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Kem Millennium - fake?

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Kem Millennium - fake?
« on: July 11, 2016, 09:32:58 PM »
 

RFS1972

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I picked this deck up in a grab-bag auction.  It came with about 6 or 7 other authentic Kem decks, but I am leery about this deck.  My issues:

1.  They are paper.  I've never seen Kem cards made of paper since that is just not what they are.
2.  They are thick.  Most likely due to being made of paper.  They are about three cards thicker than a normal set of Kems.
3.  The color is washed out.  You can see how washed out in the picture below.
4.  They use the base background of the Hemisphere cards, which were released in the early 80's.
5.  The date code is B108.  That doesn't jive with how the date codes were used during 2000 as far as I know.
6.  Quality is poor.  Look at the KoD and 4oD and notice how off center they are.

So, are these fake?  Possibly a prototype?
 

Re: Kem Millennium - fake?
« Reply #1 on: July 14, 2016, 05:17:32 PM »
 

Don Boyer

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I picked this deck up in a grab-bag auction.  It came with about 6 or 7 other authentic Kem decks, but I am leery about this deck.  My issues:

1.  They are paper.  I've never seen Kem cards made of paper since that is just not what they are.
2.  They are thick.  Most likely due to being made of paper.  They are about three cards thicker than a normal set of Kems.
3.  The color is washed out.  You can see how washed out in the picture below.
4.  They use the base background of the Hemisphere cards, which were released in the early 80's.
5.  The date code is B108.  That doesn't jive with how the date codes were used during 2000 as far as I know.
6.  Quality is poor.  Look at the KoD and 4oD and notice how off center they are.

So, are these fake?  Possibly a prototype?

Could simply be a straight-up forgery, printed to try taking advantage of millennium mania.

I've never seen a paper Kem deck, period.  It's not what they ever did.

B108 doesn't look like a code that would ever have appeared on a Kem deck prior to the purchase by USPC in 2004 and it's unlikely a "Millennium" deck design would have been made even as late as 2000.  Pre-USPC Kem codes are either a three- or four-digit number - last two digits are the year of manufacture, remaining digit(s) are/is the month.

Plain and simple - NOT a Kem deck.
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