Old School Mtg

As I traded away my non-factory cut Transmute Artifacts a few weeks ago , it dawned on me that we've never talked about miscuts or sheet alignment errors here. So it's high time for a quick post about that. Let's start with the obligatory Chaos Orb example from the Orb binder: The white bar at the top is the sheet edge. The error here is a misaligned back and shifted gold-border print. Yeah, I personally can't do better than Collectors' Edition to showcase a shifted Chaos Orb. Turns out these things are kinda hard to come by if you are looking for a specific card from the ABU rare sheet. A particularly sweet thing with Chaos Orb however is that it is located at the top row of the sheet, and as such will show sheet edge if off-centered enough. There is at least one Alpha Chaos Orb (and I'm fairly sure at least one Unlimited copy) that shows sheet edge in addition to this CE copy. Could well be more, but the total population of Orbs showing sheet edge is probably

Card templating demand precision and accuracy. If we look back at the history of Magic typesetting, we'll quickly find examples of cards with the wrong text (like Time Elemental in Spanish 4th Edition), cards with text omitted (like Vampire Bats in Chinese 4th Edition), or cards with their text offset incorrectly. The right Gaea's Touch has incorrect offset on text and symbols; a fairly common error on this particular card. Another possible typesetting error is accidental printing with the wrong font. The most famous font error in Magic is probably Æṛathi Berserker from Legends. While it didn't exactly get printed with the wrong font, the letter 'Æ' didn't exist in the standard Magic font at the time so it was printed with the first letter of its name omitted. Reasonably fun fact is that 'Æ' exists in the italicized flavor text font. Additional reasonably fun fact is that WotC created a plane called 'Rath' a couple of years later inspired by this