Short Print

A short print is a card produced in deliberately smaller quantities than the other cards in its set, making it harder to pull and typically more valuable. Short prints may be base cards printed at a reduced rate or special variations slipped into a set at low frequency.

Short prints reward careful cataloging because they are easy to overlook: they can look like ordinary cards while being genuinely scarce. Recording that a card is a short print, and which variation it is, keeps your records accurate about why a seemingly ordinary card carries an outsized value. Because they are printed at reduced rates rather than marked as special, spotting a short print often takes knowledge of the specific set, which is exactly the kind of detail worth noting in your records once you have identified it.