(Almost) all of the expensive mtg cards were printed over 20 years ago. Refining counterfeit measures in newly printed cards does nothing to prevent counterfeiting of the old and valuable cards. Newer MTG cards do have holographic stickers which makes counterfeiting new cards more difficult, but almost all $100+ cards are from over 20 years ago.

You can order holographic stickers for a few cents each nowadays. I doubt they good the same challenges they did until a few years ago.

What's the range on those? Surely someone could scan a booster box in a store before buying then (and know what rares are in the box)?

That’s why there needs to be a system like in passports - the rfid part is encrypted with the code printed on a card itself.

This way there is no way to decrypt RFID info unless one can see the face of the card.

Well, you wouldn't know what those rares are. If you are Wizards implementing this, you would have the RFID be random digits, and keep a database somewhere to match <string of hexadecimal numbers> with "English STX Professor Onyx".

But it's a good point, the access checks on the database would be a nightmare to handle properly.

Yeah I just mean for your automatic sealed pools concept you need a way for {whoever runs the tournament} to be able to scan a pool, or a verify decklist, which means a 3rd party. Local game stores are not necessarily to be trusted this much - simply because they are in the best position to scan boxes (and in the past LGSs have done shady stuff like this when sets were mappable).