It’s a big week for Magic: The Gathering as Wizards of the Coast revs up those wands for its Secrets of Strixhaven set with prerelease events at local card shops everywhere. Longtime fans of MTG are especially excited for this one, as it’s a return to a beloved setting we haven’t seen get its time in the sun since 2021’s Strixhaven: School of Mages. But some sharp-eyed magicians have spotted something that doesn’t belong on some of their new Strixhaven cards: an X-Wing. You know. Like from Star Wars.
Across Reddit and other card-collecting and misprint groups, a handful of folks have reported that the tiny anti-counterfeiting holo stamp on the bottom of their rarer Strixhaven cards is not the traditional one with the Magic logo and mana symbols. Instead, it has a bunch of tiny X-Wings flying by, which is the anti-counterfeit stamp pattern for a different card game entirely: Star Wars: Unlimited.
Is this the end of the world? Hardly. It’s just a funny misprint. Someone got mixed up at the card factor and put the wrong stamp on the wrong machine. Most people won’t even notice it, and it’s possible that, if the stamp is rare enough, collectors might see value in it and want to pay more for the cards.
But it is emblematic of what some fans are saying is a notable slip in quality control across MTG and TCGs more broadly, possibly brought about by the surge in popularity of TCGs in recent years and the need for more factories to print more cards faster than ever. For instance, just earlier this year, some folks who purchased Commander decks for the Lorwyn Eclipsed set ended up with traces of Pokémon card energy faintly printed on their cards:
It’s not limited to just Magic, either. A year ago, several folks reported Pokémon holo cards with football cards faintly printed over them:
Of course, misprints generally have always been a thing—cards sometimes make it through machines incorrectly and end up off center, or with funky ink colors, or weird splotches, or any number of other unique odditties. Heck, there’s a whole subreddit dedicated to individual errors like that, not to mention dozens of Facebook groups where such cards are bought and sold. But mixups on this level are a bit different, and seem to be happening more frequently. It also sounds like other quality control issues may be seeing an uptick in frequency. For a non-printing error example, Lorwyn: Eclipsed’s pre-release was met with some disappointed fans who opened their boxes to find a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles card instead of a Lorwyn card. And last year’s Tarkir: Dragonstorm seems to have seen an unusually high number of regular print errors:
And anecdotally, some folks are none too pleased with Strixhaven on that front either:
Critically, the internet being what it is means that it’s much easier to see the folks who complain about having an issue. Most people are not logging on to announce that their pack or their pre-release or their whatever came exactly as advertised. As such, it often looks as though problems like this are far more widespread than they actually are. Still, for me, the Star Wars and TMNT errors fall into a similar bucket of companies in the TCG business, whether that’s Wizards or a printing factory, trying to do far too much all at once and letting issues like an X-Wing fly right through a quality check unchallenged. I suspect that will only happen more often as long as TCGs maintain their immense popularity, both as games and as collector’s items.
Still, an X-Wing on a Magic card is kinda cool. I checked, but unfortunately did not get any in my pre-release. Maybe if I’m lucky they’ll sneak a The Hobbit card early into my next few Strixhaven packs.
