[drcy]

There may be some variation to aging, toning, but I'd be suspect of darker cream. I've seen fakes that were brown/dark sepia. Other than dirt/crime/toning, the front borders should be close to white.

The real versus fake cards are easy to identify, because of the rounded corners that were uniformly factory cut across the issues. The fakes and reprints will usually to almost always have different corners-- hand cut, different size/angle etc. in short, compare the corners to real cards. Also, if the sides are trimmed on a real one, this can be revealed on the smaller corners. And, of course, it would be near impossible to trim the corners deceptively.

This is the same with other factory cut round corner issues.

Realize, most baseball card forgers want quick money, an hourly wage. They don't want to spend time exactly duplicating rounded corners on a lesser value issue, when they can cut square corners on their paper cutter in 5 seconds. Even if, for whatever reason, they really wanted to exactly duplicate the corners, it would still be hard because the real cards were die cut in a factory 100 years ago.

And the up-and-up Frisch-esque National Game/Polo Grounds reprints I've seen also clearly have different corners when compared to authentic cards.