It's not just a MasterCard. There are still shops that will accept Maestro and not MasterCard. Further, some girocards, like mine, a V-Pay cards, Visa's equivalent, and not co-branded with Maestro.
Maestro is disjoint from MasterCard, this is correct. But it's also unrelated to what I said. You're right that many girocards are co-branded with Maestro and not MasterCards. However, they are not "EC cards".
Those cards that actually use the "ec" brand (rather than girocard) are proper debit MasterCards. You can see this on MasterCards German website [0]. Some banks are also using that branding to issue cards [1].
Beyond that, there are some girocards which are co-branded not with Maestro, but with MasterCard proper [2], although that is also unrelated to my previous statement.
