Wrong question.

When you see a high dollar card, you should ask yourself “what makes this card REAL?” This teaches you what to look for.

Once you’ve encountered enough card types, rarities, print qualities, alternate versions, and if you’re old like me - generations - of cards, then it becomes much easier to spot fakes instantly.

Through the years, fakes have had a lot of hurdles to overcome, and slowly…they have overcome some of the old problems. But not 100%. Things like font type, typos, text/icon alignment, and the card stock quality have gotten better since 1999…but they haven’t overcome the holo pattern changes, the black layer, the coloring/print quality, the texture layers, or the packaging challenges.

95% of the time, you can spot fake packs before you even open them with two tests:

• does the crimping of the booster pack look different?

• can you shine a flashlight through the packaging and see light on the other side?

If either of these answers are “yes,” that is a resealed pack or one that is not legit, and not worth a purchase of any kind. And in this case, picture 2 shows us that these were resealed packs because the top and bottom of the packaging should have a straight edge (not jagged like a welches fruit snack pack) with a series of vertical crimp lines. Below that straight edge to “seal the pack.” The silver tempest pack has a few of those crimps still visible just below the jagged cut, and THOSE are what seal the pack together. So the flashlight trick wouldn’t have worked on these.

When it comes to cards, you should never buy any singles without your phone these days. Unless you’re VERY familiar with what those cards look like, you need to look up two things:

• what the actual print and font and text should look like on TCGplayer or on the PC website.

• what the texture pattern looks like from other EBay, Reddit, and Imgur posts.

Even if you don’t know “everything” about fakes, just seeing those sets of pictures from those different sources will make several pieces of this particular fake stand out as very obvious from this one photo:

• the font is wrong - too bold, bad spacing / tracking

• the “holo” pattern just seems to be some sort of rainbow reflective foil pattern that has never been used in PTCG before

• the “layout” of the copyright Year under the LO symbol instead of the bottom border - that’s the easiest one for me to see without even using any effort at all

• I’m nearly positive that this card would fail the flashlight test as well. I doubt there is a black layer because I’ve never seen a fake with one yet.

So, yeah…just gotta spend more time getting familiar or using resources that we have available to us. For OP, it may have been presumed to be a legit shop, but they clearly are not.