r/magicthecirclejerking

I'm new to magic but have already dropped $3K on cards

$1500 - 2 forever decks (angel tribal atraxa good stuff and sweaty Kriik deck, both bracket 3)

$1500 on cards to show case (like a ripple foil colossal dreadmaw i really like)

since then I've been buying proxies to make a few other much cheaper decks. I was getting them off eBay where they're obviously fake/ low quality but recently ordered off a Chinese website that has proxies and when they arrived I realize they're literally indistinguishable from the real thing.

i decided to swap out my real cards to put them in a binder and just play with proxies until I go to an actual tournament when I accidentally dropped both piles of cards on the ground. I picked them up and it hit me that I genuinely could not figure out which card was real or fake even after an hour of hyper scanning. Somehow I never thought to buy a jeweler’s loupe when I was dropping thousands of dollars on magic cards!

this makes me

1. ⁠not want to buy anymore $10+ cards
2. ⁠makes it so I don't want to sell any of the cards I mixed up out of fear of scamming someone
3. ⁠now I'm questioning if any of the expensive cards I purchased are just proxies themselves

so on one hand I feel like I wasted a few grand on expensive cardboard but on the other hand I wasted a few grand on expensive cardboard

still unsure how to feel tbh, really makes you think