How to Spot a Fake T206 Card: Authentication Guide

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While most present-day card scams involve more modern cards that are easier to reproduce, counterfeit cards dating back to the Pre-War era are certainly still present.  

We have previously discussed evaluating vintage counterfeit cards, yet this piece will focus on detecting some of the more common fakes from the infamous T206 White Borders set.  

This guide will give you all the knowledge you need to avoid buying fake T206 cards.

As always, if you come across a good fake or if you need any help in authenticating a T206 card, shoot us an email at he**@*************ds.com

Which T206 Cards Have Been Counterfeited?

The answer to this question is not simple.  For any of the more valuable cards in the set, such as Honus Wagner, Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, and Cy Young (along with the expensive error cards), many attempts at fakes have been made over the years.  

Usually, the fakes are just low-production copies printed in the hundreds of thousands and sold on eBay as ‘unknown authenticity’.  Sometimes, they are labeled as actual reprints. (Be sure to see our guide to safely buying cards on eBay. 

Many T206 scammers will take older reproduction copies (that say ‘Reprint’ on the back of the card) and artificially age them.

Here is a good post of a fake T206 card with the word ‘Reprint’ removed from the bottom of the back. 

There have been several full T206 reproduction sets produced over the years (Dover and Galasso the most common), but most are of such low quality that all of the points we lay out below would be able to help you easily distinguish between the fake and the real card.  

The last thing I will note is that many fake T206 cards end up in bootleg holders from a basement or a defunct grading company, or in holders designed to look like PSA or SGC holders.  

Again, focus on the card; the steps below should help you avoid buying fakes like this.

Examining Player Name Fonts On A T206 Card

One of the first areas to examine when authenticating a T206 card is the bottom text area, which details the player’s last name and team name.  

Most fakes have been unable to reproduce the correct font and color of the text on the front of authentic T206 cards. The text is dark brown on a genuine card, whereas most fakes use black ink. 

If you have yet to handle an actual T206 card, these nuances might be harder to distinguish. Thus, I always recommend keeping a few common cards nearby for comparison.

Here’s a close-up look at the text on an authentic T206 Honus Wagner card:

It should be clear that the authentic card’s text is brown, whereas the fake Wagner card has darker, black text. There are many variations of counterfeit T206 cards, but you should be able to determine authenticity based on text color alone 9 out of 10 times. 

Some fakes are just blatantly obvious. Hopefully, the issues with this one are clear: the wrong font, which is narrower and a different size, along with the black text.  

No Factory Designation Number On The Back

Another common thing I’ve noticed on some fake T206 cards is a missing factory designation on the back. For those not familiar, aside from having various tobacco-back advertisements, T206 cards also have small print on the bottom back of the card, notating the factory where the card was produced.  

Here’s an example of an authentic Sweet Caporal back. Note the factory designation on the bottom of the card.

I will again reiterate the great Scot Reader ‘Inside T206’ piece for more information on this, but here is a look at the different factories and the advertising backs.  Your card should line up with this factory/back combination:

A card’s factory designation might have somehow been scuffed out due to excessive wear or maybe if the back of the card was glued to a scrapbook and removed, but if you find one without it, be very skeptical.  

I recently saw a fake T206 Christy Mathewson card for sale on eBay missing its factory number.  This card has many issues that indicate it is a fake, but the missing factory number would help if you were a bit more novice at examining T206 cards.

Look For Artificial Signs of Aging 

Most experienced vintage collectors can spot the signs of artificial aging from a mile away.

So, what exactly is artificial aging? 

Artificial aging involves making a reprint or counterfeit card look old and consistent with the original production year.

Common methods of artificial aging include soaking cards, burning cards, bending or creasing cards, and artificially rounding corners. 

For more novice collectors, this guide should help identify artificially aged fakes.

First, let’s take another look at that Mathewson from above.  

Burnt Edges

This card has many problems (wrong card stock, fonts, colors), but one thing caught my eye when I first looked at it: the dark browning along the edges.  

It is certainly a sign that someone took a lighter to this card, or even baked it in the oven (yep, that’s a thing), to try to burn and age the edges.  

Sure, a card can get burnt, but it’s not all that common.  So, if you see that sort of burnt look around the edges (more so on the bottom left), it will likely be a fake. 

Spider Wrinkling

One of the most common methods of artificially aging a card involves soaking it to make it look very old. Often, cards are soaked in tea or even coffee grounds to make them look really old.  

Here’s a crafter doing what a card scammer might do to artificially age a card, including dumping tea all over the paper. Note the burning he does to the paper as well. I’m sure many card doctors have watched this video or similar ones (thanks, YouTube). 

The good thing is that it’s quite easy to detect a card that has been soaked.  Here’s an artificially aged T206 Cobb Red Portrait that recently fooled some unsuspecting buyers on eBay.

First, let’s note some things on the front of the card.  

Look at all that scratching; a sign that someone probably took some sandpaper to the card–it would be very unusual for a 120+-year-old card to have this sort of scratching…especially scratches that are that white!!  

This is a sign that the paper on which the card was printed is NOT the same as that used for cards produced in the early 1900s. 

Plus, the corners have a very unusual blackness and rounding to them–often, we see fakes with very obvious rounded corners—but these ones, especially that bottom right corner, look specifically forced to look old, maybe with dirt, but I’m not quite sure. 

Now, back to the soaking. The key to identifying a soaked card is those little tiny spider wrinkles—you can notice some of them on the front, but they are very obvious on the back of the card.  That crackling appearance on the back of the card is not what a typical, authentic T206 card should look like.  

Artificial Rounding of Corners

As part of artificially aging a card, scammers will intentionally round the corners.  One important thing to understand about how T206 cards were printed is that a white coating was applied to the fronts of the cards to increase their brightness.  From Cycleback’s excellent work:

The cards were printed on a thin cardboard with the fronts only (where the players appear) coated in a smooth white substance.  This front layer, which was used on cards throughout the 19^th and 20^th century, created a smooth bright white surface that helped the images look their best.  There was no white ink used, so the white areas on a T206 were created by a lack of ink against the white coating.

Thus, on a normally aged authentic T206 card, any wear at the corners will clearly distinguish the white coating on the top of the card from the underlying paper stock. 

Here’s a fake Cobb someone sold on eBay. Note the corners, which feel forced and sharp, and lack any fibrous wear beneath the card’s top coating. This one happens to have the wrong font on the front of the card.

Give It The Old Black Light Test

We’ve discussed how a black light can help detect counterfeit cards before, but let’s revisit how it works with T206 cards.  

As a reminder, optical brighteners were added to paper in the late 1940’s.  Paper that includes these optical brighteners will fluoresce under a black light.  If the paper does not include a brightener, it will look dull under black light and not fluoresce.  

T206 cards were produced from 1909 through 1911 and did not include any brighteners. Thus, under black light, there should be no fluorescence.  

You don’t need a real T206 card to run the test against any suspect T206 card (although it would help to have an old card to get an idea of how it should appear under black light).  

Here’s an example of a test we ran on some old 1920s strip cards to evaluate their authenticity.  This should give you a better idea of what to look for. 

If you need a black light, you can grab one on eBay for less than $10. Go into a room, shut all the shades, and get it as dark as possible. Shine the black light on the card in question, and have some newer cards that will fluoresce under the light. If the card fluoresces, it’s a fake; if not, you have an authentic T206 card. 

Get a Loupe and Look For Dots

You will need a strong magnifying glass or a jeweler’s loupe.  Once you understand how T206 cards were printed, you should be able to easily identify a counterfeit card.

Here’s a 45x magnification loupe that I have–I like it because it has a light and a black light.  It can be found on eBay for less than $10. 

If we refer back to the excellent work of Scott Reader, he outlines in detail how various inks were used in several steps to create the beautiful color lithographs on T206 cards. 

While some areas use solid inks—namely, the player and team names on the front, the black border on the front of the card (and any black outline in the player image), and the tobacco advertisement on the back of the card — the remainder uses an early form of half-tone printing. 

It can, however, be considered a very crude form of ‘half-tone’ printing.  As a reminder,  the invention of half-tone printing allowed for the creation of printed images using a series of dots.  Today’s modern halftone printing uses a very consistent pattern, whereas the printing on a T206 card or any early pre-war tobacco card shows a much more irregular pattern of colored dots — more like splotches of ink.  David Cycleback puts it best:

Anyone who uses a microscope of at least 30X power will see that the printing on T206 image is just plain different than the image on a modern trading card.  It’s as simple as that.  A modern image is relatively neat and ordered, with a fine and rigid dot pattern that Mussolini would be proud of.  At 30X or more power the T206 image suggests that the printers should’ve kept off the sauce.

Let’s take a closer look at a T206 card under magnification.  This is a common card–Wilbur Goode from the set.  

If you’ve read Scott Reader’s piece, you know that the first layer of color used on the cards was yellow, and on this Goode card, there is a yellow background to examine. We can see a very messy set of ink dots, with very little consistency, aimed at producing a solid yellow color.  Although this attempt to produce a solid color doesn’t have the same sort of dot separation as black dots, which you will see on later images.

Reader also notes that black was the second color used in the print process — first for the black border, then for adding any dark colors to the player image. Thus, on all T206 cards, you will find various collections of black print dots.  

Here’s another example on the Goode card, where we can see that the black dots help define the surrounding yellow of his bat and uniform.  Again, notice especially 

We can see more black printing dots used to provide more texture in the uniform. Note that an additional blue was added to provide more color to his uniform.

By now, we can see that the printing used on a T206 card is basically a symphony of different inks.  Now let’s look at a modern card and a counterfeit pre-war card.

Here’s a mid-80s Darryl Strawberry card.  It is quite clear of the difference–notice the uniformity in print.  

And here is a fake 1909 E98 Honus Wagner card (note an original would use the same printing process as a T206 card)—we should first notice that this card has been soaked—see the spider wrinkles in the border on the second image?  

That should alert us that this card is fake.  But otherwise, there is also a much more uniform print on this card, indicating that this is indeed a modern-era reprint. 

Check For Registration on T206 Card

One common distinguishing characteristic of T206 cards and other cards produced in the early 1900s is their registration. Simply put, this means any variation in the alignment of colors used in printing the card.

An off-register card was printed with its colors out of place, leading to colors outside or inside of borders, or sometimes overlapping colors on the card. Registration problems are quite common on T206 cards.  

Here’s a clear example on a T206 card:

The key thing to understand regarding registration is that many fake T206 cards will also have registration problems, mostly designed to fool an unsuspecting buyer.  

However, the ink outside any border should look mostly solid and not have the half-tone dots of a modern card, as I outlined above. 

Here’s the same example of that fake E98 Cobb I showed above.  

See the red below the bottom border?  See how the red has separated dots — this is modern halftone printing and, again, a clear sign of a fake. 

On the real Goode T206 card below, there are some minor registration issues. Note the blue outside the border, which is just a bunch of splotchy, inconsistent blue dots. This is what an early T206 print would look like. 

I will note that on many common T206 fakes, you can sometimes identify fakes by noticing similar registration issues on common reprints.

Buy Some T206 Commons To Prepare

For anyone serious about collecting and thinking of buying any high-priced raw T206 cards, I always recommend buying some inexpensive T206 commons in order to practice some of the steps I’ve outlined above.  

We have some raw, ungraded commons available for sale starting at $27.  While you’re at it, head over to eBay and grab any reprint/counterfeit T206 cards that you can use to compare to an original.

Once you have your cards and the necessary equipment (a black light and a loupe), you should be well on your way to becoming an expert at authenticating T206 cards.

If you see any cards at auction that look suspect, feel free to let us know at he**@*************ds.com