This is a somewhat common practice, the only thing at fault here was they weren't allowed to under licensing.

This technique is usually done when by large companies to avoid diluting their product.

For example, Energizer can make a trillion batteries, but retailers would never buy them all up. So Energizer sells a percentage of their production to some po-dunk company and they rebrand them as SuperDuper Batteries. Thus Energizer makes big profit off the ones they brand as Energizer, and slight profit off ones they sell to SuperDuper.

I imagine Upperdeck was doing the same thing sort of... but in reverse. They sold ones branded as UD, but since their bottom line cost is mostly licensing fees to Konami, they then sold the cards to some other company. The cards sold the other company are virtually pure profit, with only the cost of ink and paper. It was a sneaky way to cook the books and sell tons of cards and avoid the licensing fee.

No, guys. These weren't "more" Yu-Gi-Oh cards — they were counterfeit ones. They were markedly different from the real Yu-Gi-Oh cards Upper Deck was also producing. Go to the ANN link to see the difference.

I can understand battery companies selling off excess product to be relabeled, but you can't relabel a Yu-Gi-Oh card. It's either real or counterfeit, even if the packaging is different.

Another thing that used to piss me off, is before the advent of Internet orders, the local card shops would go to the big retailers and buy all the sports cards. Then they would turn around and double or triple the price. They bascially created a shortage to give a false sense of rarity and price. All I wanted was to put them in my bike spokes.

Looks like they were bootlegging the high demand rare cards. The ones collectors and gamers buy for $20+

(Assumed) "Chinese knock-offs" can go for almost half the price of a legal card.

I think it's criminal to sell people collectible cards of ANY kind.
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I mean, really... You guys on crackcards (Magic The Gathering) paid big bucks for single pieces of cardboard with pretty pictures on them that were barely a few years old. I just don't get it. Are you stupid? Are you retarded or something?
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@Jerry:
Yeah, that's pretty much the way comic shops handled comic books in the late 80s and most of the 90s, too. They created a fake shortage and IMMEDIATELY priced new "rare" comics at three times the newsstand price. That's why I hate card collecting; At least with comics, I could go to the normal bookstore and find a comic rack with all the comics at retail price. A lot of those collectible cards were only sold through specialty stores, and they were GOUGING the people naive enough to keep buying them under those conditions.

That picture on the article scares me way more than it should.

I think because it looks like a grown man wearing that freaky anime head with the wannabe sex doll vacant look and awaiting mouth.

Actually, Upper Deck has been accused of doing this kind of thing for decades. Supposedly during the sports card boom days, they would print up more of hot cards (like the Ken Griffey rookie card) and sneak them onto the market or create "errors" and sneak those onto the market.

This news puts me in mind of the blackmarket Pokemon card ring that used to operate in my middle school. My cards, which I later found out were stolen, got repossessed and my money was never returned. That soured the Pokemon CCG for me pretty irrevocably. Of course, I still played Magic...and Rage...and Versus...

Well, at least I learned to buy from the properly licensed crooks.

Wonder if that means the cards formerly made by Upper Deck legally will no longer be legal for tournament play.

If so, I expect to hear the screams of thousands of angry card gamers...

Just to clarify, Upper Deck has never had the right to print Yu-Gi-Oh cards, they were in charge of distributing them in certain parts of the world, all cards were printed by Konami. For a good analysis of the legal matters, try going here:

http://cult-stuff.com/?p=444

And who will want to do business with Upper Deck now?
Bye bye Upper Deck.

I guess Upper Deck was just a front for Marik's Rare Hunters and their counterfeiting outfit. It's too bad Konami called foul in this as it's obvious Kaiba would have turned Tokyo into Battle City to expose Upper Deck and the Rare Hunters counterfeiting scheme. Instead we get the boring copyright/trademark infringement lawsuit.

For this instance, counterfeit is not being used meaning printing cards. What happened was Upper Deck had left over cards from a promotion and thought they could repackage and sell them as an "exclusive" product to Y\Vintage. It was because they repackaged these cards that the "counterfeiting" charge was brought up.

I heard about this ages ago, but I'm posting just to say that you need more YuGiOh shit on this site.