[RobDerhak]

Originally Posted by savedfrommyspokes

My understanding is that the backs with the bold "40th" are not legit....after going through 1000s of DS cards, I have never seen a legit DS card with the bold 40th on the back.

In looking at the 6 cards pictured in the scans, the Ortiz and Larkin cards appear to not be legit, while the other 4 cards appear legit (tough to tell for sure w/o card in hand). The Ortiz should not have the bold back and on both the Ortiz and the Larkin cards the words "Operation Desert Shield" appear bloated as compared to the more refined legit copies.

Below are a few articles that discuss distinguishing the legit copies from the fake copies:


http://www.cardboardconnection.com/1...baseball-cards

https://sportscardinfo.wordpress.com...-shield-cards/

http://www.psacard.com/Articles/Arti...-pre-war-cards

I've read all those articles prior, none mention muted backs...so I decided to poke around

There are several listed on COMC that have bold backs...they all are all or nothing...i.e. all 9 Brent Knackerts that are on COMC are bold (from 6 different sellers) while all 11 Jose DeLeons (from 7 different sellers) are muted.

All Junior Ortiz on COMC are bold (there are only 2 at the moment), and the other players that I bought that have bold backs (Schofield, Guthrie, Gallego, Mack, Pagliarulo, Schiraldi, Scioscia) are all 100% bold backs on COMC.

All points to some really smart forgeries of some relatively low value cards, or all legit...

There are also PSA slabbed cards on COMC w/ bold backs (Lee Smith, Hershiser, Lilliquist for example), so that pretty much seals it for me that the backs are not a judge of authenticity

Thanks for looking out, but I'm pretty confident that between the military regalia at the sale, the relative low value of the players I bought, and the above research that they are legit.