Print sheet

Magic cards, like regular playing cards, are printed on print sheets. These sheets of paper are fed into a printing machine and can later be cut into individual cards.

Physical properties
Print sheets are rectangular sheets made from two layers of cardboard joined together by an opaque blue adhesive, so that you can't see through the cards even in direct sunlight. The sheets are produced and cut for Wizards of the Coast by playing card manufacturers like Carta Mundi. Nowadays, WotC uses the services of four or more printers all around the world. Confirmed printers are The United States Playing Card Corporation (USPC), Shepard Poorman, Quebecor, and Yaquinto.

Card stock
The standard stock actually consists of two sheets of special paper of a specific thickness and weight that have been glued together. The line in the middle of the stock is usually described as a plastic but it is a graphite laminate. It is used as a security feature but this is incidental. This layer is what gives Magic cards their “snap” and resilience to being bent and shuffled. It also provides opacity. It is most often blue and is colloquially referred to as the “blue layer”, however it is sometimes black as well depending on where and when the stock was manufactured. Many cards printed by Shepard Poorman have a black layer. The paper receives a surface coating that is applied in layers and calendered (polished) at the factory during manufacturing to achieve a desired surface.

Sizes
Set sizes have to be tailored to the available sizes of print sheets.
 * 10 x 11
 * Regular Magic cards are the same size as poker-size playing cards. A typical pack of these playing cards contains a 52-card deck, two jokers, and one extra card, which might, for example, contain bridge scoring values. This makes 55 cards, for which a 110-card (10 x 11) sheet would be highly suited.
 * 11 x 11
 * However, Carta Mundi uses 121-card (11 x 11) sheets, which are tailored to the European market. They measure 28.25" by 40" (72 x 102 cm). In many European countries, the most common decks of cards might contain simply A 2 3 4 5 6 7 J Q K, for a 40-card deck which could appear three times on a 121-card sheet, with one card left over. 32-card decks with 7 8 9 10 J Q K A and 36-card decks with and additional 6 in each suit are even more common. If the 36-card decks come with jokers and informational cards, like a 52-card deck usually does, printing it three times on a 121-card sheet would not produce too much waste.
 * 7 x 7
 * Oversized cards appear to be printed on 7 x 7 sheets.

Filler cards
Usually the number of cards in a set and the rarity distribution are chosen in a way that all slots on a sheet are filled but occasionally, some slots remained unused and were then occupied with "filler cards". Normally these cards are sorted out prior to packaging. These can be blank, black, with stripes or crosses, with a barcode or with some text. All have a regular Magic card back.

History

 * Limited and Unlimited
 * Limited Edition Alpha, Beta, and Unlimited started out with three 11 x 11 sheets. Basic lands were printed on all three sheets. However, as part of the idea to keep players from guessing rarities, the only lands on the rare sheet were four copies of Island.
 * Revised
 * The Revised Edition still featured basic lands on the common and uncommon sheets, but not on the rare sheet anymore.
 * Early small sets
 * For Arabian Nights, Antiquities, The Dark, Fallen Empires, Chronicles and Homelands only two print sheets were used. There were three times as many "common sheets" as there were "uncommon sheets". The distribution of the cards was convoluted; there were, for example, cards that showed up twice on the uncommon sheets (dubbed "U2" in rarity) would be twice as available as "U1" cards (which appeared once on the uncommon sheet), but still rarer than "C1" cards (which appeared once on the common sheet).
 * Legends onwards
 * Legends was the first expansion to use a rare sheet, which became the standard for future large expansions.
 * Fourth Edition onwards
 * From Fourth Edition onwards, large sets came with a separate sheet for basic lands.
 * Alliances onwards
 * Alliances was the first small expansion to use a rare sheet, which became standard for future small expansions, up until Guildpact.
 * Mirage onwards
 * Every large expansion from Mirage through Onslaught as well as the core sets in between had 110 cards of each rarity indicating that during this period of time, these sets were printed on 10 x 11 sheets. Print sheets of 110 cards can also be deduced for the large sets up until Ravnica: City of Guilds and Ninth Edition.
 * Dissension onwards
 * Apparently, the return to 121-card sheets for small sets took place at the time of Dissension, halfway through the Ravnica block
 * Time Spiral onwards
 * The first large set to be printed on 121-card sheets again was Time Spiral, which was followed by the Tenth Edition Core Set.
 * Alara block onwards
 * The Alara block set the default for large sets at 249 cards, and for small sets at 145 cards.
 * Magic 2015 onwards
 * Starting with Magic 2015, WotC changed the default from 60 uncommons to 80 uncommons for large sets, and from 60 commons to 70 commons for small sets, to provide a better environment for limited play in the Two-Block Paradigm.
 * Unstable
 * The borderless lands of Unstable required something known as "gutter cutting" where a thin strip is cut out between each card. In normal printing the cards butt up against one another.

Current practice
Nowadays, regular sized cards are printed on 11 x 11 sheets. Each regular printing sheet features only cards of one rarity and language. The mythic rares are included on the rare sheet. Extras like tokens and informational cards may be used to fill in the empty spots. The cards are printed in a quantity distribution of (1:7):24:88 (mythic:rare:uncommon:common). This is one rare (+ mythic) sheet for 3 uncommon sheets and 11 common sheets (10 if one land sheet is used). The sheets are also printed in different quantities by language.

Most Standard-legal large sets have multiple printings.

Foils, special releases like the Commander decks, and other preconstructed theme decks have their own print runs (two 60 card decks fitting on one sheet). Because these cards in decks are printed in addition to any cards in the normal print run, they are less rare than cards that are not in the decks.

Future practice
It is expected that at one time there will be a switch to print on demand, where rarities are sorted out digitally instead of on fixed print sheets.

Preparing the sheets
Once R&D has finished a card list for a certain set, Editing sends the cards off to get laid out by the CAPS team of Wizards of the Coast (Creative and Professional Services). They are the ones that physically lay out the cards. They also have to take account of new card frames, watermarks and the like. And then Editing checks the card to make sure all the components are put together correctly and then gives the final go ahead. The correct digital files are sent off to the printers. During printing, four printing plates are used for each sheet: cyan, magenta, yellow and black.

After printing
Foil cards have an extra foil layer on the card that highlights certain parts of the artwork over others. A print coating - a very thin, clear protective finish - is applied over the top of all printed materials. The corners of the cards are cut with a radius of 1/8 inch (3 mm).

Collation
CAPS and R&D work together on the collation of the cards (the number and order of the cards on the sheets). All the cards are evaluated for how good they are, and the good and the bad ones are distributed evenly over the sheets. After the sheets are cut up the cards from each sheet are (almost) randomly sorted, assembled with the cards from the other sheets and then packaged. Once the boosters are made wizards does do some sort of pseudo random collating to get in the way of people who would "map" boxes based on the order of the print run. Although the cards are equally distributed by rarity, there have been times when issues involving sorting and packaging have made certain cards more likely to appear together, or in the same booster box, or even be more likely depending on the area of the country you are in. Other than Zendikar, the particular print run for a given set never really mattered.

WotC's Japanese printer produces boosters that have a reversed order of the cards (starting with the token). These cards also have a different coating and are notably darker.

Multiple printings
While many sets are have a limited amount of sheets printed, some sets, like Core Sets, are available for a certain period of time. Extra sheets are printed if there is sufficient demand. Other than Zendikar, which contained Priceless Treasures, the particular print run for a given set has never really mattered. Sometimes the first run would have minor errors or packaging problems, but they wouldn't be major enough to make having "first run" cards a significant thing. Barring statements about supplemental print runs, WotC hasn't ever really talked about first or subsequent print runs for sets. They want any card from any print run to be equivalent.

Mirage is notable because it had two significant different printings: one dark print with a rough finish, and one light print with a smooth finish. The dark Mirage was printed in US, the light one in Belgium at Carta Mundi.

Relation between print sheets and booster contents

 * In the 8 card booster packs, six were from the common sheet and two were from the uncommon sheet. Thus, three times as many copies of the common sheet were printed as of the uncommon sheet.
 * In the 12 card booster packs, three were from the uncommon sheet, and nine from the common sheet. Again, three times as many copies of the common sheet were printed as of the uncommon sheet.
 * In the 15 card booster packs of early expansions one was from the rare sheet, two were from the uncommon sheet and 11 of the common sheet. Eleven times as many copies of the common sheet, and three time as many of the uncommon sheet, were printed as of the rare sheet. In core sets, one common is replaced with a basic land.
 * In Innistrad and Dark Ascension boosters, one of the 10 commons is replaced by a card of the double-faced sheet. This double-faced card can be of any rarity.
 * In the 16 card boosters of the latest sets, one is a marketing card, one is a rare or mythic rare, three are from the uncommon sheet(s), 10 from the common sheet(s) and one from the basic land sheet. For each 8 packs, the rare is a mythic rare.

Cards are inserted into packs from partial 'print runs', that is cards are inserted into packs in a set order because machines for mass production require consistency in what they do to be fast an efficient. There are separate print runs for each rarity (and multiple for commons). The commons, uncommons and the rares/mythic rares are disconnected, meaning the producers don't control which end up together in the packs. Specials like double-faced cards are printed on different sheets, and thus also unconnected. Nowadays, there are multiple common sheets and they cut from different places to mix it up, but even so commons will clump near other commons more often than other rarities. The exact nature of print runs is not always 'random'. WotC uses them to ensure certain properties, for example no more than 1 gate in any given pack of Gatecrash, or an even mix of mono- and multicolored cards. There are usually 4 print runs for commons:
 * Run A contains 33 unique cards, each in the run twice. This is the run you see when you first open a pack, usually 3-4 cards.
 * Run B contains 22 unique cards, each in the run thrice. This is the next group of cards in the pack, and generally 2-5 cards per pack.
 * Run C1 contains 28 unique cards; 27 in the run twice and 1 in the run once.
 * Run C2 contains 19 unique cards; 18 in the run thrice, and 1 in the run once.

The first three Magic expansions (Arabian Nights, Antiquities and Legends) all had redemption programs due to printing and collating issues.

Booster mapping
Booster mapping is the process of opening several booster boxes and recording patterns in the values of different packs in different positions in boxes. However, the algorithms of the machines are such that it is not easy to predict what the content of an unopened booster is. For example, the Return to Ravnica process involved something like 7 cards consecutively from a single sheet, out of 2 sheets. There are 242 cards total on those 2 sheets and if you were to put those 242 slots in a 'wheel', then you're getting 7 consecutive cards from anywhere on this wheel.

To try and make booster mapping harder, boosterbox runs have 'breaks' in them, where the pattern is broken so that it's a little harder to guess the whole box based on opening a handful of boosters in one. Boxes are not properly randomized. One reason might be that truly randomizing is hard (it might be hard for a machine to fill a boosterbox in a pattern / resort a pile of boosters according to a changing pattern) and/or they want to stick to the general idea that a boosterbox will have a pretty exact number of mythics and a good mix of rares in it. Foils are included in roughly 1 in 6 packs.

Overview
In the following table the available knowledge about print sheets is combined. When there is no exact source, best guesses are italicized.

Abbreviations: C = Common, U = Uncommon, R = Rare, MR = Mythic Rare, B = Basic land

Expansions through Alliances, excluding Ice Age, had some common and uncommon cards that were actually more prevalent than others. This was the result of some cards appearing more often than others on the print sheet. For example, Headless Horseman is a "C1" common, and Ghosts of the Damned is a "C2" common. This code represents the number of times the card appears on the common print sheet, making "C2" commons twice as abundant as "C1" commons.