Miscuts Explanation FIXED

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cataclysm80
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Miscuts Explanation FIXED

Post by cataclysm80 » Thu Oct 10, 2013 11:36 pm

Neuron wrote: EDIT: After measuring the frames, I found that the cards are really miscut. The frame errors I reported do not exist. Nevertheless, they indicate the edition. Thank you for your hint!
I see what you're talking about now. Thanks for the pictures!

Here is some information Dan Bock wrote about miscuts...

"To understand what's going on, you need to understand something about the way sheets are cut. Please take a minute to study the picture I loaded. Imagine an uncut sheet. The magic cards on the sheet exist as the grey lines. The grey lines are also where you would expect the cuts to be.

Image

There are three steps to the cutting process....
1) Cut one way (across)
2) cut the other way, perpendicular (down)
3) cut (round) each individual card's corners

Step 1)
When a sheet gets miscut, and is not perpendicular, something like the yellow lines happens.
The problem is that there are still TWO more steps to the cards becoming MtG card sized.

Step 2)
The next step is that the perpendicular cut needs to happen. At this point, one of two things can happen with a miscut sheet.
a) the cut is made perpendicular to the yellow lines.
b) the cut can be made according to how the original intent is, along the sideways grey lines.

When (a) happens, the card comes out being a rectangle, and the image looks rotated, with the cards getting progressively worse as you travel down the sheet (compare the cards in the upper left to lower right.) 2a is following the grey lines on the sheet.

When (b) happens the cards come out NOT having rectangles. They are parallelograms. Depending on how bad they are, they may not even fit in sleeves. 2b follows the blue lines on the drawing I made. At this point there is something about geometry you need to understand. do you see how the blue lines get farther and farther away from them grey lines, especially on the right side? because the images are twisted, you are effectively getting drift away from the original intended cut lines. Because the blue line, the actual cut line, is slanted away from the grey line, the intended cut line, it is setting up a triangle between Blue-Grey-Yellow. The blue side is the new bottom of the card, which is going to have a certain fixed length. Because that side is no longer at a right angle to the sheet, the lines drift as you approach the bottom and as you approach the right side of the sheet.

Step 3)
The final step is rounding the corners.
Keep in mind, something "bad" has already happened at this point. So it is hard to predict what happens in step 3 when the cards go to get their corners rounded. Assuming 2a happened, then usually the cards will be exactly MtG card shaped, and the corners will be cut correctly. Assuming 2b happened, the cards are NOT MtG card shaped, and will probably have something bad happen. they may have weird curves on the corners, or have nearly right angles, or be mangled entirely."


Your miscuts are the Step 2 a type. The miscuts you posted are miscut similarly to one another because they are all Warp Artifact and that card is located in the same place on each sheet. Several sheets must have been miscut. Those miscut warp artifacts are probably from the same set, but it's not something we can count on for certain. Miscuts happen in other sets also, and it is doubtfull that all the sheets in that set were miscut. The not miscut Warp Artifacts could be from the same set as the miscut ones. The El-Hajjaj misprint mmgun posted on page 3 of this thread isn't miscut. I'll check my own when I get home. I'd like a closer look at your Warp Artifacts, but I can't seem to download your original file from the photo site you used. Would you please email me a copy of the original scan?

Many Thanks!

Tav
Last edited by cataclysm80 on Sat Dec 10, 2016 7:42 am, edited 3 times in total.

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Post by Neuron » Fri Oct 11, 2013 11:11 pm

Very interesting! Did Dan Bock work in the past for Carta Mundi or is that an inductive statement?

I assume that mmguns misprint was printed before ours. During the production, some screws of the cutter might have become loose or something similar, causing the miscut cards. Then they corrected first the text and later the cutters position. But disregarding that, I based my order on the alignment. I try to e-mail you the largest scan that I have so that you can check whether you agree.

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Post by dragsamou » Sat Oct 12, 2013 8:42 am

Hi

Indeed very interesting post from Dan Bock =D>
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Post by hammr7 » Sat Oct 12, 2013 7:57 pm

That explanation is consistent with the answers I provided over the years. I do like the diagram.

The one item I would like to add. I have not seen the cards that were the source of this response. However, I would be surprised to see multiples of the same card being both miscut and ending up in the same collection unless they left the print facility by unusual methods.

The cutting knives used to cut whole sheets (step 1) and large strips (step 2 tend to work best when processing one sheet, or only a few sheets, at a time. The corner rounding (step 3), on the other hand, works better on large stacks of cards.

Anyway, since sheets are processed one at a time or a few at a time, and then stacked for packaging, it would be very unusual to see multiple copies of one card without seeing any copies of every other card on that uncut sheet. Since the card is a rare, if these cards made it into regualr cards or boxes, there should be similar miscuts of all the other rares on that sheet.

Another point of interest. The corner rounding process is not as chaotic as one might think for Dan Bach's explanation. The worst cut (actually "grind") that can happen would be the rounded corner. As cards get more miscut some corners, those with obtuse angles, won't be in place and may not get any trim. The corners with acute angles may get cut back more, back to a rounded edge that clips the corner back toward where it should be.

However, if the acute angle extends more than a little, the more likely outcomes is that the oddly-shaped card jams the transport mechanism. This is why you see a decent number of miscuts that are smaller than a regular card, but very few that have any dimensions larger than a regular card.

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Post by dragsamou » Sun Oct 13, 2013 10:58 am

hammr7 wrote:That explanation is consistent with the answers I provided over the years. I do like the diagram.

The one item I would like to add. I have not seen the cards that were the source of this response. However, I would be surprised to see multiples of the same card being both miscut and ending up in the same collection unless they left the print facility by unusual methods.

The cutting knives used to cut whole sheets (step 1) and large strips (step 2 tend to work best when processing one sheet, or only a few sheets, at a time. The corner rounding (step 3), on the other hand, works better on large stacks of cards.

Anyway, since sheets are processed one at a time or a few at a time, and then stacked for packaging, it would be very unusual to see multiple copies of one card without seeing any copies of every other card on that uncut sheet. Since the card is a rare, if these cards made it into regualr cards or boxes, there should be similar miscuts of all the other rares on that sheet.

Another point of interest. The corner rounding process is not as chaotic as one might think for Dan Bach's explanation. The worst cut (actually "grind") that can happen would be the rounded corner. As cards get more miscut some corners, those with obtuse angles, won't be in place and may not get any trim. The corners with acute angles may get cut back more, back to a rounded edge that clips the corner back toward where it should be.

However, if the acute angle extends more than a little, the more likely outcomes is that the oddly-shaped card jams the transport mechanism. This is why you see a decent number of miscuts that are smaller than a regular card, but very few that have any dimensions larger than a regular card.
As usual...Brilliant =D>
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Post by cataclysm80 » Mon Oct 14, 2013 6:21 pm

Just for the sake of continuity, Here is a link to the thread where this discussion originated http://www.magiclibrarities.net/forum/v ... php?t=9058 and more importantly, here is the picture of the cards we are talking about...

Image

The misprint at the top right, along with the entire middle row is miscut.
Tav
Last edited by cataclysm80 on Wed Apr 16, 2014 5:56 am, edited 3 times in total.

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Post by cataclysm80 » Mon Oct 14, 2013 7:00 pm

hammr7 wrote:I would be surprised to see multiples of the same card being both miscut and ending up in the same collection unless they left the print facility by unusual methods.

it would be very unusual to see multiple copies of one card without seeing any copies of every other card on that uncut sheet. Since the card is a rare, if these cards made it into regualr cards or boxes, there should be similar miscuts of all the other rares on that sheet.
Now that you can see the cards, you'll notice that it is a pretty minor miscut. The four miscut cards in the scan have all been identified as German 4th Edition (by greatly enlarging them and measuring the vertical alignment of the card name). Looking at an uncut sheet of rares from 4th Edition reveals that Warp Artifact is very close to the bottom of the sheet being just above the bottom row and 3rd card from the right. (El-Hajjaj is in the middle of the bottom row.) As shown in the diagram, the miscut gets further off center as the cut moves down the sheet. The majority of cards being above these on the sheet would be less miscut, maybe even imperceptibly so towards the top of the sheet, with only the bottom few rows of the sheet appearing something like the cards you see here, which is only slightly miscut. I think it's possible that a miscut this small could have passed a quality control inspection as long as it was towards the bottom of the sheet and no cards were being ruined or showing other cards. This isn't much different from cards that are cut straight but slightly off center which were fairly common back then. As such, it's possible that a large number of cards could have this slight miscut issue, making it more likely that somone could find similar miscuts of the same card, particularly if they were actively searching for them. The person who owns these particular cards did say that he had actively searched for misaligned copies like this, and also that he had seen other cards which were similarly misaligned. So Yes, other similarly miscut cards DO exist.

Note: The Non-Miscut cards in the picture are from German 3rd Edition and German Two Player Starter Set.

Note: The Right card in the middle row is miscut differently, being clined to the left instead of clined to the right like the others.

Tav

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Post by hammr7 » Mon Oct 14, 2013 7:37 pm

A large stack of cards is like a log or a board. If you have ever seen a wood lathe (or even a router) bevel an edge of a piece of wood, you have seen the kind of process that rounds edges on cards. You are literally grinding away material.

If you don't set the router guide correctly, you end up with a corner cut which isn't as deep or as round as it is supposed to be. these kinds of issues were quite common in earlier Magic printings, to the same extent as color variations. Since the rounded corner, unlike Alpha, isn't that deep, it takes a pretty major deviation to notice.

Square-cornered cards are simply cards that didn't get one or more of their corners rounded. If the card is otherwise shaped correctly (perpendicular edges of proper dimension) then Steps 1 and 2 were just fine. The problem occurred in the corner trimming only. And since cards are normally stacked for that process, if you have 4 or 5 of a specific rare with the abnormal corner, you likely have 4 or 5 (or more) of every other rare on that sheet with the same abnormality.

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Post by Neuron » Mon Oct 14, 2013 10:29 pm

You are literally grinding away material.
I'm sorry, but I think that's not true. You can see a burr on the most cards in one direction (changes between editons). That can only occur if the cards are punched. There are also foil cards which have the cardboard cut away but the foil layer is still square. How could you achieve such a thing by turning?

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Post by hammr7 » Mon Oct 14, 2013 11:52 pm

Neuron wrote:
You are literally grinding away material.
I'm sorry, but I think that's not true. You can see a burr on the most cards in one direction (changes between editons). That can only occur if the cards are punched. There are also foil cards which have the cardboard cut away but the foil layer is still square. How could you achieve such a thing by turning?
There are different ways of cutting cards. If it is all done at once (in one step), then you can never have non-perpendicular sides like the Dan Bock diagram. You can have miscuts where the borders aren't where they are supposed to be, but except for an edge card, all card would be the correct size.

If you break the process up into three steps:

- cut sheet into strips
- cut strips into squared cards
- trim corners of cards

Then it is very inefficient to use hydraulic systems to press-cut the edges.

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Post by Neuron » Tue Oct 15, 2013 12:13 am

If you break the process up into three steps:

- cut sheet into strips
- cut strips into squared cards
- trim corners of cards

Then it is very inefficient to use hydraulic systems to press-cut the edges.
You are right, that would be inefficient, but how can you explain the burrs otherwise? Don't you agree at least they aren't made for cosmetical reasons? :wink:

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Post by cataclysm80 » Mon Oct 28, 2013 5:07 am

Here are some miscuts that I opened myself back in 1997. This is the first time I've shown them on the internet. I opened two boxes of 5th Edition when it came out. These two cards were in the same box. I'm pretty sure that they are off of the same sheet and that they were both part of the same corner rounding operation because both cards are miscut exactly identical.

The cards are printed correctly. The image on the back lines up perfectly with the image on the front.
Cut # 1 was the miscut.
Cut # 2 was correct as it's parralel to the printed image
The corner rounding operation didn't go very well because the cards aren't the right shape.

It would be next to impossible to have a miscut like this if the cards were being stamped out with a hydraulic press.

Image

Tav
Last edited by cataclysm80 on Wed Apr 16, 2014 5:27 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Post by dragsamou » Mon Oct 28, 2013 10:40 am

cataclysm80 wrote:Here are some miscuts that I opened myself back in 1997. This is the first time I've shown them on the internet. I opened two boxes of 5th Edition when it came out. These two cards were in the same box. I'm pretty sure that they are off of the same sheet and that they were both part of the same corner rounding operation because both cards are miscut exactly identical.

The cards are printed correctly. The image on the back lines up perfectly with the image on the front.
Cut # 1 was the miscut.
Cut # 2 was correct as it's parralel to the printed image
The corner rounding operation didn't go very well because the cards aren't the right shape.

It would be next to impossible to have a miscut like this if the cards were being stamped out with a hydraulic press.

Tav
Hi Tav

I do have cards miscuts almost exactely the same way. Will post scan later.
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Post by Tha_Gunslinga » Mon Oct 28, 2013 3:01 pm

I have a bunch like that.

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Post by hammr7 » Mon Oct 28, 2013 5:51 pm

When you are cutting or trimming wood, especially veneers (and stacks of cards behave like a continuous stack of veneers), you usually get a cleaner cut on the top surface than the back surface. In fact, best practice for veneers is multiple scores of the veneer to prevent tearout. This is usually followed by using a "backing board" when finishing the cut.

When corners are ground off (like a board in a lathe) there is a definite "top" of the stack and a definite "bottom". The cards get pushed past a stationary cutting station for each corner. While the stack of cards is compressed and supported from behind, by necessity there is less support at the edges where the corners are trimmed.

For trimming card edges, the stack of cards acts as a backing board, but the pressure pushing the cards into the trimming station(s) causes a bit of edge deflection. This deflection can mimic the slight edge compression you would see if the card edges were die-cut.

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