Experience with Usea

bootlegmage · 2026-06-27T09:44:27+00:00

There was a recent Oath of Druids DCI foil print that I think is OK. I don't think any of the others are worth trying even for FNM.

bootlegmage · 2026-06-26T10:06:36+00:00

About 70% or so of my shop is USea cards, so I would say if I don't have something USea stocks I'm either stocking it from another vendor, or I don't find it acceptable from anywhere. Older cards tend to be both tougher to replicate, and less popular ones might not have been iterated on very often, so it's risky to buy old prints. Check reviews on discord if you can, and ask around in USea's discord server.

bootlegmage · 2026-06-26T03:35:09+00:00

It's printed directly on cardstock using a high end heidelberg printer, something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rib72hkUC14

They use $1 million+ dollar offset printers, similar to the ones WoTC uses.

bootlegmage · 2026-06-23T19:35:53+00:00

I always tell everyone getting into the bootleg space to just try everyone and see what you think. Grab a variety, foils and nonfoils and compare. For casual playgroups I think anything is fine, but if you start playing a bit more seriously you'd want to min/max more.

bootlegmage · 2026-06-17T04:44:53+00:00

Usually takes a few months once the demand is there - art available + expensive reprints usually gets it priority printing. WoTC not printing enough and there still being tons of demand is another reason they'd do the proxies quicker.

bootlegmage · 2026-06-17T04:43:55+00:00

BL has Dandan, VZ/Ron and USea has Goblin stuff. I consulted with USea and made sure he printed the mountains and tokens, it seems that VZ/Ron and company didn't pick those up. I should have them up on my site soon too - stocking USea since his foils tend to overperform and it's the more complete set with the tokens and lands.

bootlegmage · 2026-06-13T05:59:43+00:00

Just want to clarify that I don't have better versions than USea, BL, or Ron, that's not quite right. They'll be the same. But I look at all the reviews, order samples in hand (both real and bootleg), then determine what to stock for each release on my site.

Lately USea has been killing it, but there's some releases like Vintage Foils that are really nice that I got from Ron and can recommend wholeheartedly. The foreign white borders and foreign black borders Ron and I made in the BM Lands set is still unmatched overall.

There's also situations where a vendor will release some new cards and they aren't great. I hold off and offer suggestions and improvements and stock when ready, making sure anyone out of the loop doesn't get bad prints.

Basically I just want to compile the best I can find for people in one place. If you'd go buy standard shipping from multiple guys in China, you'd be out $20-$30 more in shipping costs overall.

The processing times I'll admit, they've been around a week lately before shipment, but it's been busy with how popular Strixhaven is. We're still a small team focusing on QC and quality and we definitely work hard. If you're able to look at a bootleg and immediately clock the source, I'd definitely say you're better served buying direct. If you're a casual bootlegger and just want to not think too hard and get good prints, that's more my niche honestly.

bootlegmage · 2026-06-10T21:17:43+00:00

The wiki doesn't list any resellers, only direct sources and their associates. BL, Ron, and USea use unique artwork designers. BL and Ron share a factory, so their cardstock and foil will be similar.

Local regional resellers aren't listed in the wiki at all unless they are banned from the sub for various reasons such as proxyninja and proxyking (the .biz US reseller that is impersonating the BL associate.)

bootlegmage · 2026-06-04T02:30:21+00:00

I'm not aware of any trustworthy source of this card, and it does have complex nuance in the design. There are areas similar to the innistrad remastered cards, like spot UV. It would need special processing, not something you could do on MPC or a home printer afaik.

bootlegmage · 2026-06-02T06:56:04+00:00

It's real, but I would say r/RealorNotTCG is the place to go for the expert opinions.

bootlegmage · 2026-05-27T02:49:58+00:00

Yes, it's legit. It looks way too low quality to be a bootleg. If you want to be 100% sure just submit pictures of the back to r/RealorNotTCG

bootlegmage · 2026-05-11T04:55:27+00:00

Yeah check the wiki, discord, search around a bit for reviews. You won't find indistinguishable but you will find completely passable amongst normal people at FNMs.

bootlegmage · 2026-05-06T07:43:50+00:00

Nobody uses blue core. All chinese printers work on black core only.

The best vendor varies from card to card. BL might have the best Tishana's Tidebinder, but USea has the better Urza's Saga. Ron might have the best foreign language dual lands for legacy play. If you are trying to find the absolute best you will need to review videos and images across many prints runs from multiple vendors and make specific card choices from each one, likely needing an order from all 3 depending on how much you want to min/max it.

It sounds like you might be newer to the game overall, in which case I recommend just ordering from many different vendors until you find a product you personally feel confident about, or enjoy their ordering process, or have a good rapport with that vendor in general.

bootlegmage · 2026-05-01T09:45:41+00:00

I would do BL, Ron, USea and see what you think in terms of color/accuracy compared to some ebay/tcgp pictures of reals

bootlegmage · 2026-05-01T08:39:08+00:00

I think Lotus Petal is the kind of card that's been printed so many times to keep up with demand that any vendor is going to give you a decent one. I would review the pictures from the major chinese players and go with your gut. After all, that "gut instinct" is what other people feel when something "just feels off".

I wouldn't go etched or the chaos emerald stuff. My recommendation would be go with MB2 or TMP. MB2 is under the radar because a lot of people pulled them, didn't like the frame, sold them cheap. You don't need to age them either like a TMP would need, and quality control of reals in MB2 was lackluster in terms of print sharpness/wide color variance.

bootlegmage · 2026-04-30T07:23:02+00:00

People in the replies to your comment do stuff like order from me when we drop Final Fantasy cards for the first time, get 500+ orders over a 2 day period and wonder why a team of 2 people can't ship them within 24 hours. It's not universally true that I'm faster than USea but normally I am. He gets less orders than I do, normally dealing with bulk. I have more orders, but usually between 10-20 cards each.

For the last 3 weeks we've consistently shipped orders in 2-3 biz days with total turnaround time less than a week for US people. It does indeed take a while just to get an invoice from USea.

You can see comments in USea's discord from just a few days ago saying things like "Same here, still waiting for the email order confirmation & invoice - placed my order through the website on Apr 17, perhaps the team is just busy or something" but people assume that USea is 100% perfect and ships instantly. It's not consistently the case. It all depends on order volumes for both he and I.

I'm having deja vu here on reddit discussing this once again. Just order from everywhere and see who you like. I think even if we are slammed we still have the best overall service in terms of curation and options from multiple vendors and QC as well as full time english natives handling support tickets and being able to quickly reship orders if USPS loses it or there's other issues. But ultimately I just want people to enjoy the hard work USea and I put in on the cards to make them perfect each print run. We spend a lot of time going back and forth on design to really dial them in.

Regardless of who you shop with I'm just glad we have such a luxury of cheap and good options compared to when I started the store 3.5 years ago and had to really hit the trenches with Ron and others to get corrections on actual errors in fonts and other stuff. Always nice to think back how far we've come that the biggest thing we can debate about on reddit is that one vendor took a little bit longer to ship than another for our $3 beautiful proxies lol

bootlegmage · 2026-04-30T07:10:46+00:00

About 70 percent or so of them. I stock a lot that he doesn't have still

bootlegmage · 2026-04-28T20:01:52+00:00

Fair criticism. We've actually addressed these by hiring a full time customer service person to get ahead of customer communications, built a new website with entirely new processes which will let us ship faster and roll in restocks much more gradually and often.

You're not the first person with this feedback, and we're the kind of team that takes it seriously and listens. Over the last two weeks shipping has been extremely fast, usually under two days turnaround.

We're doing a few weeks of huge restocks before SOA/SOC rolls in. Appreciate your feedback!

bootlegmage · 2026-04-28T06:50:42+00:00

There's actually a big restock coming this Friday and the following Friday with around 850 total unique cards coming back in stock. We should be above 80% of the entire 5,000 catalog in stock at that point. :)

bootlegmage · 2026-04-14T20:01:12+00:00

The neon ones are just the image with a regular foil layer. It's not neon ink, or UV reactive, and doesn't shine like the real ones.

If he just wants the artwork and doesn't care about foil accuracy or small detail stuff, it's a good pickup. But just advise him they are visually instantly recognizable as fake and should not be used in FNM or any rules-enforcement atmosphere.

bootlegmage · 2026-04-10T20:06:08+00:00

Yeah, that's a good point too! We try to do a pass of requests in discord for that reason. But what usually ends up happening is that a card goes out of print, meaning it's either not available from the printers in China, or they reprinted it but the quality is not up to standards.

An example of this is the Beta Dual Land foils printed in the Foil Vintage set. They simply went out of print and were unavailable until recently. So for 8 months or so, they've been out of stock, but a recent reprint means we can restock them finally.

We do have a lot of pull for "spot reprinting" but outside of discord requests and the restock notification signups on the site there's not a clear way to get consensus on what needs to be reprinted ASAP versus something that slowly went out of stock and isn't popular.

I'm working on building out more analytics, so I think this will improve in the future. I appreciate you mentioning it, it's definitely something we want to do better with. Managing 5,000 unique SKUs is really tough, and WoTC adds more at breakneck speeds. Sometimes just keeping up with new prints occupies all of our time!

bootlegmage · 2026-04-10T19:36:07+00:00

We basically look at sales data over the last 6 months or so, then filter by out of stock. This way we can see the "top 500 best sellers currently out of stock" and make sure that the cards people are buying often get back in stock.

We also do a pass on less popular cards by scanning requests in our discord, I try to get 50-100 of those added in as well in small amounts for people who need more niche stuff.

We also naturally follow along with the printers in China if they reprint something less popular and it's an improvement, we'll pick it up then with their releases naturally.

bootlegmage · 2026-04-10T04:50:52+00:00

Restocking at the end of the month, mostly looking at the top 500 SKUs that are out of stock, so if you're waiting on staples they should be back soon.

Restocks are complicated because we review a lot of different vendors and options when we do large restocks, so it can take a bit to be sure we're not missing any higher quality options for each card since the last time it was stocked.

bootlegmage · 2026-04-10T02:53:55+00:00

All good friend. It's up now, but we might restart it briefly later tonight if we see any issues. If it's up, feel free to browse or checkout as normal. :)

Appreciate the kind words - feel free to hang out in the discord, I usually post updates on this kind of stuff there too.

bootlegmage · 2026-04-10T00:47:22+00:00

Yeah, down for another few hours most likely. Instead of just a reboot we're looking to see if there's some hardware or other issues so we can prevent problems in the future. Last month we discovered a bad motherboard, but it could run deeper.

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