You have to have a deck of cards that you shuffle before playing. In some tournaments, I think you’re allowed to use sleeved cards, but I doubt you could use slabbed cards, since they couldn’t really be shuffled, and it would be way too easy to stack the deck.
In some tournaments, you’re allowed to use “proxies” - you show your opponent that you have the actual card (which can be slabbed or sleeved), then show them the common card that on which you’ve written something like “Proxy for Blue InstaWin” that is actually physically shuffled into the deck. In casual play, it’s common etiquette to ask your opponent if it’s ok to play with proxies, and just not use your expensive card if they object and you don’t want the wear and tear. Tournaments will have more specific rules.
My brother is a semi-competitive Magic player, my understanding is that for tournaments beyond Local Shop level, there’s an expectation (though maybe not a requirement) that your whole deck will be sleeved identically. This makes it easier for mash shuffles and stops you from recognizing cards by their backs (and protects the cards as well).
I’ve played Magic with folks who were using pure-fantasy decks (well, yes, they’re all fantasy, but that’s not what I mean), with proxies for cards that nobody at the table had ever even seen in person. It can be fun. But the “counterfeits” used for that generally consist of a cheap card on which someone has scribbled “Black Lotus” with a magic marker.
Wizards of the Coast also, a few years back, released a set with cards that could only be played proxied or sleeved, because the cards had two front sides and no back (but gameplay still depends on not knowing what the top card of your deck is before you draw it). They even included a few extra cards with each pack, with a valid back and just a checklist on the front, specifically for use as proxies for those cards. So I think it’s safe to say that the company is officially OK with proxying.
These days, the valuable cards are “parallels” and other subset cards that aren’t part of the base set. For every base card, there are a number of different parallels for it. And then there are autographed cards, which ALSO have parallels.
For instance, one of the premiere sets to come out recently is the 2019 Topps Chrome Sapphire set. There are 700 base cards, each with parallels of “Orange #/25 (1:11), Purple #/10 (1:28), Red #/5 (1:55), SuperFractor 1/1 (1:377)”. Then on top of that, there are 39 rookie autographed cards, with parallels of “Green #/50 (1:107), Orange #/25 (1:214), Purple #/10 (1:533), Red #/5 (1:1,061), SuperFractor 1/1 (1:5,214)”.
Parallel cards for guys like Tatis Jr. go for tens of thousands of dollars.
They still do. It is a kind of gambling, but it seems to skirt under the legal definitions. I think a key point is that the cards are in no way directly redeemable for cash or other benefits. There is a thriving secondary market in which you can sell valuable cards, but Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast (which produces and sells the cards) is not even peripherally involved in it.
But a Mickey Mantle card isn’t any better at flicking against a wall than a Joe Schlobotnik card. On the other hand, a Black Lotus is much better at winning Magic games than is a Wood Elemental.
Yeah, that was big in my eighth grade class. A few of the kids had the original “Fuck Face” card without any deletion, then Fleer panicked and spit out a number of different “corrected” cards, with some of the “corrected” cards fetching quite a premium themselves for their rarity (I assume the link goes over that – I haven’t had a chance to read it yet.) And the “white out version” fetched a premium over the original “error” card! It was fun leafing through the month’s Beckett Baseball Card Monthly to see the prices of these cards some of us actually had, and also to see all the various corrected versions listed, as it wasn’t common at all to have more than one “corrected” baseball card (I honestly can’t think of another card that was something more than just “error card” and a single “corrected” card listed.)
I did actually get to the link in the link. It’s very hedge-y and non-definitive. So genuine “whiteout” cards may or may not exists, unless I’m misreading it. It’s all just one guy’s thoughts on the matter.
Anyone interested in reproduction counterfeit paper goods should try to watch Galileo’s Moon, a documentary on PBS. It’s very well done and shows how so many experts were fooled and how the forgery was unraveled. I can’t find a link to the entire, hour-long ep but here’s a preview:
