One vital piece of knowledge is knowing how to spot a fakie and (hopefully!) avoid it. A fakie is any pony toy made in an attempt to use Hasbro's hard earned My Little Pony toy name to pull in a few bucks for themselves. These things may look similar to MLP's but they are definitely not! The one big giveaway of a fakie is looking at the bottom of the horses hooves. A real My Little Pony will have the company of "Hasbro" written on the bottom of one of the the hooves, as well as a copywrite date directly above it.

One place where the Hasbro mark won't help you is with Cabbage Patch Ponies, since they were made by Hasbro as well. Generally, these ponies are easy to pick out from MLP's as they're much bigger, have the weird knee joints and cabbage patch doll eyes. Some people like these ponies and even avidly collect them. Just don't let someone pass them off as an authentic MLP on you.

Fakies are, for the most part, a lot uglier than any Hasbro ponies. Most people can tell them apart just by looking. Usually the body proportions are all wrong or the designs are butt ugly. Some fakie companies, however, use original Hasbro molds to make their knock-offs. From a customizing point of view, these are great! But as a collector, make sure you don't let someone pass these off to you as a the real thing. Oftentimes, these fakies will be missing either a mane or a tail and the plastic will be of a poor quality. One thing fakie companies never got were the Hasbro styles eyes. The eye paint of every fakie in an MLP mold is nothing like the original. All you have to do is pull your Cotton Candy off the shelf and do a quick comparison to let you know that the pony isn't genuine. Or if you can spot weird additions to the MLP mold, that's another good indicator. Things like umm... really scary teeth (as seen below), jewels and anything that has both wings and a horn.

Fakies have been made to mimic all sorts of MLP's; adults, babies, merry go round ponies, boy ponies, I've even seen a really scary fake seapony! It looked like the Ogopogo or something! Some fakies are so ugly you just have to love them, or so laughable you'll fork out a couple of bucks just to gaze in wonder at the insanity of these companies and wonder, "What the hell were they thinking?"