The Magic Librarities

ende73>> might those AP cards be found in precons?

Volcanon wrote:Does this have to do with 'common runs'? Cause in the new sets there are always two or three runs or something.

We are well aware of the fact that there are multiple runs. The point here is that each run must use a different setup for plate printing. In other words, the plate setup varies for print run #1 to print run #2...etc. This small fact that the plate positions are shuffled based on print run means there are more things to collect for people, miscuts, uncut sheets, etc. Also this is an interesting fact not publically well known before. There is sufficient proof that shows that the card positions do shift on varying print runs.

hammr7 wrote:So if we can figure out any preconstructed ice age promotions, and if any of these had blessed wine, then that may give us a key to how the variations exist.

Hi.
From Crystal Keep,the Ice Age promo commons are:
Aurochs
Balduvian Barbarians
Bone Shaman,
Chub Toad
Dire Wolves
Essence Flare
Flygja
Gaze of Pain
Gorilla Pack,
Norritt
Prismatic Ward
Scaled Wurm
Word of Undoing.
About 50% of the Promo cards were Norritts.

202,000 Ice Age Rare **
606,000 Ice Age Uncommon **
2,047,000 Ice Age Common **
3,555,000 Ice Age Land (per picture) **
2,213,500 Ice Age Promo Commons
4,047,000 Norrit (Ice Age common which was also a promo card)

Hope this help.

agzz wrote:ende73>> might those AP cards be found in precons?

That's a good point there.

Unfortunately I have never pulled out a single misprint from a pack myself so I don't know whether these were in precons. I always bought my misprints or traded for them.

Also, I'm not familiar with precons' composition though I guess we could look that info up somewhere.

ende73 wrote:

agzz wrote:ende73>> might those AP cards be found in precons?

That's a good point there.

Unfortunately I have never pulled out a single misprint from a pack myself so I don't know whether these were in precons. I always bought my misprints or traded for them.

Also, I'm not familiar with precons' composition though I guess we could look that info up somewhere.

Can't be. Dega Disciple for example is not in a preconstructed deck.

http://www.crystalkeep.com/magic/lists/files/pcd-ap.txt

but of course i can also be the starter <-> booster thing

Another possibility is prerelease vs release. Since we know errors have been fixed between the 2 printings, it stands to reason that the layout of the cards on the plate might also change.

l0qii wrote:Another possibility is prerelease vs release. Since we know errors have been fixed between the 2 printings, it stands to reason that the layout of the cards on the plate might also change.

Good point. So far there only appears to be a maximum of two misprint types for a given card, implying two print runs so far. Has anyone seen cases of 3 or more of these types?

There is more than one Carta Mundi plant that is printing cards. Is it possible that the different plants layout the sheets on their own?

The explanation that I like best so far is that there is more than one press running at a time (in the same plant), and to help with randomization they have different sheet layouts for the different presses. Perhaps this even factors into how the collation is done.

It seems almost impossible to say for sure unless we got some help from someone with intimate knowledge of the whole process.

I can't speak for Carta Mundi, but generally you want to minimize the number of plates required for printing because they are costly to produce. It doesn't make sense to tackle randomization by shuffling plates around. There has to be a practically unavoidable reason for having 2 plates containing the same cards.

Unless each card is a plate and then put into a larger fram, like typesetting used to be done. That way you do not have to cast a full plate, but onlt the individual ones. So just by putting the card plates in place, you can get the full 11x11 sheet.

mintcollector wrote:Unless each card is a plate and then put into a larger fram, like typesetting used to be done. That way you do not have to cast a full plate, but onlt the individual ones. So just by putting the card plates in place, you can get the full 11x11 sheet.

I have never heard of a printer like that, but I suppose it's possible. I think it's unlikely though.

l0qii wrote:

mintcollector wrote:Unless each card is a plate and then put into a larger fram, like typesetting used to be done. That way you do not have to cast a full plate, but onlt the individual ones. So just by putting the card plates in place, you can get the full 11x11 sheet.

I have never heard of a printer like that, but I suppose it's possible. I think it's unlikely though.

You are kiding me right? Ever hear of Gutenberg?

http://www.juliantrubin.com/bigten/gute ... vable.html

Although I am sure there is some more modern variant...my point is typesetting as been around for hundreds of years.

The first printing presses were Typeset. The Capital letters and normal letters were kept in separate drawers - hence Uppercase and Lowercase. I doubt this is how these errors occured though.

There is more than one Carta Mundi plant that is printing cards. Is it possible that the different plants layout the sheets on their own?

This seems like the most logical explanation to me.

mintcollector wrote:Unless each card is a plate and then put into a larger fram, like typesetting used to be done. That way you do not have to cast a full plate, but onlt the individual ones. So just by putting the card plates in place, you can get the full 11x11 sheet.

This is a pretty interesting theory, but our evidence (till now) is pretty much against it, since we saw 3 miscut Blessed Wines of which 2 were similar, and the same applies to miscut Portents.

Also, about 10 miscuts I own, which Fvzappa also owns, are similar.

This evidence, though very far from statistically significant, seems to point towards only 2 versions of that plate, at least for Ice Age commons.

EDIT: Poor grammar

There are a couple of other logical possibilities.

It has already been mentioned that errors were corrected, and these might coincide with the different sheet layouts. If so, they might have constructed the second arrangement by sorting out the correct text/artwork arrangements (from the first printing), and then added the modified/corrected cards at the end of the sheet. If even 10 cards needed updating, then virtually every row might see changes in what cards were neighbors.

Also, printing plates don't last forever. Ice Age had a huge production run. Even if all commons were produced on the same machine, the liklihood of creating more than one set of plates was high. A replacement set of plates (or an additional set, if more than one press was used) could have coincided with the error corrections.

I would think it most likely that only one machine was used for each rarity of sheet. Printing presses of that time could handle 50 sheets or more per minute. With long runs these machines could exceed 70% uptime. So if Carta Mundi ran 16 hours a day and 6 days per week, a single machine could knock out 2,000,000 sheets in about 10 weeks.