I bought two Power Artifact on MKM as Near Mint copies, but the black border seems really odd, i haven't seen such borders before.
The cards seem to be in a very good shape, they have no surface scratchings, bendings, feel like boosterfresh, but the coloring of the border looks so weird, with this kind of black/white structure, that i ask myself:
Is this normal, if not, can they still be considered Near Mint? Or could they be fake?
Interesting. The dot patterns, printing elsewhere look good to me. I'll check out my copies of Power Artifact later, to see if I notice something similar.
IMO, the idea that a border is pure black, no other colors of any sort, is just not as absolute as what we've been almost indoctrinated to believe, and there is some variance, or some variations. By variations, assume we're talking about cards that have not become inflicted with a printing error of some kind - colors running light, or dark, bleeding, other funky things like that, but instead are talking about cards that have had the image(s) printed correctly color wise (if that makes any sense).
The cards seem to be in a very good shape, they have no surface scratchings, bendings, feel like boosterfresh, but the coloring of the border looks so weird, with this kind of black/white structure, that i ask myself:
Is this normal, if not, can they still be considered Near Mint? Or could they be fake?
Here are some pictures from handy:
http://i.imgur.com/1MoqUrn.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/C1CEbrb.jpg (This one shows the Structure of the borders very good)
http://i.imgur.com/uWCOon5.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/alBiRdG.jpg
1200 dpi scans (WARNING: 4 MB!):
http://i.imgur.com/n1GQhGU.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/485LX12.jpg
Thank you for your comments.
IMO, the idea that a border is pure black, no other colors of any sort, is just not as absolute as what we've been almost indoctrinated to believe, and there is some variance, or some variations. By variations, assume we're talking about cards that have not become inflicted with a printing error of some kind - colors running light, or dark, bleeding, other funky things like that, but instead are talking about cards that have had the image(s) printed correctly color wise (if that makes any sense).
For example, in the thread concerning the authenticity of a Force of Will from Alliances, there are some very good images of the card close up. Of particular interest is this image of the mana symbols on the FoW in question, which also shows the black border. The image clearly shows the a consistent turquoise dot pattern in the border of the card, which appears to be part of the card, and not a result of the picture being compressed into a jpeg as others have speculated when I brought this pattern up.