T206 Honus Wagner that was on Ebay - thoughts?

[T206Collector]

Originally Posted by TobaccoKing4

What about the back looks fake? I'd like to learn what you guys are seeing that I'm missing. To my eye the back looks legit but the front looks fake as ever.

Why the back is fake:

1. The color is too pink
2. The staining is artificial -- look at the left bottom edge and right bottom edge. You can see how the fibers that make up the card are darker. If you see a card that you think must be fake (e.g., a T206 Honus Wagner on ebay), always look for how the staining bleeds into the cracks of the surface and edges.
3. The corners (and you can see this on the front as well - especially top right and bottom left) were clipped with a scissors, and then rounded down by a thumb which caused uniform fraying at each corner.

Once you've handled hundreds of raw T206s and stared at them for hours at a time, all of these things and more will pop out to you immediately. Which is why you should not buy raw T206 cards worth over a couple of hundred bucks, at least until you've had a lot of experience handling them raw.

The front is just not what a T206 card looks like. The close-up of the eye should show a black dot matrix as the shadow.

Take a look at all the little black dots that make up the shadowing on this Hal Chase:



And instead what you see there is little white cracks, which were caused by the soaking in tea or whatever that was used to age the card. The surface of an authentic T206 would never crack like that.

It's a decent effort at a fake, all things told. But a fake nonetheless.