this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
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Upper Deck was the king of sports trading cards and even though they were making hundreds of millions in the 80s, they got caught creating counterfeit versions of the most desirable cards to make even more money. Once they got caught there wasn’t much to be done as it wasn’t actually illegal for them to do so. It soured the collectors market for a long long time.
Circle back around to around 2000 and upper deck somehow got a license to print Yugioh cards in Europe. Only, they decided to start also making counterfeit cards of the 10 most desirable cards and made 50K of each of them and started seeding the collector market in the US by selling them in the states to make even MORE money. It wasn’t long before they got caught and then sued and settled out of court for some insane amount of money.
Somehow they’re still around and printing sports cards. It’s kind of mind boggling.
How can the manufacturer of those cards make counterfeit cards? Wouldn't they still be real cards but just diluting the market?
I wondered the same but then thought of this about Yugioh, they (card manufacturer) are producing cards but don’t own the rights to the characters. That belongs to whoever owns Yugioh. They probably had an agreement with YugiohCo to print a certain amount of each card and that would mean keeping rare cards rare. I guess the same thing could apply to baseball cards too. Between the card manufacturer and MLB. But I honestly have no idea.
You’re not far off. Any license for collectibles certainly restricts the print run to ratios determined by the licensor. The person granting a license doesn’t want the person using the license to devalue it.