Over the 30 years the game has been around, Magic: The Gathering has had a number of infamous reprints.
Over the 30 years the game has been around, Magic: The Gathering has had a number of infamous reprints.
A blue Hurricane? Yup. The wrong game's card back? That's happened, too. But those examples are from the 1990s. Surely, they don't occur any more.
Or do they?
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, a lot of things were locked down and manufacturing was hit hard.
Like many things suffering from supply chain issues at the time, Magic: The Gathering cards just couldn't be printed on time. As such, scheduling went a little out of whack to make up for it all.
The set Jumpstart was to be released in June 2020, but due to the delays in making them, it was pushed back to July. There was a problem, though. Even with the extra month, the manufacturer still had to rush them. As such, high quality control suffered. And, as a result, this happened:
Cards started being double printed.
While most cards were affected, the big chunk of them had combined land combinations, making some unusual looking cards that, admittingly, looked pretty cool too. You can tell where the problems came too though. 'What do you play it as when you get it?' became the biggest hindrance, and Wizards of the Coast quickly went into damage control mode
But, besides the printing error, there just wasn't enough to go around. As a print-to-demand product, though, the company quickly printed more. As they did, they corrected all the error ones.
Of course, there were other issues with Jumpstart ranging from card quality to bad packaging. But, again, COVID and supply issues sort of created the perfect storm for it to happen. It simply became a product of the time.
And those dual misprint cards became big money. It's not often that land cards go into the hundreds and even thousands n the secondary market, but lo and behold, they can.
Magic today has a lot more quality checks and runs to make sure misprints don't happen en masse. But, as Jumpstart showed, sometimes there is just enough that they still do. Every now and then, at the very least.
