I bought a pair of used Marner pro stock sticks off of SLS a couple of years back. (I'm assuming that they were the real thing, although on SLS there's always a possibility that they weren't.) They were in good shape when I bought them and seemed pretty lightly used. I liked them a lot - super light and great feel. The one knock on them for me was the durability. I broke both pretty quickly - the blades went soft and then broke. All of which is to say that my experience sounds similar to BruinDust's