Unlike your printer at home, each specific layer of color is applied separately.

MTG cards are printed via a mass production process known as offset lithographic printing. Ink errors are the misprints that happen during ink application (aka printing) and are easily the most common type of misprint. Hopefully that makes sense, but I’ll do my best to clarify where the line between ‘misprint’ and ‘expected printing variation’ is for each category of misprint! So while a card that’s 1% darker than the intended version is technically a misprint, that 1% darker card falls within the margin of expected error and it isn’t considered a misprint. Instead there’s a margin of acceptable deviation from ‘perfect’ that manufacturers account for and allow. So why do misprints exist? The reason is that it’d just be too expensive to produce Magic cards to that level of perfection. If every Magic card was ‘manufactured as intended’ then they’d all be perfect and misprints wouldn’t exist. Understanding severity is key to understanding misprints.

While I could have simply said “Any product not manufactured as intended” I want to introduce the concept of severity early into your definition of misprints. A misprint can be defined as any manufactured product that was not produced as intended and falls outside the expected margin of error.

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