One last tip! If you are buying cards online, be wary of third-party sellers offering lots of rare cards for cheap. Then, the next time you buy cards at a flea market, you will know you are getting your money's worth! Turn it into a sleuthing game of Detective Pikachu and it will be fun. Hopefully, your kids will be excited (instead of disappointed) to find a few in their collections.
Learning how to spot them turned into a fun, mystery detective game for us. I hope these tips help you and your kids spot Pokemon fakes. Sometimes the artwork is printed off kilter so the borders are thicker at the top or bottom or on one side.
When you look at the edge with a magnifiying glass, it is pretty obvious (see picture below). Sometimes you can see the black layer with your naked eye, but this is really difficult. This is because real cards are constructed with better materials to make them stiffer and less prone to wearing out. Does it have the black layer? The most reliable method of distinguishing a genuine card from a fake card is that the real cards have a black layer sandwiched in between two white layers, when you look at the edge of the cards.
The kids will teach their friends, and I will teach you.ġ. Now, I think, all three of us are pretty good at recognizing a fake. We compared cards to each other and to online images. We examined their collections with magnifying glasses.
We googled, we watched youtube videos, we read articles. To my astonishment, I instead discovered that this particular card did not exist! It was a fake!ĭown the rabbit hole we went. And since most of my Pokemon could only do 100 or less damage per turn, I figured I was just doomed! During a break from the game, I started searching for how to beat this particular card. My son pulled a card on me that had HP 7000. So how did we discover that we had fake Pokemon in our midst? Well, each Pokemon creature card has a HP number (Hit Points or Health Points) that indicates how much damage that Pokemon can take before it gets knocked out. To be totally honest, so am I! But I'm a nerd like that so. My kids are really excited to try this soon. To find the league nearest you, go to the official Pokemon website and type in your address HERE. And if you really get into it, there may be a Pokemon TCG league nearby, where you and your kids can meet and play with new friends. I figured I'm probably not the only parent who had no idea there are fake Pokemon cards floating around, so hopefully you will find this article helpful!įirst of all, let me say that the game itself, if you and your kids have not yet learned, is super fun and a great way to strengthen reading and math skills! Plus, there's all kinds of strategy involved, and no two games are the same. Little did I know, that this would then lead us down a rabbit hole of discovery that their collections have been infiltrated with counterfeit cards. I decided it was time we learned how to play the actual game. But that all changed after their latest bout of begging for yet MORE cards. All I knew about Pokemon The Card Game about a week ago is that my kids are obsessed with collecting and trading the cards, and that vast amounts of money (both theirs and mine) have gone into their collections.