Who cares.
Modern bans a lot of stuff, and legacy allows proxies anyway.
Standard and draft are money pits as usual.
It's not like there's any real value to this stuff.
I guess you could win events and sell the prizes later, but I can't be bothered to do so.
Although I do think that buying a few pieces of cardboard a couple of decades ago (and/or paying large amounts of money for them afterwards) should entitle me to some protection against financial loss should said pieces of cardboard ever be acknowledged as pieces of cardboard.
Spending money does not automatically entitle you to protection from financial loss.
Magic cards have uses other than functioning as currency, so your analogy likening them to money is largely without merit. Counterfeiting is ethically wrong but the demand obviously exists. WotC can either meet this demand and profit enormously off of it or deal with the inevitable *****storm of counterfeiting madness that is to come. Evaluating the subject on purely moral grounds does nothing but make you feel better about yourself for being on the 'right' side.
Although I do think that buying a few pieces of cardboard a couple of decades ago (and/or paying large amounts of money for them afterwards) should entitle me to some protection against financial loss should said pieces of cardboard ever be acknowledged as pieces of cardboard.
But it is a moral question. Is counterfeiting morally wrong?
Yes.
Anything else is beside the point.
To which point are you referring? My point was that counterfeiters are going to be a large problem for WotC and the secondary market that supports it as well as players who enjoy the game. WotC asking themselves "Are the actions of counterfeiters morally wrong?" and giving themselves a one-word answer and a pat on the back will accomplish nothing. Only by looking at the situation rationally instead of being morally reductionist about it will they acknowledge and find solutions to the actual problem.
Although I do think that buying a few pieces of cardboard a couple of decades ago (and/or paying large amounts of money for them afterwards) should entitle me to some protection against financial loss should said pieces of cardboard ever be acknowledged as pieces of cardboard.
Spending money does not automatically entitle you to protection from financial loss.
I thought it was obvious by the wording of my post, but I do agree with you.
I agree with banning. Mostly because there's no other way to stop it, aside from printing the RL, which they already said wasn't going to happen.
Banning makes the forces the players to be more diligent when purchasing their cards. That really should be a skill to learn anyway when you're dropping hundreds on card board. I mean what other collectible market just takes things on faith.
Banning people is a way to reduce that problem. These cards are only needed for cheating at tournaments, so severe punishment for that would help a lot.
What other solutions do you offer?
There are no interesting tournaments for these cards, just small ones in rare places.
And regarding the morals things are two-fold; cheating wotc which isn't bad, and cheating other players which is a bit bad, but the tournaments are so few that this is very limited.
The P9 are like the dinosaurs, their value is in hanging on the wall.
But it is a moral question. Is counterfeiting morally wrong?
Yes.
Anything else is beside the point.
In a free market (and even in a capitalist regulated semi-free market like the one we have now) there are enough amoral actors that it's moot. Profit margins are consistently > moral standing every time.
Thus the argument remains - there is more demand then there is supply and amoral actors are counterfeiting and selling to unwitting people who are just trying to meet their natural demand to play the game. It ultimately is not the player's fault for having cards that (unbeknownst to them) are fake, but Wizards for not meeting the demand themselves.
IF a player would spend $100-$300 on a playset of cards that they believe to be real, but it turns out they are counterfeit, then they would have spent that same money to buy the cards from Wizards directly and Wizards would have profited instead of the counterfeiter.
But, since Wizards is not meeting the demand, there is a vaccum - and that is a prime opportunity for amoral counterfeiters to thrive.
(Disclaimer - I'm using your terms here. There is a difference between morals and ethics, counterfeiting is unethical, not immoral)
Meeting demand is a terrible way to manage a wildly successful game that has, to one extent or another, succeeded based on it's collectibility. You always want demand to exceed availability because humans are driven by aspiration whether we know it or not. It is a pressurized water tank, in a way. The supply is the pressure in the tank that allows for the water to reach the demand for that water down the pipeline.
Now, things can be taken too far for sure, and I think that some of you folks feel that the pressure has gotten to dangerous levels such that the game is at risk for a catastrophic failure. Or perhaps pressure has gotten so great that the flow of water where you are is so great that you can't dip your cup in to get a drink I can't say you're wrong because every consumer decides that for themselves. Those of you, however, who see counterfeiting as an inevitable relief valve that keeps the pressure within acceptable limits you are wrong. Counterfeiting is a leak, not a relief valve, and a leak leads to catastrophic failure just as much as over pressure does.
A relief valve regulates pressure and will stop when pressure comes back down to acceptable levels, because if that pressure gets too low then the water won't make down the line. That is what WotC tries to do with things like Masters sets (whether you think they do it well is another thing)- those are relief valves. Counterfeiters, on the other hand, are a leak because they don't give a flying **** how low the pressure gets or how much damage is done to the tank- there are always more tanks (or other products) to punch holes in when one fails.
Those that buy counterfeits are folks who get their water from the leak and are thus tacitly allowing the inevitable damage that the leak will cause to the whole system, because you just want to get yours. Those that stand by with their arms crossed watching the leak, and the people getting water from it, and not caring if it gets exploited, are blaming WotC for letting pressure get to high in the first place. Both those groups might justify it by calling the leak a relief valve because once the water line gets lower than the leak as effectively a relief valve because the leak will stop and the water level gets to what those people see as an acceptable level. What they are both ignoring is that it was not a leak that happened due to over pressure and failure of the tank, the counterfeiters just punched a hole in the tank at a point when the pressure was already high. That made it easier to do and allowed for more flow through the leak, but it was still outside damage that caused it, not internal failure. What they are also missing is that as the counterfeits get better and better that leak is getting bigger and lower in the tank until it is so close to the bottom that the tank just can't maintain any flow and so big that it is impractical to repair.
I could take the metaphor further, but I think I have tortured it enough.
And when prices come back down to a certain level, counterfeiting becomes less profitable, even unprofitable, and it stops. until the pressure builds up again. remember, producing low-quality counterfeits may be cheap and easy, but actually making counterfeits that have a chance in hell of passing as real isn't exactly a cheap startup. It's kind of funny, but this provides the counterfeiters with an incentive to keep prices high- they need to make back their money, and they actually rely on the secondary market to make a profit.
WotC's financial incentive is to reprint. Reprints sell packs, and secondary market prices are irrelevant to WotC's business plan. They have zero investment in the secondary market, and by opening up more formats to players, they can sell a wider variety of products. They already know products like EMA and MMA sell well, so they can do paper Vintage Masters, every few years, and make a killing by keeping the cards desirable without having them be prohibitively expensive.
Or, they can let counterfeiters make all that money instead, while customer confidence erodes and the secondary market becomes a game of "is this potentially a fake that can get me banned" every time you buy a card online. That to me seems like the absolute worst outcome, but as long as the RL and the current reprint policies are followed, that's exactly where the game is heading.
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Cards are game pieces, and should be treated as such, easily replaceable.
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
And when prices come back down to a certain level, counterfeiting becomes less profitable, even unprofitable, and it stops. until the pressure builds up again.
Sorry, I hadn't finished my point. Got tired of typing on my phone and moved to laptop.
Reprints are a relief valve, but they still have to make sure demand exceeds supply, so that valve has to have conservative limits. I think people fail to see how much that their desire and aspiration for that next thing that is out of their reach makes them more interested in that thing- even if they feel frustrated and resentful that they are doing it. WotC can't just open the hose and expect long term viability of the system, it depends on a certain amount of pressure for that to happen. Reprints to the extent that it would make counterfeiting unprofitable would ultimately damage the game in the long run. You and I both feel that a relief valve put in place by WotC is a good way to combat this, where we disagree is how much flow it should allow. You say you want a relief valve put in place by WotC as a good way to combat this, and I don't disagree, but what you seem to be proposing is substantially increasing the size of the outflow pipe, which can't be undone and (IMO) will harm the game in the long run.
Counterfeiters, on the other hand, just want to punch as big and as low of a hole as they can to get what they want, long term viability be damned.
Banning people is a way to reduce that problem. These cards are only needed for cheating at tournaments, so severe punishment for that would help a lot.
What other solutions do you offer?
I think banning in tournaments works if it is for a second or third offense. It would be pretty frustrating to get banned for a first offense when you didn't know your card was counterfeit in the first place.
Also, as Lakanna said above me, WotC's reprint policy is too conservative. If they decided to reprint more cards, they would simultaneously:
1)Make a version of the card which is harder to counterfeit in the case of pre-hologram cards.
2)Put money in their own pocket by increasing consumer incentive to buy sealed product.
3)Lower profit margins for high-quality counterfeiters (which are the ones they should be worried about) by decreasing secondary market value of said cards.
It's really win/win for them if they can find the sweet spot between not pissing collectors off by tanking the secondary market and not pricing players out of the older formats.
I think you guys are overestimating counterfeits in general
I actually think you are correct right now. I have yet to touch a counterfeit that I couldn't pick out with 100% accuracy, and I have seen a couple waves of them. The thing is they are popping up a bit more frequently, and that moves a certain kind of player to start blaming WotC for that happening.
I don't care about fakes either. If it spreads access to the game for people who can't afford the "real" deal, then great! Magic needs MORE players, not exclusivity with absurd prices.
It's a game first and actually playing it will always be 1000x more important to me than Magic finance.
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I think you guys are overestimating counterfeits in general
I actually think you are correct right now. I have yet to touch a counterfeit that I couldn't pick out with 100% accuracy, and I have seen a couple waves of them. The thing is they are popping up a bit more frequently, and that moves a certain kind of player to start blaming WotC for that happening.
I recently had a Liliana of the Veil that I could not tell was counterfeit by handling it. I got a notification from one of the PucaTrade admins that the user that sent it to me had had complaints of sending counterfeits lodged against him so I tested it (it failed the light test), but simply holding it and using it normally it seemed identical to my other LotVs. (Thankfully, PucaTrade refunded me the cost of the card.)
Screw morals. That is (luckily) not what governs the world.
Er... what?
Yes? If you have a question, speak up. "er what" is not a very constructive statement to add to a discussion.
It's something more suited to the debate forum, but I think it's sad if you think morality has no bearing on world governance. Obviously it isn't the only thing that has bearing, but to say it has none is both wrong and makes me feel badly for you if you think that.
I think it's sad if you think morality has no bearing on world governance. Obviously it isn't the only thing that has bearing, but to say it has none is both wrong and makes me feel badly for you if you think that.
Morality is subjective. It used to be that it was considered immoral for two people with different shades of skin to get married, and now that's perfectly fine. A man and a woman living together (even if they weren't a couple or having sex) was used to be considered immoral, now it's fine.
The Bible records that if a man were to die and leave behind a widow - his brother is morally obligated to marry her. Today, we find such an idea silly.
Morality means different things to different cultures and different time periods - thus it is a really poor guidance system to base governance on.
Ethics derived from logical conclusions is much, much less subjective. Governance should be based on ethics, not morality.
Now - all that said - Counterfeiting is unethical. However the fact of the matter is that ethics have no place in a market economy and especially not a Capitalist one where profit margins are the most important factor. Weather or not they SHOULD have a place is irrelevant (I wish Corporations behaved ethically - but they don't)
The fact is that if it is profitable to counterfeit, someone will counterfeit regardless of who gets screwed over. The only way to stop it is to make it unprofitable to counterfeit. The only way to do that is for Wizards to supply the demand themselves.
Unless you can think of another way to make counterfeiting unprofitable. Waving a magic wand and wishing counterfeiting would stop won't make it so.
I see morality as a PROBLEM. An error, a mistake that only exists to make the world worse and keep society back. I see it as archaic, retrograde, ancient and sorely out of date, and I would wish that the few remnants of it that exist in any governing body would simply be extinguished as quickly as possible in the name of progress, cooperation and evolution.
I have seen a lot of really good counterfeits since I've begun playing MtG. Those that have tons of fakes in tournaments should be dealt with according to the tournament rules and regulations. But I have met someone who accidentally bought some too without knowing they were fake - they were new to MtG. I guess it's up to each circumstance on how to deal with them. There is a demand for fake mtg cards because some cards are ridiculously expensive. Logically if you can find an alternative, the consumer will go for what is the lowest price. I don't really mind people who use fakes if it's reasonable or they tell me before hand.
Off-Topic: About morality and ethics, we need both. Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatest President of USA and men said this: "An ethical man knows it's wrong to cheat on his wife, a moral man wouldn't."
Whether we like it or not, we still need morals even if it is subjective.
Counterfeiters, on the other hand, just want to punch as big and as low of a hole as they can to get what they want, long term viability be damned.
Corporations and market actors are mandated by profits regardless of who is hurt. There are many, many, many examples of Corporations knowingly letting a factory defect slide that may kill people - because they factor in that sales will outweigh any lawsuit costs.
Knowing this, how can you possibly expect counterfeiters to 'stop' just because it is unethical for them to counterfeit?
The only way to stop counterfeiting is to make counterfeiting unprofitable. There are only 3 ways I can think of to do that. 1) Increase the cost of business.
Printing quality techniques are getting cheaper and cheaper, which is why we see more counterfeiting now than ever. The only way to increase the cost of business is imposing stricter counterfeiting fines - but the fact is most of these operators act outside of copyright jurisdictions (China being the biggest one) or are slippery enough that they can't be pinned down. 2) Attack the customer base.
This is the same technique used in the 'war on drugs' - attack the customers. This is what happens when you ban players who unknowingly have fake cards. Many of these players have no idea that their cards are fake, and have acted in good faith. They paid full price for the cards and weren't getting them cheap to save money. Really, why should they be the ones punished?
Plus for every one person that gets punished there are probably 10-20 other unwitting customers who are still buying the cards, because there is a huge demand for them. This really doesn't hurt the counterfeiting trade in any way. 3) Reduce their profit per sale.
This really is the only option I can see. By reprinting more, the value of the cards will be low enough that high quality reprints are less profitable. They don't even have to reprint enough to completely crater the collectible value, they just have to print enough that fakes are not worth doing.
If you have any other suggestions on how to reduce counterfeiting, by all means suggest them - but the argument that "Counterfeiting is immoral end of conversation" benefits no one but the counterfeiters.
The analogy to waterflow does accurately describe the problem - counterfeiting IS a leak - but does not do anything to help resolve the problem. The only way to fix the problem is to maintain the pipes and not let the pressure get to the point where the cracks appear in the first place.
I'm emphatically NOT saying that Wizards should "Open the hose and let longterm viability be damned" - they just have to reprint enough that the prices are low enough that counterfeiting is no longer profitable. That can happen when demand is > supply - just not at the extreme we are seeing right now.
Ethics derived from logical conclusions is much, much less subjective. Governance should be based on ethics, not morality.
Uh... ethics is the study of morals. (Or, in some contexts, a synonym for "morals".) To say you want governance based on ethics and not morals implies a misunderstanding of the difference between the two.
Ethics derived from logical conclusions is much, much less subjective. Governance should be based on ethics, not morality.
Uh... ethics is the study of morals. (Or, in some contexts, a synonym for "morals".) To say you want governance based on ethics and not morals implies a misunderstanding of the difference between the two.
The main difference is that morals are more abstract, subjective, and often personal or religion-based, while ethics are more practical, conceived as shared principles promoting fairness in social and business interactions. For example, a politician’s sex scandal may involve a moral lapse (a subjective judgment), while a politician taking money from a company he is supposed to regulate is an ethical problem. But of course, both ethics and morals may have a part in both situations.
When you take a class on ethics you do also study morals (because there are no classes on morals - they are too subjective) but you also learn in those classes what the difference between the two are.
In any event, it does not change the issues regarding counterfeiting. Weather unethical or immoral - market actors care about profits more.
1) The other way to increase cost of buisness is by using better - if more expensive - authentification marks.
this only helps the cards that they print after introducing those new authentification marks. so it basicly does nothing
Oh it does.
As any cards WotC actually "really" cares for are the new ones, as thats what they make money with.
Old cards become something like a painting, its hard to proof its fake or not, especially if its a really good fake, but then, if its such a good fake, for any means in a tournament, nobody has a real problem with that (and WotC doesnt make any money on the 2nd market anyway).
With truly expensive cards you want to grade them anyway, so that again becomes a "proof" system, just like for expensive paintings of other artwork, some kind of expert has to make the judgement call if a card is real or not.
you do realize that you basicly are saying that counterfeits are ok as long as they are good enough, right?
In the end thats the case.
Its like everywhere else.
If you have a fake that does everything so good that nobody will recognize it as fake, it is as good as real.
Like with all fake products, no matter what, as long as nobody KNOWS they are fake, they are for any means "real".
If theres a reason to doubt they are real, you need some form of proof, and that only works if they are not good quality, so in that case, its a pretty clear thing, if you can identify cards as fake in any reasonable way, they are just Proxy cards.
If the card however is a very good copy, theres no reason to doubt the card isnt real to begin with and for that, nobody will have any issue during a tournament, as nobody knows they are fake (maybe not even the player itself).
----
Are fakes ok ? Certainly not.
But in the end, the reality dictates that Proxy cards are only a issue for a "tournament" if they can be identified as such.
Counterfeits are never morally "OK," but a card that is indistinguishable from the official printing might as well BE the real thing. And the odd part is, it only really matters for collectors. I personally would be happy if Wizards decided to reprint Dual Lands with no artwork: just a blank square with the words "Land - <subtype> <subtype> and a pair of mana symbols. Collectors would never want these: they'd be ugly, even offensive to the sensibilities of anyone who loves to collect the cards. But as long as they were legal to play with, a large number of people wouldn't care. Those people are the ones the current reprint policy hurts: people who want the cards, not for "value" or "collectible" purposes, but just to have the cards to play with.
Counterfeiters are tapping into that large, unmet demand. Wizards has the ability to print whatever cards they want: they own the copyrights and they own the IP. Counterfeiters do not have that right, legally, but that won't stop unethical actors from filling an unfilled niche in a market economy. It shouldn't be that way, and it isn't right, but it's true. Declaring something immoral and calling it a day doesn't fix the problem. If you want to hurt counterfeiters, you need to go after their revenue stream, and that means you either somehow convince everyone to not play fakes (good luck!) or you make the changes to the secondary market somehow to make them unprofitable. The only way you can do that is by doing enough legal reprints that the illegal ones aren't worth the cost of doing business.
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Cards are game pieces, and should be treated as such, easily replaceable.
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
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Modern bans a lot of stuff, and legacy allows proxies anyway.
Standard and draft are money pits as usual.
It's not like there's any real value to this stuff.
I guess you could win events and sell the prizes later, but I can't be bothered to do so.
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To which point are you referring? My point was that counterfeiters are going to be a large problem for WotC and the secondary market that supports it as well as players who enjoy the game. WotC asking themselves "Are the actions of counterfeiters morally wrong?" and giving themselves a one-word answer and a pat on the back will accomplish nothing. Only by looking at the situation rationally instead of being morally reductionist about it will they acknowledge and find solutions to the actual problem.
I thought it was obvious by the wording of my post, but I do agree with you.
Banning makes the forces the players to be more diligent when purchasing their cards. That really should be a skill to learn anyway when you're dropping hundreds on card board. I mean what other collectible market just takes things on faith.
And regarding the morals things are two-fold; cheating wotc which isn't bad, and cheating other players which is a bit bad, but the tournaments are so few that this is very limited.
The P9 are like the dinosaurs, their value is in hanging on the wall.
In a free market (and even in a capitalist regulated semi-free market like the one we have now) there are enough amoral actors that it's moot. Profit margins are consistently > moral standing every time.
Thus the argument remains - there is more demand then there is supply and amoral actors are counterfeiting and selling to unwitting people who are just trying to meet their natural demand to play the game. It ultimately is not the player's fault for having cards that (unbeknownst to them) are fake, but Wizards for not meeting the demand themselves.
IF a player would spend $100-$300 on a playset of cards that they believe to be real, but it turns out they are counterfeit, then they would have spent that same money to buy the cards from Wizards directly and Wizards would have profited instead of the counterfeiter.
But, since Wizards is not meeting the demand, there is a vaccum - and that is a prime opportunity for amoral counterfeiters to thrive.
(Disclaimer - I'm using your terms here. There is a difference between morals and ethics, counterfeiting is unethical, not immoral)
Now, things can be taken too far for sure, and I think that some of you folks feel that the pressure has gotten to dangerous levels such that the game is at risk for a catastrophic failure. Or perhaps pressure has gotten so great that the flow of water where you are is so great that you can't dip your cup in to get a drink I can't say you're wrong because every consumer decides that for themselves. Those of you, however, who see counterfeiting as an inevitable relief valve that keeps the pressure within acceptable limits you are wrong. Counterfeiting is a leak, not a relief valve, and a leak leads to catastrophic failure just as much as over pressure does.
A relief valve regulates pressure and will stop when pressure comes back down to acceptable levels, because if that pressure gets too low then the water won't make down the line. That is what WotC tries to do with things like Masters sets (whether you think they do it well is another thing)- those are relief valves. Counterfeiters, on the other hand, are a leak because they don't give a flying **** how low the pressure gets or how much damage is done to the tank- there are always more tanks (or other products) to punch holes in when one fails.
Those that buy counterfeits are folks who get their water from the leak and are thus tacitly allowing the inevitable damage that the leak will cause to the whole system, because you just want to get yours. Those that stand by with their arms crossed watching the leak, and the people getting water from it, and not caring if it gets exploited, are blaming WotC for letting pressure get to high in the first place. Both those groups might justify it by calling the leak a relief valve because once the water line gets lower than the leak as effectively a relief valve because the leak will stop and the water level gets to what those people see as an acceptable level. What they are both ignoring is that it was not a leak that happened due to over pressure and failure of the tank, the counterfeiters just punched a hole in the tank at a point when the pressure was already high. That made it easier to do and allowed for more flow through the leak, but it was still outside damage that caused it, not internal failure. What they are also missing is that as the counterfeits get better and better that leak is getting bigger and lower in the tank until it is so close to the bottom that the tank just can't maintain any flow and so big that it is impractical to repair.
I could take the metaphor further, but I think I have tortured it enough.
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WotC's financial incentive is to reprint. Reprints sell packs, and secondary market prices are irrelevant to WotC's business plan. They have zero investment in the secondary market, and by opening up more formats to players, they can sell a wider variety of products. They already know products like EMA and MMA sell well, so they can do paper Vintage Masters, every few years, and make a killing by keeping the cards desirable without having them be prohibitively expensive.
Or, they can let counterfeiters make all that money instead, while customer confidence erodes and the secondary market becomes a game of "is this potentially a fake that can get me banned" every time you buy a card online. That to me seems like the absolute worst outcome, but as long as the RL and the current reprint policies are followed, that's exactly where the game is heading.
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
Sorry, I hadn't finished my point. Got tired of typing on my phone and moved to laptop.
Reprints are a relief valve, but they still have to make sure demand exceeds supply, so that valve has to have conservative limits. I think people fail to see how much that their desire and aspiration for that next thing that is out of their reach makes them more interested in that thing- even if they feel frustrated and resentful that they are doing it. WotC can't just open the hose and expect long term viability of the system, it depends on a certain amount of pressure for that to happen. Reprints to the extent that it would make counterfeiting unprofitable would ultimately damage the game in the long run. You and I both feel that a relief valve put in place by WotC is a good way to combat this, where we disagree is how much flow it should allow. You say you want a relief valve put in place by WotC as a good way to combat this, and I don't disagree, but what you seem to be proposing is substantially increasing the size of the outflow pipe, which can't be undone and (IMO) will harm the game in the long run.
Counterfeiters, on the other hand, just want to punch as big and as low of a hole as they can to get what they want, long term viability be damned.
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I think banning in tournaments works if it is for a second or third offense. It would be pretty frustrating to get banned for a first offense when you didn't know your card was counterfeit in the first place.
Also, as Lakanna said above me, WotC's reprint policy is too conservative. If they decided to reprint more cards, they would simultaneously:
1)Make a version of the card which is harder to counterfeit in the case of pre-hologram cards.
2)Put money in their own pocket by increasing consumer incentive to buy sealed product.
3)Lower profit margins for high-quality counterfeiters (which are the ones they should be worried about) by decreasing secondary market value of said cards.
It's really win/win for them if they can find the sweet spot between not pissing collectors off by tanking the secondary market and not pricing players out of the older formats.
I actually think you are correct right now. I have yet to touch a counterfeit that I couldn't pick out with 100% accuracy, and I have seen a couple waves of them. The thing is they are popping up a bit more frequently, and that moves a certain kind of player to start blaming WotC for that happening.
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It's a game first and actually playing it will always be 1000x more important to me than Magic finance.
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It's something more suited to the debate forum, but I think it's sad if you think morality has no bearing on world governance. Obviously it isn't the only thing that has bearing, but to say it has none is both wrong and makes me feel badly for you if you think that.
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Morality is subjective. It used to be that it was considered immoral for two people with different shades of skin to get married, and now that's perfectly fine. A man and a woman living together (even if they weren't a couple or having sex) was used to be considered immoral, now it's fine.
The Bible records that if a man were to die and leave behind a widow - his brother is morally obligated to marry her. Today, we find such an idea silly.
Morality means different things to different cultures and different time periods - thus it is a really poor guidance system to base governance on.
Ethics derived from logical conclusions is much, much less subjective. Governance should be based on ethics, not morality.
Now - all that said - Counterfeiting is unethical. However the fact of the matter is that ethics have no place in a market economy and especially not a Capitalist one where profit margins are the most important factor. Weather or not they SHOULD have a place is irrelevant (I wish Corporations behaved ethically - but they don't)
The fact is that if it is profitable to counterfeit, someone will counterfeit regardless of who gets screwed over. The only way to stop it is to make it unprofitable to counterfeit. The only way to do that is for Wizards to supply the demand themselves.
Unless you can think of another way to make counterfeiting unprofitable. Waving a magic wand and wishing counterfeiting would stop won't make it so.
Well said.
Off-Topic: About morality and ethics, we need both. Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatest President of USA and men said this: "An ethical man knows it's wrong to cheat on his wife, a moral man wouldn't."
Whether we like it or not, we still need morals even if it is subjective.
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Corporations and market actors are mandated by profits regardless of who is hurt. There are many, many, many examples of Corporations knowingly letting a factory defect slide that may kill people - because they factor in that sales will outweigh any lawsuit costs.
Knowing this, how can you possibly expect counterfeiters to 'stop' just because it is unethical for them to counterfeit?
The only way to stop counterfeiting is to make counterfeiting unprofitable. There are only 3 ways I can think of to do that.
1) Increase the cost of business.
Printing quality techniques are getting cheaper and cheaper, which is why we see more counterfeiting now than ever. The only way to increase the cost of business is imposing stricter counterfeiting fines - but the fact is most of these operators act outside of copyright jurisdictions (China being the biggest one) or are slippery enough that they can't be pinned down.
2) Attack the customer base.
This is the same technique used in the 'war on drugs' - attack the customers. This is what happens when you ban players who unknowingly have fake cards. Many of these players have no idea that their cards are fake, and have acted in good faith. They paid full price for the cards and weren't getting them cheap to save money. Really, why should they be the ones punished?
Plus for every one person that gets punished there are probably 10-20 other unwitting customers who are still buying the cards, because there is a huge demand for them. This really doesn't hurt the counterfeiting trade in any way.
3) Reduce their profit per sale.
This really is the only option I can see. By reprinting more, the value of the cards will be low enough that high quality reprints are less profitable. They don't even have to reprint enough to completely crater the collectible value, they just have to print enough that fakes are not worth doing.
If you have any other suggestions on how to reduce counterfeiting, by all means suggest them - but the argument that "Counterfeiting is immoral end of conversation" benefits no one but the counterfeiters.
The analogy to waterflow does accurately describe the problem - counterfeiting IS a leak - but does not do anything to help resolve the problem. The only way to fix the problem is to maintain the pipes and not let the pressure get to the point where the cracks appear in the first place.
I'm emphatically NOT saying that Wizards should "Open the hose and let longterm viability be damned" - they just have to reprint enough that the prices are low enough that counterfeiting is no longer profitable. That can happen when demand is > supply - just not at the extreme we are seeing right now.
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You are either mistaken, or have a different perspective context than I am aware of;
http://grammarist.com/usage/ethics-morals/
When you take a class on ethics you do also study morals (because there are no classes on morals - they are too subjective) but you also learn in those classes what the difference between the two are.
In any event, it does not change the issues regarding counterfeiting. Weather unethical or immoral - market actors care about profits more.
Oh it does.
As any cards WotC actually "really" cares for are the new ones, as thats what they make money with.
Old cards become something like a painting, its hard to proof its fake or not, especially if its a really good fake, but then, if its such a good fake, for any means in a tournament, nobody has a real problem with that (and WotC doesnt make any money on the 2nd market anyway).
With truly expensive cards you want to grade them anyway, so that again becomes a "proof" system, just like for expensive paintings of other artwork, some kind of expert has to make the judgement call if a card is real or not.
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In the end thats the case.
Its like everywhere else.
If you have a fake that does everything so good that nobody will recognize it as fake, it is as good as real.
Like with all fake products, no matter what, as long as nobody KNOWS they are fake, they are for any means "real".
If theres a reason to doubt they are real, you need some form of proof, and that only works if they are not good quality, so in that case, its a pretty clear thing, if you can identify cards as fake in any reasonable way, they are just Proxy cards.
If the card however is a very good copy, theres no reason to doubt the card isnt real to begin with and for that, nobody will have any issue during a tournament, as nobody knows they are fake (maybe not even the player itself).
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Are fakes ok ? Certainly not.
But in the end, the reality dictates that Proxy cards are only a issue for a "tournament" if they can be identified as such.
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Counterfeiters are tapping into that large, unmet demand. Wizards has the ability to print whatever cards they want: they own the copyrights and they own the IP. Counterfeiters do not have that right, legally, but that won't stop unethical actors from filling an unfilled niche in a market economy. It shouldn't be that way, and it isn't right, but it's true. Declaring something immoral and calling it a day doesn't fix the problem. If you want to hurt counterfeiters, you need to go after their revenue stream, and that means you either somehow convince everyone to not play fakes (good luck!) or you make the changes to the secondary market somehow to make them unprofitable. The only way you can do that is by doing enough legal reprints that the illegal ones aren't worth the cost of doing business.
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.