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Luigi Carts Review (2026): Real Brand, Recycled Mario-Carts Wave, or Both?

By Broken Bags Editorial 2026-05-15 8 min read

“Luigi carts” is a confusing category because it’s actually two completely different things sharing a green-hat Nintendo mascot on the box. There’s a real California-licensed cannabis brand called Luigi Oil (founded 2024 by Hovik Sudzhyan in Los Angeles), and there’s a recycled packaging-only wave that’s a direct descendant of the notorious 2019 Mario Carts EVALI-era boxes. The first is a real operator with real product. The second is whatever filler had access to Luigi-printed shells from overseas wholesalers.

Both are unauthorized Nintendo IP. That part is settled — Nintendo has never licensed Luigi for cannabis or hemp products. What varies is whether a real, accountable supplier is behind the device in your hand, and that’s the actual question this review answers.

The Luigi-vs-Mario-Carts distinction (this matters for SEO and safety)

If you’re searching this brand, you’re probably also seeing “Mario Carts” results — they’re visually related but they’re categorically different products. Worth getting straight:

Mario Carts (the EVALI-era brand)

Mario Carts appears by name in the CDC’s September 2019 MMWR on the Wisconsin EVALI cluster, listed alongside Dank Vapes, TKO, Chronic Carts, Off-White and Supreme as a brand used by hospitalized EVALI patients. Independent lab testing reported by DabConnection found a sample claiming 83–87% THC actually measured 69.35% THC and tested positive for pesticides. Mario Carts has no website, no contact info, no licensee. It is not a brand in any normal sense — it’s a packaging supply chain. Merry Jane and Rolling Stone documented the same pattern: empty Mario-branded packaging out of Shenzhen wholesalers, filled domestically with unregulated distillate.

Luigi carts (the newer, bifurcated wave)

The same wholesale supply chain that made Mario Carts shells now makes Luigi shells, and those continue to circulate in the EVALI-pattern channels (Telegram plugs, gas stations, Instagram DMs). But starting in 2024, a California operator named Luigi Oil launched a real licensed cannabis brand using the Luigi character identity. Founded by Hovik Sudzhyan, headquartered in downtown Los Angeles, now in 100+ California dispensaries (MG Magazine profile, luigioil.com, Purple Lotus San Jose brand intro). Their flagship is the 2g live-resin / liquid-diamond disposable, and the dual-pack format (2g disposable + infused preroll bundle) that hemp shops carry variations of.

Notably: Luigi does not appear in the RTI Reddit / EVALI characteristic-term study (where Mario Carts has an F-score of 0.996), and Luigi was not listed on the DabConnection 2024 Mega Fake Cartridges List. That’s not an endorsement — it means Luigi is newer, less documented, and not yet a named villain in the public-health literature. The bifurcation between “real licensed Luigi Oil” and “recycled Luigi-printed packaging” is the only thing that matters when you’re standing in front of a vendor.

What you’re actually buying

Luigi-branded 2g disposables come in three practical categories:

1. Licensed California Luigi Oil. Real producer, Hovik Sudzhyan’s LA operation, sold through Weedmaps-listed California dispensaries. Subject to METRC tracking and state-mandated contaminant testing. Per MG Magazine, Luigi Oil runs in-house testing at its downtown LA facility. Highest tier.
2. Hemp-derived Luigi-branded disposables. Real hemp product (Liquid Diamonds + Live Resin formulation, dual-pack bundles with infused prerolls), shipped under the Luigi identity through a hemp-side distributor. Source-dependent quality — “branded but unverified” until you know who filled the device. This is the channel BB’s “LUIGI 2g LD LR Dispos WITH infused Prerolls” lives in.
3. Recycled packaging-only Luigi shells. Empty Luigi-printed cartridges sourced from the same Shenzhen wholesale pipeline that produced Mario Carts, filled domestically by whoever bought the boxes. This is the EVALI-pattern channel. Almost always sold at gas stations, smoke shops, Telegram DMs, Instagram plugs — $15–$25 price points that real product can’t hit.

The verification work — what does this device cost vs. retail floor? Who is the seller? Is there any COA at all? Does the box quality match brand spec? — is what tells you which of the three you’re holding.

What Reddit and TikTok say

Direct r/fakecartridges threads on the “Luigi” name are sparse — the brand is new enough that the documented Reddit corpus mainly catches it inside the broader “are these themed disposables legit” bucket. The patterns that are documented:

• TikTok #luigicart and #luigi2g is dominated by “real or fake” unboxing videos — the format inherited directly from the late-2019 Mario Carts wave. Search demand for “Luigi 2g dispo real or fake” is large enough that TikTok surfaces a dedicated discovery page.
• The character-themed cart format itself raises Reddit’s hackles. The RTI EVALI characteristic-term study found Mario Carts was characteristically co-mentioned with words like “are fake,” “fakes,” “packaging.” Buyer skepticism is baked into the cartoon-cart category — Luigi inherits that whether it deserves to or not.
• Delta-8 / hemp-derived disposables as a class get compared on Reddit to “black market purchases of Delta-9 THC counterfeit carts, because both types of products are untested” (per RTI’s Weed Light delta-8 Reddit study). Luigi-branded hemp disposables sit squarely in that distrust zone.
• Repeated complaints in the Luigi-adjacent commerce blogosphere flag hardware variation, oil viscosity inconsistency, and battery failure as the most common buyer regrets — symptoms of a single brand name spread across multiple unrelated fillers.

How to tell a real Luigi disposable from a fake

Because most Luigi-branded inventory is “branded but unverified,” the verification checklist is the same one applied to any Nintendo-IP cart, with an added emphasis on price-and-source:

1. Price — the highest-signal check

Per the luigivape.com authentication coverage, the single most reliable fake indicator is the gas-station / smoke-shop price point. Luigi 2g disposables at $15–$25 are virtually guaranteed to be from the packaging-only EVALI channel. Authentic licensed Luigi Oil or vetted hemp-derived Luigi-branded product clusters at $35–$70 depending on dual-pack bundles and SKU. The unit economics for real product, hemp or cannabis-side, don’t work below ~$30.

2. Provenance

Where did it come from? Weedmaps-listed California dispensary (verifiable through CA DCC license search) = legitimate Luigi Oil. Established hemp retailer with multi-brand catalog and named supplier = defensible hemp SKU. Telegram or Instagram DM plug, gas station, $15–$25 price point = almost certainly packaging-only EVALI-channel product.

3. QR code / COA

Licensed Luigi Oil pushes verification stickers that should resolve to the official luigioil.com domain. Hemp-derived Luigi-branded SKUs that publish a real third-party COA are categorically different from a Luigi box with a dead QR code. A dead QR or one redirecting to a generic landing page is the strongest single fake tell.

4. Hardware

Current-gen authentic units ship with USB-C charging (not micro-USB), lithium-ion battery weight, rigid (not collapsible) packaging, and clean print without smudged or misspelled words. Light, plasticky-feeling hardware with rough seams or off-color foil is the EVALI-channel signal.

5. Oil viscosity and color

Authentic live-resin distillate is golden-amber, high-viscosity, slow-moving. Water-thin or dark brown oil with visible “floaties” is the classic vitamin-E-acetate-era counterfeit signature.

Lab testing and safety

Licensed Luigi Oil (the California cannabis brand) runs in-house testing per the MG Magazine profile and is subject to METRC seed-to-sale tracking + California’s state-mandated contaminant panel (pesticides, heavy metals, residual solvents, microbials, mycotoxins). California-side product is testable.

Hemp-derived Luigi-branded disposables sold outside California dispensaries: source-dependent. There’s no centralized brand-level COA portal for hemp-side Luigi inventory. Verification depends on the distributor behind the specific SKU.

Packaging-only Luigi shells from the EVALI-pattern channel: no testing, no provenance, structural risk from vitamin E acetate and any other thinning agent. The CDC found vitamin E acetate in every THC cartridge it seized in a September 2019 raid, versus zero seized in 2018 (CDC MMWR). The supply-chain pattern that produced that contamination is the same one that prints character-themed boxes today.

The Nintendo IP question

Worth saying plainly: all Luigi-branded carts are unauthorized Nintendo IP usage. Nintendo has never licensed Luigi or any Mario-franchise character for cannabis or hemp products. Per Nintendo’s official piracy and IP policy, unauthorized character use is grounds for takedown. Both the licensed California Luigi Oil brand and the EVALI-pattern packaging operate on borrowed visual equity that could vanish whenever Nintendo’s legal team decides to act on it.

Practical impact for buyers: the brand identity has unresolved IP exposure. The product channels themselves are independent of that exposure — what you’re actually buying is “a hemp or cannabis disposable in a Luigi-decorated box,” not “a Nintendo-blessed product.”

Luigi vs the alternatives

If you specifically want the Mario-themed cart aesthetic, Luigi is the category-current option — and a defensible buy if you source through a vetted vendor. Mario Carts itself is a separate brand and we recommend avoiding it — it’s the original EVALI-era packaging-only operation with no real producer behind it.

Frequently asked questions

Final verdict

Luigi is one of the more interesting cases in the cart-tok ecosystem because the brand identity is real in one very specific channel (Hovik Sudzhyan’s California operation), defensible in one other (hemp-derived through vetted distributors), and dangerous in the third (recycled Mario-Carts-style packaging from the EVALI-pattern pipeline). The visual brand is unauthorized Nintendo IP across all three.

The substantive risk is not Luigi-the-brand — it’s the packaging-only channel that pretends to be Luigi. The packaging is the easy part. The fill is the variable.

Rating: 3.9 / 5 for hemp-side Luigi-branded product sourced through a vetted distributor. Subtract 2 points if the unit came from a gas station, smoke shop, Telegram plug, or any seller at the $15–$25 price point. Add a point if you’re buying actual licensed Luigi Oil through a Weedmaps-listed California dispensary — but you won’t see it ship nationwide, and you shouldn’t trust anyone who says otherwise.

This review reflects publicly-available consumer reports, Reddit community sentiment, and lab data as of 2026-05-15. We carry verified Luigi sourced through our vetted distribution channel. We are not affiliated with the Luigi manufacturer. Hemp-derived products only; we do not ship to states where federally legal hemp-derived cannabinoids are restricted at the state level.