Say I just bought a raw card on ebay. How do I know for a fact its real?
Shouldn’t these cards be super easy to replicate? What makes us sure we are getting the real thing? What even makes PSA or BGS so sure after all?
They can 1:1 anything these days. Pokemon cards just seem so vulnerable for counterfeiting. Fake purses, shoes, clothes get passed everyday. Why not cards? Someone could master every inch of of these cards and reproduce a fake copy that passes the feel test and bend test and anything else.
Disregard the obvious fakes. This current value could attract the professionals who master every detail
You could never reproduce a historic artifact of time by every measure. You could make it believe, as they do in the film industry, by look or photograph. But not by feel, not by texture, or material (that they don’t manufacture in its specs anymore), etc.
You could never place a fake WOTC card in front of me and have me not know within seconds. Some can look good in pictures (for a minute), but it’s INCREDIBLY hard to make an even remotely believable fake. But of course I know my stuff. The average person could be easily duped because it takes experience and awareness to not be fooled by the conman.
Maybe not anytime soon, but sure, I think its possible. But this logic can be applied to literally anything else and people are still paying premiums for brand name products. Even that same cert BGS Lebron card looked pretty convincing.
The printing presses for the original sets are long-defunct, they’d be incredibly hard to fake properly. The same is true for other long-lived TCGs like MTG.