Post
by Royal Ass. » Sat Apr 26, 2008 5:18 pm
April 25, 2008
Q: I have a foil Reflecting Pool from Shadowmoor that has the plains symbol. Is this a print mistake?
–Vic, Philippines
A: From Aaron Forsythe, director of Magic R&D:
Sadly, it is. To ease your pain, here is a bit of a long story:
For a long time, various DCI promos (including Friday Night Magic prizes) have had foil "knockouts" in their text boxes as a way to make the card feel more special. By "knockout" I mean that the physical colored ink printed on the card is more or less the same as it is on the normal versions of the card, but some extra voodoo is performed on the layer of foil applied to it, allowing a logo to shine through.
When Mark Rosewater was compiling his long list of ways for jokes to be worked into the Unhinged set several years ago, he came up with "jokes in the foil," using a trick similar to the one done on the DCI promos. The premium versions of cards such as Goblin Mime and Gleemax show hidden things in the foiling of the card art, and there are several other such cards in the set.
We had all that in mind when the question came up during Shadowmoor development of how obvious it would be that the lands in the Sapseep Forest cycle had basic land types. We wanted a way to show the big mana symbol in the text box similar to the way they appear on normal basic lands. Because these cards have text, the big mana symbol wouldn't look nice in the frame, but art director Jeremy Jarvis was willing to try doing a special foil treatment so that the premium versions of the cards had something special going on that the normal versions do not.
Unfortunately, when you are trying new things, mistakes can easily be made. The premium versions of our cards don't have nearly as many pairs of eyes scrutinizing them as the regular versions do, mostly because we always assume that they are essentially going to be the same. The white mana symbol was inserted into the text box of the premium Reflecting Pool, carried over from the premium Mistveil Plains, and no one noticed it until the printed cards were in our hands.
All printed versions of the foil Shadowmoor Reflecting Pool have the white symbol on them, so yours isn't a particularly rare version or anything like that, but rather just a result of an oversight. We certainly know what to check for the next time we do special foil treatments like this.
Ci sono cose che succedono ai vivi non ai morti.