How do you spot fake Pokémon cards? With the Pokémon TCG hobby growing faster than ever, and top tier cards selling for serious money, the counterfeit Pokémon card business is booming, and if you’re not careful you could be its next victim. This guide gives you a few easy, basic, and free tests for how to tell if a Pokémon card is fake or genuine.
Here’s two golden rules right up top. First, none of these at-home tests can give you the same level of confidence as professional advice from a TCG dealer. The quality of fakes is constantly getting better, so if you’re tracking down the most expensive rare Pokémon cards and considering spending serious cash, we’d strongly recommend getting an expert to help identify them (more on that later).
And secondly, if you’re new to Pokémon card collecting, buying high value single cards isn’t the ideal place to start. It’s expensive, risky, and misses out on half the fun: opening packs of 100% real cards from your favorite Pokémon sets, for the thrill of the chase. When you’re starting out, cracking packs is likely to spark more joy than email negotiations about a dubious collector’s item – and we can recommend the best Pokémon packs to buy right now.
That said, if you’ve got a card you think might be counterfeit, a combination of the tests below should alert you to most of the key red flags that indicate a card isn’t genuine, weeding out all but the highest quality fakes. We’ll list the key steps to follow, then dive into each in detail.
Here’s how to identify fake Pokémon cards:
- Always compare against genuine cards.
- Check the card stats are correct.
- Check for printing errors on the front and back of the card.
- Check the card’s dimensions and materials.
- Check if it’s a known Pokémon misprint.
1. Always compare against genuine cards
The most important requirement for all these tests is that you compare your potential fake against a real copy of the Pokémon card in question.
If you already have access to an authentic copy in good condition, that’s obviously the ideal point of comparison – this ensures you know exactly what a genuine copy of the card looks and feels like, making it much easier to spot if your new card has a subtly different type of material, or faults in the holographic foil.
However, for comparing the exact design and printing of the card for errors that might mark it out as fake, you don’t need to have a physical copy – you can also check it against a card scan from Pokemon’s official database.
This makes it easy to carry out the first couple of tests, as you know exactly what words, numbers, and symbols should be on the card and where.
2. Check the card’s stats are correct
It may seem too obvious to mention, but the first and most obvious sign of a counterfeit trading cards is surprisingly easy to overlook: sometimes they don’t even get the text right. Manufacturing fake cards is a business like any other; some fakers take pains to make it as perfect as possible, while others simply churn out millions of obvious forgeries, trusting that they’ll have made their money before anyone notices.
So, before you spend time inspecting for minute printing errors and color shades, check that the key bits of information on your card match the real thing – especially:
- Pokémon name – misspellings are an immediate, huge red flag.
- HP and damage values – fake cards often have huge numbers.
- Collector and set numbers – two 3-digit numbers divided by a slash, found in the bottom left or right corner of the card.
- Rarity symbols – these have changed over the years, so refer to our Pokémon card rarity guide and your authentic comparison card to make sure it’s right.
You may have cracked a smile at the idea a faker could get something as basic as the Pokémon’s name wrong, but let us ask you a question: how many Pokémon are there these days, and what are all their names? If you don’t know every Pokémon name by sight, how do you think an excited youngster might fare, on opening a pack they thought was real?
Fakers don’t have to fool everyone, they just have to sell their product and get away with it – so we test for the silliest mistakes first, because they’re more common than you’d think.
3. Check for printing errors on the card front
Assuming all the stats and information are legit, next we check for printing errors on both sides of the card. There’s a host of different things that could be wrong on both sides of a counterfeit card, and some are easier to spot than others.
Below are the most common errors you’ll see on fake cards, but it’s not an exhaustive list, so be careful to check anything that doesn’t look or feel right against your authentic card (or online scan) as a benchmark.
Fonts – make sure all the fonts used are consistent with the ones on a real card. Fakes may have user different fonts in various spots (not just the large-type text) so check carefully.
Print quality – Compare the printing – especially all the card text – against the printing on a genuine card. If anything is noticeably blurrier or less sharp – especially the smaller-print text towards the bottom of the card – that’s a strong indicator the card is fake.
Spelling and punctuation errors – Look especially for any instances of Pokémon without the accented ‘e’, as this is a major red flag – but fake cards may have any number of other typos, too. Cast a keen eye over it all. Find one or more glaring errors, and it’s almost certainly a fake card.
Energy symbols – on fake cards, the small, circular energy symbols are often the wrong size or design, or in the wrong position. Typically, either the coloured circle, or the superimposed symbol, or both, may be printed too large. The positions may also not line up properly with the text below, or be out of symmetry.
Print year – genuine Pokémon cards have their print year and copyright printed at the bottom of the card. The exact position may vary between cards (remember to check the correct position on a real copy, or an authoritative photo of one), but, if it’s missing entirely, the chances are the card is a fake.
Print alignment – fake Pokémon cards will often have the card art printed off-centre, or on a tilt, against the card’s rectangular border, due to their cheaper, imprecise printing processes. Beware, though, that specific minor misalignments are present in some genuine misprints – guidance on that is below.
Coloring – generally, fake Pokémon cards tend to get the colours wrong on a variety of elements. If the colours look off, or out of place, anywhere on the card, compare it directly to a real one to confirm the difference. Pay close attention to the colours of the border and background (on both the front and back of the card). They should be sharply contrasting – if they blur or fade together, that’s a red flag for a fake.
Holographics – ordinarily, Pokémon cards have holographic foils only on certain sections of the card art (often only the main card image) – but this can vary depending on the type of card. Since ‘holos’ are rarer than other cards, if this is what you’re dealing with, it’s best to look up online which areas of the card should be holographic, and which shouldn’t; the Pokémon TCG database is a good place to start for this, but you might also find help from a friendly collector, dealer or via a collectors’ group on social media.
4. Check for printing errors on the card back
As the one part of a Pokémon card’s design that almost never changes, you might think that the iconic ‘Pokéball on blue swirl’ card back design would be the easiest thing to fake correctly, but in fact it’s specifically designed to be difficult to reproduce just right, and consequently is an important red flag for fakes that you should always check.
More specifically, you’re almost certainly looking at a fake if the diagonal sweep of light blue colour immediately to the top-right of the Pokéball (i.e. the red hemisphere) is a solid, light, or ‘washed-out’ blue colour. On an authentic card, that diagonal sweep is dappled with the dark blue colour underneath – as in the photo above.
Online TCG dealer The Card Bazaar says its number one method for spotting fake Pokémon cards is checking for irregularities in the Pokéball art on the back of the card. According to the site’s own tips on identifying fake cards, “around 80% of counterfeits” can be identified purely based on the reverse card art being the wrong shade of blue (usually fakes are lighter blue than the real thing).
5. Check the card dimensions and materials
Next, you should check that the card’s dimensions are exactly right. Authentic, official Pokémon cards have a precise, standard size of 2.5 inches (63 millimeters) wide and 3.5 inches (88 millimeters) tall, partly in order to make fakes easier to spot. You can find full details in our complete guide to Pokémon card size.
It’s surprisingly difficult (and expensive) to manufacture perfectly sized, perfectly cut trading cards to that exact specification, so even the best designed fakes can often slip up on the dimensions, making this an essential check.
If possible, you should also check the texture of the card’s materials – a test that obviously requires you to have an authentic physical card on hand to compare, unlike all the previous tests.
Feel the texture of the front and back of the card; authentic cards, while the textures can sometimes vary, tend to have a smooth, matte finish – whereas fakes tend to be glossy and shiny – partly as it’s cheaper, and partly to help hide any printing errors.
6. Check if it’s a known Pokémon misprint
If your card passes almost every one of these tests and seems nearly perfect, but seems a little bit off in one specific way – a single bit of text in a different order, for example, or one side border a millimetre or two thicker than the other – then it might not be a fake, but an authentic Pokémon card from a known group of printing errors: a Pokémon misprint.
Also known as error cards, misprints are quite rare in the Pokémon TCG, but they have happened, and still do, occasionally, when some parameter or other gets set very slightly incorrectly on a given print run. Given their rarity, many misprints are incredibly desirable for Pokémon TCG collectors, and your card might be worth a decent chunk of hard cash! If you suspect you’ve got a misprint, the first thing to do is check your card’s characteristics against a database of known error cards – the best one we’ve found is at Bulbapedia.
Then, if your card matches the description of one of the known misprints, it’s time to seek out a trustworthy TCG dealer to check out your card, confirm your identification, and value it. Misprints are like winning the fake-Pokémon-card-spotting lottery, so good luck on your quest!
Fake Pokémon card tests we don’t recommend
Counterfeit Pokémon cards have been around as long as the real thing, and in that time there have been so many changes in the methods of producing fakes that fans have popularized loads of different ways to test authenticity. Some, like those above, are as trustworthy as ever – but others aren’t worth your time, either because the results are unreliable, they put you at too much risk of damaging your cards, or both.
The weight test
You’ll sometimes see it recommended to weigh your Pokémon card to test if it’s a fake. Authentic Pokémon cards weigh between 1.8 and 2 grams, and it’s true that some fakes can be lighter, due to using lower-quality cardstock and fewer layers.
However, it’s not a very useful test. Most modern fakes are able to get the weight about right, and in cases where the card is notably lighter than the real deal, you’ll almost certainly already have been able to spot the card as a fake via other means, like quality and feel of the material – making weighing a bit surplus to requirements.
The bend test
The bend test has you carefully bend the card a little, to feel the stiffness of the cardstock, and do the same with a real card by comparison.
We’ve previously recommended this test, because stiffness under tension is hard for fakes to get right and thus a good indicator – but we’ve seen sense in the counterargument that, unless you’re incredibly deft in how much pressure you apply, the risk of permanently damaging your card is very high.
The light test
Also long popular is the light test, which requires you grab a torch, turn off the lights, and shine the light directly at the card, then shine it at a genuine card for comparison. Given the aforementioned tendency towards fake Pokémon cards having thinner, poor-quality cardstock, they will let through noticeably more light than the real deal.
While you’ve got that torch on your genuine card, you might be able to see a reinforcing black layer, sandwiched between two white card layers. That extra layer is supposedly missing from almost all fake cards, and some collectors swear by this as a test (usually with the aid of a magnifying glass).
The big problems here (apart from it being quite time consuming) are that modern fakes are generally not thin enough for the light test to be conclusive – and that the huge variety of different holographic card treatments in Pokémon nowadays react to light in totally different ways. It’s not useless, but it’s not useful or reliable enough to bother with.
The rip test
The light test’s infinitely more evil variant, this requires you to tear open or peel back the corner of your card to check for the presence of that magical, authenticity-guaranteeing internal black layer.
Does it work? Maybe – but it doesn’t matter, because conducting the test destroys your card. The rip test is very, very stupid. Do not do this.
Other tips for identifying fake Pokémon cards
There are many different production methods for fake trading cards, including Pokémon TCG cards, each with their own tell-tale signs that differentiate the product from the genuine article – which means no one guide to identifying fakes can contain every possible red flag. Here are a few pointers on what to do if you’re not sure about a card.
If, for some reason, you’re looking at a Pokémon card to buy, but you can’t physically hold and inspect the card for yourself (for example, if there’s a global pandemic, the shops are shut, and you can’t go within two metres of another person), always ask the seller to take an original, high quality photo of both sides of the card for you. This should let you carry out all but the material-based tests, and allows a good deal of confidence the card is real.
In general, however, we wouldn’t recommend buying rare, valuable Pokémon cards remotely, without the chance to examine them in person before you pay. These can cost an arm and a leg, and if you’re serious enough about your prized collection to invest the sums required, it’s worth waiting for the opportunity to check the card out properly, with your actual, real live hands and eyes.
Still, if you’ve tried all the above tests on a card you own – or one you’re looking to buy – and you’re still unsure whether it’s the genuine article, it’s always a good option to get in touch with a reputable dealer of collectible cards, who might be able to give you an expert opinion.
And that’s all you need to know to identify the majority of fake Pokémon cards you’ll come across. If you’ve made it this far, we’ve got expert guides explaining loads of other important info for the hobby, including the best Pokémon cards in the game right now, and the highest HP Pokémon cards to tough out enemy attacks in-game. For newbies, we also have a cracking beginner’s guide on how to play Pokémon cards.
Source: Wargamer
