CGC excels in authenticating the Protostoises and Disco Charizards of the TCG world. Cards that have been questioned by the community but can be subjected to highly technical analysis and proven to be manufactured with the same methods and materials of authentic cards. Their articles on these cards were highly informative. While I had been skeptical of these cards, their authentication and public release of information convinced me that they were legitimate test prints.
The issue with all of these prototypes is that they aren’t manufactured in a manner even approaching systematic or traditional production, which means they’re outside of the area in which CGC has proven their competence and expertise. To the best of my knowledge they’re just printed on paper and glued to cardstock or something. I don’t need to go in-depth about how this type of production is much easier to fake than the production of standard trading cards.
I will stray into CGC criticism here because it appears they have strayed away from their original authentication principles for error and test print cards. There’s an ever-expanding set of cards that they will authenticate and grade and an ever-expanding definition of what an “authentic” card actually is.
With these cards, the only thing that makes them “authentic” in the broadest interpretation of the phrase is their provenance. Who made them, when did they make them, and how were they used. The implication has always been that the only provenance needed is that the cards come from Akabane, who could have only obtained them legitimately. However, now that we know that’s not the case (and even worse, the cards come from someone who is pretending to be Akabane in order to establish false provenance) we now have zero publicly available proof of their “authenticity.”
People are supposed to take the word of CGC that these are authentic, relying on hypothesized secret documentation that proves their authenticity that somehow can’t be released, described, or alluded to in any way. This is the complete opposite of how CGC originally built their test print authentication practices.
I’ll refrain from criticizing CGC too heavily simply because we don’t have any more information. However, I do think that serious questions need to be asked about how CGC and the community at large is defining “authentic.” Are the “Jamboree playtest” cards now authentic test prints which CGC will authenticate?
