Liar, Liar?

What do you do when you see a card like this for a player you are collecting?


Numbered to 500, no prime jersey designation

Personally, for me, I swear a bit. After I am done cursing the existence of douchebags who make living off of this souless profession, I simply avoid it like the clap. Of course, there are people that don’t. Despite it being a "too good to be true" patch, they go right for it while wondering why they could never be lucky enough to pull a patch like that.

The bad part is that two things are preventing fake patches from being easily spotted and avoided these days. First off, the motherfuckers are monitoring collector boards to know what we look for in fake cards. Perfectly centered logo patches on high numbered cards are obvious, so they started doing off centered logo patches on cheap low numbered cards. One guy even stole pictures of pulls from the box break boards on the forums and sold those scans on eBay. What a shit eating ass spelunker! Granted, when the high bidder got his cards, he was probably pretty pissed.


No numbering listed, no prime jersey designation

The second part is actually a good/bad thing. Today, with the rising cost of boxes and demand for multicolored patches, manufacturers are starting to put amazing cards into circulation without changing numbering on the cards. Logo patches, laundry tags, and sleeve patches can all be found on numbered patch cards out of 1, all the way up to as high as 100. It’s a bad state for people who know what can be done to cards, but also cool, because now you can actually pull cards like the fakes out there. The worst thing is that now its much tougher to tell what is the fake patch and what is the real one. It also creates a new stomping ground for the shiteaters that make the fake cards, because its become almost commonplace to pull logo patches in numbered patch sets in this day and age.


Numbered to 200, no prime jersey designation

The best of the new sets of logo patches is easily the Topps Sterling Jumbo patch set. Each of these extremly high end cards comes with a hugemongous patch of the players in the set. It’s a fucking ridiculous concept, but totally awesome. They sell for giant amounts of money, and its basically impossible to determine if they are safe to buy. If I had the money, Id be VERY careful.


Sold for 500+ on both.

Websites like Sports Card Info and Fake Patch Report do a great job of chronicling scams in the hobby, but how many of the uninformed/uneducated sheep actually read their sites? Really the only people poised to help this problem is the card manufacturers, but their involvement has been minimal as expected. They are incorporating more die cut windows, which make it harder to fake, but the one thing they could do is not being done. If I were them, I would take each card and scan the print run and release it to the general public in checklist form. This would be great because you could see if your card is real or fake just by looking at their release.

Sidenote: It would also give us a clue as to what percentage of the cards are single color - great for high end sets! It could force them into making more multicolored stuff.

With that, just remember, it isnt worth buying a card unless you are sure its legit. If its too good to be true, it usually is, almost without exception. Plus, you may want to avoid pristinesportscollectibles, zinger222, photoking, shoelessjoejackson and all the other known fakers/donkey rapers out there.