Apathy House :: Fakes, Frauds and Facelifts: How to identify counterfeit and altered Magic cards v3.0

1.0 There are fake Magic cards???
2.0 Am I in danger of being scammed?
3.0 How will I know one when I see one?
4.0 Some important things to know about the real cards
5.0 Some examples
    5.1 Very Good Fake Beta Ancestral Recall
    5.2 Just As Good Fake 4th Edition Armageddon
    5.3 A Well-Colored Beta Scrubland
6.0 Contributors

5.2 Just As Good Fake 4th Edition Armageddon

This 4th edition Armageddon I aquired in a trade. I don't know how many other cards were in the bunch, but I've received 31 of them to date, mostly commons. I passed over this card 3 times before I noticed it looked funny. What i noticed first was that it was dated 1995 (4th edition), but the ink was more similar to that of a 5th edition card.

Upon closer inspection I found that it was a high resolution inkjet print. When compared to a real card it was easy to tell they had used a completely different printing process.

REAL

FAKE

Here's another image of how the printing process differed. This is a section of the artwork near the sun. The real card (left) exhibits the familiar dithering that can be seen on real cards. The fake (right) does not.

The corners of this card were also too nicely cut and rounded. They were not chopped like a real card. Through further inspection I was also able to rule out the possibility of this being an Alternate 4th card.