Editor’s Introduction: In this week’s Magic Oddica TheMisprintGuy shares a few Magic cards that received a bit of an extra sticky treatment. Check out Chapter XXII of Keith Adams‘ Magic Oddica to learn all about these unique collectibles!
So there I am, at GenCon several years ago, and someone comes up to me and says “Hey, my friend just got some cards with tape on them. He’s going to remove it so he can play with them. You need to stop him.” Wait, what? I need to see this for myself! Let’s go tackle this guy and see what the fuss is.
The first thing you may think of is why would a card have tape on it in the first place? And what’s the big deal? I think we all could apply tape to a card. Except this one’s different. And suddenly it dawns on my why I was grabbed with such urgency, no ordinary joker with tape did this – this was done within the factory. The tape is UNDERNEATH the printing. I knew I had to keep these cards intact.
There was a bit of mystery for a while, until I found a few photos within Carta Mundi, who manufactures Magic cards. Wizards published a photo of a very large stack of sheets, uncut and shrink wrapped. At the top, the shrink wrap was taped to the sheets. So, this is a logical explanation to the scenario. A piece of the tape was left on a sheet, and it was printed over, cut, and placed into packs. As a result, these two basic lands made it out with a nice big flaw on them. And to think I stopped someone from taking the tape off of two basic lands…was he in that bad of need of a simple Plains?
Over the years, I’ve seen this happen a few times. One other such instance was in my local card shop, a piece stretched over two Innistrad commons. This is extremely rare and almost unheard of, but they do look rather interesting. I’ve attempted to play with the basic lands, but so far most judges will not allow it as it adds thickness to the card. They are still some of my favorite misprints however.
And as always, here is a video where I share these cards with you. One of the things I did for comparison is show a card with tape that I added, so you can see the difference between it and cards with tape underneath the print. A huge difference, making the misprints a cool and rare find!