New Old Fakes, Today!

The Actual News:

Pokémon Aaah! has always been about the fakes. I’ve built my reputation on providing the most authentic fakes on the internet!…at least, back when I had a reputation to build.

Anyways, after poking through some old pictures, I thought I’d take some time to help take our minds off the Election for a bit (especially for the 42.07% of you who don’t live in the United States) by sharing with you some of the fake stuff I did in the intervening years between when I stopped working on PA! back in the day and when I started back up last year. …has it been a year already? Oh boy.

Ok first off, check this one out: this is less about my fakes and more about what other people did with them. Y’know those cheap Chinese rip-off Pokémon cards where they took existing TCG cards and gave everyone 3200 HP, or made Mewtwo an Electric type or something? Well a couple years back, I found this picture of a bunch of those counterfeit TCG cards that someone owned, and two of them that they had looked a bit familiar…

Yep! One of those Chinese knock-off card makers actually took some of my own fake cards, printed them out and sold them as their own! If you need a reminder, they’re copies of these two fakes:

Venustoise	Pokémon	October 27, 1999	53
Super Charizard	Pokémon	November 12, 1999	82

Now I don’t know whether to be upset or impressed, but either way, I wish I could’ve gotten some of them. Lol actually, if I had bought any of them, then I’d probably be the only person in the world to actually make NEGATIVE money on their own fake cards.

Alrighty, onto the new fakes. Well, “new”, relatively speaking.

On 4chan/vp/ some years ago, they had a thread where they were converting existing music albums to be more Pokémon-related… and, well, I felt the following was just too obvious not to do:

Portishead has to be one of my most favorite music groups, and their self-titles album has to be one of the most important cornerstones of my musical canon. So turning it into “Team Rocket-Team Rocket” was just too perfect to pull off. In this case, clearly the Portishead “P” were all turned into Team Rocket “R”s, and the little girl on the stage in the background was turned into a Kirlia. I really enjoyed making this one.

Oh, then there’s some Magic fakes I did for shits-and-giggles…

Specifically, recently Wizards of the Coast mentioned that in their upcoming Time Spiral Revisited set, they would take cards made since the introduction of the new card style released in 8th Edition and make versions of them using the classic card layout. So stuff like Path to Exile would be made into an old-style card. Well, a few years prior I thought about something of the reverse: I tried to take the old card style and fit them into the modern card layout. So the classic “Black Parchment” or the “Green Wood” game text box would reappear, along with the original style’s backgrounds. I only made these two, but you can get an idea of what it could look like. I’d love to make more of these if other people like it!

Other fakes I made were “Baseball Card Fakes”. Part of this had to do with the combination of baseball cards being the first cards I ever collected and the amazing success of the Boche-era San Francisco Giants dynasty (with the Giants winning the World Series in 2010, 2012 and 2014!). Feeling the rush of Giants orange flowing in my veins, I just HAD to turn some of my Giants heroes into baseball cards of a certain era… two of them on show below.

First off, I’ve got a few cards in the style of the Topps 1951 series:

Obviously these guys weren’t even alive to have cards of them made in 1951, so I did them the honor. For an example of what Topps 1951 cards looked like, take a look below:

For that series only, it was framed to be more like a game (a trading card game, perhaps?), and each player’s cards could affect the game, such as drawing a strike or a ball card would mean your pitcher threw a strike or a ball, etc. I therefore tried to provide a fair variety of the various types, based more on what those players did in the post season (ie Panda Sandoval’s home run prowess, or Lincecum’s pitching skills, etc).

The second set of “fakes” were based on the Topps 1987 series. But on top of my Giants’ heroes (using the classic 1980’s Giants logo for good measure), I made “fakes” for teams which didn’t exist in 1987… mostly because I just wanted to see what cards of those teams would look like. Take a look!

I really enjoyed making these, and it helped that they all shared a set format in order to make designing new ones a breeze. And for an idea of what actual Topps 1987 cards looked like, I’ve got a couple examples below.

But baseball cards weren’t the only cards I collected back in my formative years… around the late-80’s and early-90’s, comic books were becoming more and more popular and mainstream, and so it wasn’t long before ancillary merchandise would be produced, like trading cards. I was more into Marvel back then, so I bought countless packs of Marvel cards from 1990 and 1991. And so with all those leftover cards in my collection, why not try and make some fakes of those cards, especially of characters which never existed back then.

And who else is more obvious to make new fake cards of than the one and only Deadpool?

Yep! The Merc with a Mouth finally has his own 1990 and 1991-era Marvel card. Sweet! But alas, I don’t remember where I put the raw files for these cards… comics are even MORE mainstream than they’ve EVER been since the 80’s, and it would be awesome to make more fakes for new characters made in the 00’s and 10’s, like Ms. Marvel.

Finally, while going through some of my old files and boxes while in the process of moving, I rediscovered some actual home made fakes I made. Lemme just show you them first, and I’ll explain the details after:

Lol wut?? OK so, I made these back when I was in 8th grade in Junior High, and back then I was into the Star Wars CCG. In fact it would be the first card game I would get into. Or was it the Star Trek CCG? Either way, it would be the Star Wars CCG which first sparked my dreams of making fake cards, and these two cards are some of the first examples of this.

Now as for who these characters are… well, the “Smiley Trooper” on the left was supposed to be the front line trooper of my “Smiley Empire”, aka the “United Smiley Space Army Corp” or USSAC. The character on the right was based on a character from the Eek! the Cat series: the Squishy Bears. Except with a Z because edgy. But uh… the Squishy Bearz (the ones with a Z, not an S) were actually the front line troops of my mortal enemy in Junior High school. So why are they on my side? Was I trying to reclaim the Squishy Bears because I loved that show too? I forget.

The cards themselves have nonsense abilities. To be honest I never actually learned how to play the Star Wars CCG, even to this day. I just bought them because everyone else was, and we also liked Star Wars. If I was smart, I would’ve bought packs of Magic, seeing as this was right around like the release of Reserved, or maybe Unlimited. Definitely after Alpha and Beta though.

…

But anyways, that’s that for now! That’s a lot of fakes to catch up on, so I share the other fakes I’d like to share some other time. Well, as soon as I find them, that is. Either way, I hope you enjoyed this romp down memory lane, even if some of this was actually new to you. Good times.