The Magic Librarities

I may be missing something really obvious so please bear with me if this question sounds stupid, but:

- English Ice Age has 121 commons which were printed on common sheets measuring 11 X 11 cards, right ?
- The white card Blessed Wine is a C1 (like all IA commons), meaning it appears once on that sheet : http://www.wizards.com/magic/generic/ca ... cklist.txt

So how is it I have 2 miscut Blessed Wines from the set with DIFFERENT cards above it ? :-/ O:-)

http://img114.imageshack.us/img114/33/2 ... inezx6.jpg

Thanks for your help.
ende73

That's pretty cool actually.

I guess it's possible that there were 2 distinct common sheets, one for starters and one for boosters for example, produced and packaged in parallel. As long as each card still only appears once on the sheet it won't affect the rarity.

Off hand I can't think of any box set or precon containing this card... anyone?

Were lands printed on the commons sheet like they were for earlier sets? Ice Age had 15 basic lands (5 colors with 3 artworks for each land) as well as 5 snow-covered lands. My guess is that if the lands were printed on the commons sheet, that gave you multiple different types of common print sheets in differing formats. Recall a C1 means that it would appear once on the common sheet, and not twice or thrice. It does not mean that the card HAS to appear on the sheet though. This is theory #1.

Theory #2 would be that any release has multiple print runs in it. It could simply be that one print runs common sheet has a differing layout that subsequent prints runs.

There may be other possible explanations, but these two seem plausible. Does anyone have uncut IA common sheets that could help answer this?

mintcollector wrote:Were lands printed on the commons sheet like they were for earlier sets? Ice Age had 15 basic lands (5 colors with 3 artworks for each land) as well as 5 snow-covered lands.

I also thought this could be a factor, but Wizards' checklist linked above classifies Lands as L6 rarity, which I believe means 6 of each on a separate land sheet, for a total of 120 cards on the sheet (+1 Filler ?)

The separate print runs theory is more likely, maybe to be used separately in Starters / Booster packs as Ioqii pointed out.

Does anybody have the link to fvzappa's images of his partial IA miscut set ? It would be interesting to see what his Blessed Wine looks like.

This is interesting, because I believe between you and I, we have another occurence of this. The miscut Portent you have has a red card above it, while the one I have has a white card above it.

(Still want yours, by the way ;-) )

ende73 wrote:Does anybody have the link to fvzappa's images of his partial IA miscut set ? It would be interesting to see what his Blessed Wine looks like.

http://kzappa.photosite.com/

I can confirm that Ice Age basic lands were printed on a separate sheet. Each land was represented 6 times on the sheet, and one Plains card was represented 7 times in order to leave no slot unused.

pp wrote:

ende73 wrote:Does anybody have the link to fvzappa's images of his partial IA miscut set ? It would be interesting to see what his Blessed Wine looks like.

http://kzappa.photosite.com/

Thanks.

And apparently Fvzappa's miscut Blessed Wine falls into my "left-hand side category" one, since it has a green 1-1 creature above it: http://kzappa.photosite.com/page4/IA04.html

ende73 wrote:And apparently Fvzappa's miscut Blessed Wine falls into my "left-hand side category" one, since it has a green 1-1 creature above it: http://kzappa.photosite.com/page4/IA04.html

I think it's a Tarpan. His Portent matches yours, as well. When I get home tonight I will scan my White-topped one and post it for comparison.

For many of the earlier expansions small print runs were made to supply cards and packs for magazines, comics, and other pre-release tie-ins. There were also cards that were issued in starter-type preconstructed product offerings. These cards were so plentiful that they seemed to be C2s even when there was only one copy in the regular common print sheet.

There was never any specific information announcing how these cards were produced, but it makes sense that there were smaller runs that only contained the cards of interest. It would have been too tough to hand collate these offerings from complete 121 card sheets.

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

Well I think at the bare minimum, there is enough evidence that shows more than one sheet having been produced. The reasons behind it though are the question at hand.

Here's my white cut Portent, with a link to Fvzappa's red cut one here

By the way, the White card is one of either COP: White, Green, or Black.

I currently own about 40 IA miscut cards showing a card beside it, and here are all the differences with Fvzappa's ones:

Fylgia - mine has a black card at its left (it's vertically miscut), Fvzappa's a green one.
Ray of Erasure- mine has a red card above it, Fvzappa's a black one
Enervate - mine has a red card above, Fvzappa's the edge of the sheet !
Tarpan- mine white card above, Fvzappa's red card above
Lim Dul's Cohort - mine green card above, Fvzappa's red card above
Gaze of Pain - mine green card above, Fvzappa's edge of sheet
Pyknite - mine white card above, Fvzappa black

Interestingly, I have a similar number of cards which are like Fvzappa's, meaning that according to this small statistic two versions of the common sheet with a different positioning of the cards were made.

Also, I think it's unlikely this is due to promotional reprints etc. since there are so many cards involved.

Apparently having two different versions of the common sheets was (and maybe still is, see post below ;-) ) a common practice.

I also tried looking at some of my miscuts coming from small sets with no starters and look what I found:

http://img224.imageshack.us/img224/8521 ... utsed6.jpg

So maybe having different sheets for the commons (but maybe for the other rarities too) is standard procedure after all.

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