. If they can not replace it and their deck is legal without it, you can remove it from the deck and decklist, but efforts to replace it should be made first.

As far as rising to the level of cheating, If they KNEW it was counterfeit (or worse if they made it them selves) and played with it anyway, then it should be considered cheating.

I love the idea of a counterfeit card seminar but I think in order to really make it effective, they would need to have examples of counterfeit cards. In YGO the quality of the counterfeits ranged from really obvious to ones that could fool more than 50% of the judges. One specific example is there were some that the ONLY thing wrong was the font for the card number and card type, everything else was perfect. I have not seen counterfeits for any of the other games.

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I'd agree with everything Spotsknight said. The important part is to figure out the intent of the player. In all likely hood, cheating in this manner would fairly hard to prove unless you had some past knowledge.

Presentations are always helpful, but like spots said, unless you have some fakes with you, it's something difficult to teach. I've seen a few different fakes for yu-gi-oh and most are done pretty well. Usually the most obvious thing is the typeface being off. The main issue with fakes, is that it can pretty hard to spot fakes from a distance, especially when walking around.

I have seen fakes for other games. Pokemon comes to mind. I remember there were poorly done fakes going around for awhile that were basically stickers ususually stuck to the back and front of a spare Magic: The Gathering card. Of course, this didn't last too long, as they were fairly easy to spot, especially when they were played with for awhile and started peeling apart. I think one of the yu-gi-oh fakes myself and spots found once was done similer to this.

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Go Player ~ 22 Kyu

Just to get this straight i would like to know what to do with those faked cards.
I was judge for magic and we where encouraged to take fake cards and send them in, or destroy them immediately.
What does the UDE wants us to do?

Taking a persons property and destroying it, because you suspect its counterfeit?

!!!!  That could get you in a lot of trouble   !!!!

I'd recommend taking the deck as part of any deck check, photographing the suspected cards, asking the player about the cards, and where he got them.  Advising the player that you think they are counterfeit, and asking him to let you send them in to UDE, including his name address and UDE number, so that the cards can be returned to him if you are wrong.

Just my thoughts....

In the past, after any penalties and repairs are done, we usually just gave the card back to the owner to do as they wish with.

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Go Player ~ 22 Kyu

Counterfeit or not, the card belongs to its owner, we have no right in taking it.  All we can do is enforce that they are not allowed to use it in the sanctioned event. 

I would also ask them a few questions concerning where they purchased the card and send an e-mail to Upper Deck at fit@upperdeck.com with the details.

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Franklin Debrito
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