I recently dug out what’s left of my old Yu-Gi-Oh cards and realised that quite a few of them are fakes. Below is a picture showing some major differences between the cards. I’m not an expert in spotting fakes but comparing the cards below it’s obvious that one of them isn’t real. I’ll give you a clue: The actual card is named Jetroid.

Small Jet Aircraft is the wrong name to start with and the card description is the box at the bottom looks like a bad translation from Google when compared to the Jetroid on the right. The monster type of a Jetroid is Machine but the other card is from the Mechanical family for some strange reason, once again I put it down to bad translation. The Small Jet Aircraft card has a little silver square in its bottom corner which is common on Yu-Gi-Oh cards and can make them look authentic but this needs a special hologram and the silver square is usually gold on cards that claim to be first edition which can be seen under the picture. Looking at the top of the cards where it says wind and has a green symbol, the Small Jet Aircraft wind isn’t properly inside the symbol.

All this can be seen pretty quickly by anyone that spends the time looking. Sadly, I was quite young and didn’t care about quality when I bought my cards so quite a bit of what’s left of my collection is most likely fake. Now that I’ve taken the time to look at my cards I realise that I can still play with them with friends or family, it’s just that none of these cards will be the pride of my collection.

Be careful when buying playing cards from sources that aren’t properly reputable as you can end up with valueless cards that are disappointing to look at and embarrassing to show to knowledgeable friends. I bought some of my cards abroad, I traded some with friends and I think some came from a local fayre. Buy cards from proper shops and look up how to identify fakes, this two things will leave you with a better collection.