One of the more interesting Magic Rarities surfaced in early 2002—a card made completely of metal! Rumors of the cards existence were met with intense skepticism by the Rarities cognoscenti, including myself.

Then we saw the video. (MPG, 1.3 MB)
(Video courtesy of Marc Gembinski)

OK, so the thing is real. Now the question becomes: where did it come from? It has been confirmed that this is not a WotC-created product. It also was not handed out at a convention. The image on the card is from the Revised edition, so that would place its creation sometime in 1994. The best estimate is that this is a sample card: created by a company as a sample, hoping to sell its process to WotC. The sample was not accepted, and the usual course of action in such a situation is to destroy the samples. At least in this one case, that was not done, and now the metal Fork resides in a private collection.

The metal Fork appears to be made of brass. It's very shiny, and the scan does not do it justice. The picture and text appear to be imprinted with some sort of laser etching.

A second metal card subsequently surfaced, a Birds of Paradise. This one is of much poorer quality, looking like etched aluminum or tin.