Interesting discussion going here, altough it saddens me how few participants we have these days.
One thing that I didn't see anybody pointing out yet is what we all should expect these spikes to cause as secondary effects...
All duals and P9 cards should see a significant uptick. Some are already doing this, but I foresee all of them following. This is basically the same thing that happened when revised duals jumped in 2009, modern staples jumped, Zen Fetches jumped etc. And everytime when stores finally upped their buy-prices, people flooded them with the newly more expensive cards and bought duals and low-end power (Twister, cheaper Moxes, unlimited duals etc.) and when those prices needed to be corrected the expensive p9 started to feel underpriced and allowed people to trade in few Moxen to get an Ancestral Recall or trade their unlimited duals for few betas etc. (And this increase in price will lead some people who were very close to buying Unl P9 pieces to choose CE or ICE versions, leading to incresed demand on those, which is already happening...)
Another effect of these buy-outs is that collectors of old sets, who normally take their time, have accelerated their rate of acquisition, which is mostly why we see the alpha and beta spikes on random cards like Camouflage, which aren't on the reserved list. The market only has limited amount of the 93/94-period cards, so any additional interest will increase the price at this point. There are also some collectors (myself included) who collect some alpha cards just for fun and will gladly sell some formerly bulk Lg rares to finance a new burst of activity.
And last, there's now a major financial redistribution going on. Group of people have pumped propably few hundred thousand bucks to the MtG-market buying reserved-list cards in a few short months, and knowing Magic players, lot of that money will go towards other cards. I know I have sold a lot of high end commnder foils to people, who have sold a stack of cards they had got when first starting playing in the mid 90s. I will naturally put some of the money towards some of my less important collection goals (like set of alpha Kudzu, I would have loved to own twenty years ago for my GR-LD-deck) which can sometimes lead to additional effects on the market...
Lot of the people who have sold their reserved list cards are entrentched players, who already have large collections, so they will put their gains into cards they want, which often are legacy and vintage staples and reserved list cards. This means that I believe strongly that while the reserve buy-outs will most likely calm down in a while, there will be a notable increase across the board in dual lands, power and high end old cards, which will keep going for at least few months after these buy-outs slow down, before the inevitable downtick in value, which usually happens after a price increase, when the market tries to find the new balance betwen supply and demand and the less patient speculators try to unload their copies.
There's also the 'organic' dual value increase caused by legacy GPs, which had already caused some upward pressure towards other legacy staples, so it's hard to say exactly how strong the RL-buy-out effect actually is, but at least we finally will see how many copies of the old cards will find their ways out of the closets and attics of retired players when the market finds the new price equilibrium and those cards start selling again.
As others have stated the card appears to be real from the small sample we get to see. The white 'shadow' is due to how the cards are printed, with white color coming from unprinted cardboard and the four colors being printed seperately on the card. Due to any movement of the print sheet one or more colors can be off-set. In this case the black is offset somewhat. This can be a mark of a fake, but only if you don't see the same offset on other parts of the card (or offsets in another direction). In this case the dot pattern isreally nice and the small amount of black lines match pretty well with what real cards look like. But again whole pics are much more useful for athentication than just details.
Also in my opinion offset cards are more likely to be real than ones that are nearly perfect, due to people not looking too carefully if there are no obvious imperfections, as the OP demonstrated started checking his card much more carefully after noting the irregularity.
I don't want to nitpick on an awesome project, but...
There's another Desert version. One of the 11 versions of the Desert has a small white print dot, which looks (using some imagination) a campfire on one of the dunes. I didn't download the pics, but it looks like you have two of both versions, so maybe having four of each might be even cooler.
Now for something on more positive note...
I've been collecting An cards for the last 17 years and that set is mindblowing. Now I know who has been removing all the signed copies from circulation in Europe. I had to pay some premium for my signed Deserts and Camels (as I collect both). As for the 'Campfire' desert, I can pretty certainly state that it's one of every 11 Deserts that has the dot, as I took bit over 200 AN Deserts and checked the distribution. every 10,8 had the dot. That makes it as rare as the An Mountain.
At least I got most of the big cards in late 90's or early 2000's for my 4x set for relatively cheaply, crazy to imagine the effort you have put into these sets.
I suspect still a further downswing on anything not in high demand, but as the supply isn't that deep, stores and traders will start buying the cheaper stuff up at some point. I know that I've been getting few cheap foils from MCM already. For European buyers there's still a big dip coming on most cards hovering around 30 euros, as lot of buyers want to wait until the price drops below 25 euros and the shipping gets cheaper. There are at least 12 foil rares and few foil mythics around this point. For example, I think that Chrome Mox foils will end up at 24.95 for a while, altough the art is gorgeous, so it might not quite make it. As for other foils there's still some hope, as not too many of the chepaer copies are being bought. Dack, Jace, Karakas and Crypt all went down from Saturday.
I suspect that for MCM users the bottom is still waiting, as lot of sellers update on weekdays, so further supply should be incoming yet and there's still plenty of downward movement going on. So the best period will be during the next week or gamble a bit and wait for three-four weeks to see where the bototm was/is. Propably the best strategy is something betwen these two, get what you absulutely must and cards you identify as underprized soon and wait a while on the rest.
I mainly checked the foils, as I'm tempted to get a foil set of EMA together, but know that I shouldn't...
Most of the checks have already been mentioned, but I still believe that handling the card is the easiest method to find the earlier fakes. So far no new cards with holostamp have been faked to my knowledge. Mainly ecause there just is not enough really expensive cards to fake among the new cards to go through the trouble of getting the hologram material somehow. Fakers also had trouble printing proper width borders, so checking how wide the borders on the card are was one of my ways to check scans for chinese fakes. There are also few bit harder methods, like using publishing software to seperate the color layers and checking for printing angles and checking how many dots per square inch there are.
I haven't had a chance to examine the latest batch of fakes, but I doubt that all these mistakes have been fixed, as after certain quality level all extra work just starts costing fakers more than they can make. Also network with other players and if you find somebody who knows how to check for fakes, ask them to teach it forward. That way we can get as many players to be able to spot fakes as possible, making selling them no longer profitable and solving lot of the problems we now have.
We are also at the point where one can get pretty accurate estimate of the card age by spectroscopy. There isn't a proper off-the-shelf machine able to do this for cards, but the new femto-laser analyzers are already affordable and make only a tiny black dot on the material we want to analyze... The methods are being developed to spot art forgeries fast and should actually be directly usable for cardboard. The machines are aleady below 30K euros from the 2M they used to be eight years back...
How on earth has this thread dropped so far. Hopefully I can breath a dash of life into this again. I just finalized yeasterday a pretty epic trade including 5 Unlimited P9 pieces and one beta P9. Almost felt like it was back to 2004, when I used to do this bit more often.
As some background I was asked to help a local player to sell his Unlimited set so I had lot of nice cards, but lot of them are really hard to move, unless they are in great condition. Another friend, who runs a gaming store has quetly been collecting 2x Unlimited set, he wants to have for his retirement to play with his brother (yep, so as long as condition is similar betwen the two copies he's happy... Store owners can be awesome), so knowing he needed some help to finalize his sets I traded him 19 Unlimited rares, including Timber Wolves, Web, Blaze of Glory and some actually chase cards like Time Walk, Mox Jet and Pearl, Fork, Disk, Armageddon, Lich etc. along with random Unl rares to the few extra pieces of power he has been saving since the last millenium for just these purposes.
So I walked away with an extra Mox Saphire, Mox Emerald and a very nice beta Twister and managed to move about 10 rares that I propably would have had to wait for ages to find a buyer for. My trading partner got to just five cards away from his target and I got some cards I can sell much faster, so the owner of the set should be pretty happy too. While the trade was pretty even, I gained about 200 worth of actually saleable product and have to do less work to reach the owners target in value of sales.
The best part was, while we didn't have Magic players around, there was an older lady buying some board games, who listened about our trade talks. When we started talking about actual prices, her expression was priceless. We actually ended up joking that she might end up jumping us and grapping the collections, as there was more money on the table than her pension is in a year (With almost three full Unlimited sets).
As others have already answered, you most likely have regular revised cards. They had lot more trouble with quality control at the time and older sets had lot of other problems, including the color differences on the backs of the cards. That actually meant that top players at the time always knew when they would be drawing lands or certain key cards, as using sleeves was discouraged (and you only had the clear ones availlable at first. Also it's pretty normal to have random commons to be in great condition than the playable rares, as much larger percentage of them have been played. I personally have over 2k never played revised cards in one of my bulk box, most the Lightning Bolts and Hypnotic Specters have been played, but Stone Rains, Tranquilities and other less often played cards have just been stored for the last 21 years.
The shadow-effect around the card name (and propably around the creature type and artist credits too) comes when one or more of the printing steps is slightly off-set. MAgic cards are printed in five steps, so any changes in print sheet alignment or trouble to position the printing rolls will cause one color to be off-set. White text is result of leaving areas without ink, so any off-sets are easily visible.
If you are still worried there are few tests you can do:
1) the light test. Take a bright light source and put it behind the card. Now compare this to a known real card from the same set. They should let equal amounts of light through. Just note that any wear and darker colors will affect how much light is let through. So checking the text box is always easiest.
2) Loupe or HD scan tests. MAgic cards use very definite print patterns, some which are pretty rough to replicate well. Mana symbols should have different texture than the rest of the card (there are clear dots on the symbols) The ink pattern is another issue, but as you seemed to have two cards somewhat off-set, there will be some differences on the rosette-pattern. The third and often easiest area to check are the white borders. These should be completely white, with no specs of different colored ink and finally the straight black lines around the art and text box should be continuous lines, not a row of seperate black dots.
3) Edges of the card under magnification. Magic card stock is laminated from two sheets and the glue betwen the the layers is blue or on few special products black. With good magnification it's possible to see this blue layer on edges and corners.
4) card size test. Lot of the older fakes were cut less than professionally, so the card size was bit different. Take a random black bordered card and put it behind the Atog. If the black edges show clearly at some edge or multiple edges the tested card is smaller than regular. Then put the AtoG behind the known real card. If white shows, it's larger than a known real card... This should be pretty basic.
There are multiple othe rtests, but those four are pretty simple to do and spot most fakes without problems. As for the different feel of the card stock, compare it to other near mint revised cards. The card stock ages and these days printers use bit different chemicals and the process itself has been changed a bit, making comparing new and old cards bit challenging.
5
One thing that I didn't see anybody pointing out yet is what we all should expect these spikes to cause as secondary effects...
All duals and P9 cards should see a significant uptick. Some are already doing this, but I foresee all of them following. This is basically the same thing that happened when revised duals jumped in 2009, modern staples jumped, Zen Fetches jumped etc. And everytime when stores finally upped their buy-prices, people flooded them with the newly more expensive cards and bought duals and low-end power (Twister, cheaper Moxes, unlimited duals etc.) and when those prices needed to be corrected the expensive p9 started to feel underpriced and allowed people to trade in few Moxen to get an Ancestral Recall or trade their unlimited duals for few betas etc. (And this increase in price will lead some people who were very close to buying Unl P9 pieces to choose CE or ICE versions, leading to incresed demand on those, which is already happening...)
Another effect of these buy-outs is that collectors of old sets, who normally take their time, have accelerated their rate of acquisition, which is mostly why we see the alpha and beta spikes on random cards like Camouflage, which aren't on the reserved list. The market only has limited amount of the 93/94-period cards, so any additional interest will increase the price at this point. There are also some collectors (myself included) who collect some alpha cards just for fun and will gladly sell some formerly bulk Lg rares to finance a new burst of activity.
And last, there's now a major financial redistribution going on. Group of people have pumped propably few hundred thousand bucks to the MtG-market buying reserved-list cards in a few short months, and knowing Magic players, lot of that money will go towards other cards. I know I have sold a lot of high end commnder foils to people, who have sold a stack of cards they had got when first starting playing in the mid 90s. I will naturally put some of the money towards some of my less important collection goals (like set of alpha Kudzu, I would have loved to own twenty years ago for my GR-LD-deck) which can sometimes lead to additional effects on the market...
Lot of the people who have sold their reserved list cards are entrentched players, who already have large collections, so they will put their gains into cards they want, which often are legacy and vintage staples and reserved list cards. This means that I believe strongly that while the reserve buy-outs will most likely calm down in a while, there will be a notable increase across the board in dual lands, power and high end old cards, which will keep going for at least few months after these buy-outs slow down, before the inevitable downtick in value, which usually happens after a price increase, when the market tries to find the new balance betwen supply and demand and the less patient speculators try to unload their copies.
There's also the 'organic' dual value increase caused by legacy GPs, which had already caused some upward pressure towards other legacy staples, so it's hard to say exactly how strong the RL-buy-out effect actually is, but at least we finally will see how many copies of the old cards will find their ways out of the closets and attics of retired players when the market finds the new price equilibrium and those cards start selling again.
1
Also in my opinion offset cards are more likely to be real than ones that are nearly perfect, due to people not looking too carefully if there are no obvious imperfections, as the OP demonstrated started checking his card much more carefully after noting the irregularity.
1
1
1
There's another Desert version. One of the 11 versions of the Desert has a small white print dot, which looks (using some imagination) a campfire on one of the dunes. I didn't download the pics, but it looks like you have two of both versions, so maybe having four of each might be even cooler.
Now for something on more positive note...
I've been collecting An cards for the last 17 years and that set is mindblowing. Now I know who has been removing all the signed copies from circulation in Europe. I had to pay some premium for my signed Deserts and Camels (as I collect both). As for the 'Campfire' desert, I can pretty certainly state that it's one of every 11 Deserts that has the dot, as I took bit over 200 AN Deserts and checked the distribution. every 10,8 had the dot. That makes it as rare as the An Mountain.
At least I got most of the big cards in late 90's or early 2000's for my 4x set for relatively cheaply, crazy to imagine the effort you have put into these sets.
1
1
I suspect that for MCM users the bottom is still waiting, as lot of sellers update on weekdays, so further supply should be incoming yet and there's still plenty of downward movement going on. So the best period will be during the next week or gamble a bit and wait for three-four weeks to see where the bototm was/is. Propably the best strategy is something betwen these two, get what you absulutely must and cards you identify as underprized soon and wait a while on the rest.
I mainly checked the foils, as I'm tempted to get a foil set of EMA together, but know that I shouldn't...
3
I haven't had a chance to examine the latest batch of fakes, but I doubt that all these mistakes have been fixed, as after certain quality level all extra work just starts costing fakers more than they can make. Also network with other players and if you find somebody who knows how to check for fakes, ask them to teach it forward. That way we can get as many players to be able to spot fakes as possible, making selling them no longer profitable and solving lot of the problems we now have.
We are also at the point where one can get pretty accurate estimate of the card age by spectroscopy. There isn't a proper off-the-shelf machine able to do this for cards, but the new femto-laser analyzers are already affordable and make only a tiny black dot on the material we want to analyze... The methods are being developed to spot art forgeries fast and should actually be directly usable for cardboard. The machines are aleady below 30K euros from the 2M they used to be eight years back...
1
As some background I was asked to help a local player to sell his Unlimited set so I had lot of nice cards, but lot of them are really hard to move, unless they are in great condition. Another friend, who runs a gaming store has quetly been collecting 2x Unlimited set, he wants to have for his retirement to play with his brother (yep, so as long as condition is similar betwen the two copies he's happy... Store owners can be awesome), so knowing he needed some help to finalize his sets I traded him 19 Unlimited rares, including Timber Wolves, Web, Blaze of Glory and some actually chase cards like Time Walk, Mox Jet and Pearl, Fork, Disk, Armageddon, Lich etc. along with random Unl rares to the few extra pieces of power he has been saving since the last millenium for just these purposes.
So I walked away with an extra Mox Saphire, Mox Emerald and a very nice beta Twister and managed to move about 10 rares that I propably would have had to wait for ages to find a buyer for. My trading partner got to just five cards away from his target and I got some cards I can sell much faster, so the owner of the set should be pretty happy too. While the trade was pretty even, I gained about 200 worth of actually saleable product and have to do less work to reach the owners target in value of sales.
The best part was, while we didn't have Magic players around, there was an older lady buying some board games, who listened about our trade talks. When we started talking about actual prices, her expression was priceless. We actually ended up joking that she might end up jumping us and grapping the collections, as there was more money on the table than her pension is in a year (With almost three full Unlimited sets).
Trading can be loads of fun.
1
The shadow-effect around the card name (and propably around the creature type and artist credits too) comes when one or more of the printing steps is slightly off-set. MAgic cards are printed in five steps, so any changes in print sheet alignment or trouble to position the printing rolls will cause one color to be off-set. White text is result of leaving areas without ink, so any off-sets are easily visible.
If you are still worried there are few tests you can do:
1) the light test. Take a bright light source and put it behind the card. Now compare this to a known real card from the same set. They should let equal amounts of light through. Just note that any wear and darker colors will affect how much light is let through. So checking the text box is always easiest.
2) Loupe or HD scan tests. MAgic cards use very definite print patterns, some which are pretty rough to replicate well. Mana symbols should have different texture than the rest of the card (there are clear dots on the symbols) The ink pattern is another issue, but as you seemed to have two cards somewhat off-set, there will be some differences on the rosette-pattern. The third and often easiest area to check are the white borders. These should be completely white, with no specs of different colored ink and finally the straight black lines around the art and text box should be continuous lines, not a row of seperate black dots.
3) Edges of the card under magnification. Magic card stock is laminated from two sheets and the glue betwen the the layers is blue or on few special products black. With good magnification it's possible to see this blue layer on edges and corners.
4) card size test. Lot of the older fakes were cut less than professionally, so the card size was bit different. Take a random black bordered card and put it behind the Atog. If the black edges show clearly at some edge or multiple edges the tested card is smaller than regular. Then put the AtoG behind the known real card. If white shows, it's larger than a known real card... This should be pretty basic.
There are multiple othe rtests, but those four are pretty simple to do and spot most fakes without problems. As for the different feel of the card stock, compare it to other near mint revised cards. The card stock ages and these days printers use bit different chemicals and the process itself has been changed a bit, making comparing new and old cards bit challenging.