Beware of Fakes!
Just like anything else with a price tag, Pokemon products are counterfeited and sold to unsuspecting kids and parents looking to save a few Rands.
Fakes are easy to spot - if you are familiar with the real stuff that is. The best advice I can give anyone is to only buy from reputable dealers. Products sold by anyone else are likely to be fake and will earn you a life time ban from Organized Play. Cards
Fake cards are most often identified by their backs. The real card backs are much more detailed than the fakes. For some reason, the counterfeiters can not produce a clear copy. The card on the left is real, the one on the right is a fake - note how the blue smoke to the top right and bottom left look smudged. Fake cards also frequently are a lighter blue or have a purple tint in the blue border. |
The front is slightly more difficult to identify as fake although you can pick it up quite easily if you know what you are looking for. Fake cards usually have a smaller print font and the energy symbols are either more pronounced or are printed off center.
Some fake cards also have unrealistically high HP numbers and or attack values. The current high value for HP is around 230 for the new Mega Evolution cards and the highest attack values are around 300. It must be noted that only the newer EX and Mega cards have such high values.
Quite often, the retailer will tell you that the cards are legal if you are not going to play competitively - this is absolutely untrue. The cards are fake and you are quite literally throwing away your money bu purchasing them. Nintendo Games There is an emulator cartridge available that will play the games off a SD memory card. It is often advertised as a 250 in 1 game cartridge and sold pre-loaded with games for around R450. |
The cartridge is also advertised as a R4i, R4 Gold or R4 SDHC.
While this may seem like an attractive deal, I can guarantee you that it is not. The cartridges contain pirate copies of the game ROMs and quite often contain bugged or badly translated copies of the games - there are even fake Pokemon games that contain swearing and one very infamous version that contains cartoon nudity. The cartridges can also contain software that will crash your very expensive console by re-writing the firmware (I have seen this happen to a few acquaintances). The seller does not guarantee the cartridges so you will loose your money if they crash and Nintendo will not honour your console warrantee if your firmware is over written by hacked software. Believe me, it is not worth the risk!
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