Black lotus real or fake? - Card Authentication - Magic General - Magic Fundamentals - MTG Salvation Forums (2024)

Quote from Rivered9 »

Picked up a bunch of magic cards at a yard sale of mtg cards at a yard sale for $5 - did pretty good with them with a couple of Karakas cards and a few other decent priced cards and then came across this black lotus. It's in terrible condition (not sure if it would even be worth anything if it is real) and I never played much magic so I have no idea if it's real or fake . Hopefully someone here might be able to help.

http://i64.tinypic.com/28mhhy.jpg

These may help a little more - theyre supposedly 600 dpi. I have no idea what to look for but hopefully they help.

thanks!

http://i68.tinypic.com/2evybk6.jpg

http://i66.tinypic.com/r8xvsj.jpg

It looks like a badly beaten beta black lotus. Try saying that 3 times fast! Those scans are not 600DPI so it's still hard to tell

If it is genuine, it's still worth a lot of money

seems rebacked to me

the back seems to have solid black borders so the back is original
BUT
the front of the card has horizontal stripes, even on the black border (seems unusual to me) i think someone printed the front of the black lotus and rebacked a card

probably fake

what other cards were in that sale? if you scan them too we can see if there are other fakes and confirm this aswell

Nice find. With the pic I was 75 % sure it was a fake, as the colors were really off, but it seems that it was due to the camera and lightning, as the scan looks much better.

As other have told you the scan you posted is not large enough to let us tell you anything concrete. I would need a 600 dpi scan in some hosting service which does not limit the image size. a 600 dpi scan is about 12-20 MB in size, so something like Dropbox will work, but Salvations or some other forum will not.

If the card is real, it will be worth 300-1.5 k$, depending how badly it's bent. But I would need to be able to zoom in enough to see how the printing dots are printed on the card, or have the card in hand to tell anything about authenticity. From the small image most glaring flaws are missing. Beveled edges look crisp and text looks very well defined.

You can yourself do some tests, which help. Firts take a white bordered card and put the Lotus on top of it. If white shows, the card is smaller than a real card (usually fake), then put the card on top of the Lotus and is black shows, the Lotus is larger than a real card (surprising number of early fakes were slightly too small, especially at the corners...). Secondly take a bright light and try to find a undamaged part of the card. Shine the light through the card. Some light should come through and the glue holding the two halves togehter should be visible as 'marbling'. Compare to a different real card to see if it's normal. Rebacks often have glue in darker gluts or otherwise unevenly distributed. Rebacks alos let through either more or less light, depending how much the cards have been sanded.

As for the third step, take a magnifying glass is you have one and look at the 0-symbol on the casting cost. It should have very different dot pattern from the other areas outside the symbol-circle. If all those are ok, you can start hoping.

Nirvana is also way off. There are several ways to see if the card is real without ripping it in half. Most include measuring the edges and letter placement, dot patterns on different parts of the card and shining a bright light through the card (damaged cards are not ideal for this, as the creases and other damage let more light through). WotC used to authenticate cards at PT's and large game shows in the late 90's and were great at identifying some really strange items, like non-factory cut cards (which are again a thing these days.), rebacks and dark beta cards.

Nice find anyway.

Quote from xenob8 »

you can zoom a lot on Tiny pic

Or, you can left click, and drag on the image you see when you first click the link, and put the image in a new tab - it's fairly bigish, but more importantly, just the image - none of the tinypic crud. From there, you can further zoom in with ctrl + mouse wheel.

The *back* looks good, the front looks weird... is it just me, the scan, or do I see some odd scanline like stuff on it> 0_o