One of the cool things about the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG that keeps us coming back for more is the collectability factor. With hundreds of thousands of players worldwide, the collecting and trading scene is just as big as dueling itself, and that makes the rarer and more playable cards really valuable and a lot of fun to chase. Since Yu-Gi-Oh! is a truly international game (it’s currently printed in seven different languages), there’s even a big market for foreign language cards. (Personally, I’m still figuring out how I can get my hands on an Italian play-set of Zombie Master, aptly named Zombie Maestro.)

No matter what you’re interested in collecting though, the driving force behind the tradability of Yu-Gi-Oh! is its rarity scheme. With commons, rares, super rares, ultimate rares, secret rares, ghost rares, and two flavors of ultra rares, there are a lot of different versions of popular cards. While a general understanding of the rarity structure will give you a basic knowledge of how rare a card is, there are a few exceptions. Secret rares are usually one of the toughest rarities to pull from boosters—second only to ghost rares—but some promos and variant cards (like those found in the collector’s tins) are secret rare foils. Ultra rares are two-per-box in current booster sets, but in the past they were sometimes one per box, and every starter deck and structure deck includes an ultra rare too.

Some cards printed in a high rarity aren’t really that difficult to get, but sometimes the opposite is true too: a card with a low rarity may be surprisingly scarce, for more reasons than just high demand. A lot of people have heard the term “short print” kicked around, but few really know what it means. Today I’d like to clarify things a bit and help you understand why sometimes a common isn’t really so common.

What Is a Short Print?                                                        

A short print card is one that, across the complete print run, appears at a lower frequency than other cards at its same rarity level. Since there are fewer copies of them produced, fewer copies make it into packs than other cards at the same rarity. Short prints are harder to get, though the actual chance to pull a short print varies from set to set. A short print can exist at any rarity in a booster set: if the contents of your pack are random (not like a structure deck or a collector’s tin promo), the set may or may not have a few short printed cards.

Since cards are packaged randomly on a per-box basis, it can be difficult to identify what is and isn’t a short print. Just because you pulled copies of all but two commons from a box doesn’t necessarily mean that the cards you’re missing were short printed—it’s more likely to be luck of the draw. Short prints don’t have a unique foil finish or a discerning mark, so it’s pretty difficult to identify them unless you’re opening up cases of cards at a time.

Why Do Short Prints Exist?

For me, this is the interesting part. A lot of people believe that short prints exist for a variety of reasons—that it’s a “top secret rarity” or that there’s some sort of conspiracy or something. In truth, the reality isn’t nearly so exciting: they just exist because of how cards are printed.

When a card company prints a booster set, they don’t print the cards one by one. They do so by printing lots of cards at a time on a big sheet of card stock. Once the sheet is printed, it gets diced up into the individual cards we know and love. However, since different rarities require different card stock and varying types of foil and ink treatments, the cards of a single rarity are all printed separately on different sheets.

In addition, creating the layouts for each sheet takes time and resources and that costs money. So for an 80-card set, they don’t make 80 different sheets with one card on each: they create a much smaller number of sheets that they then print a lot of. Uncut sheets of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards used to be given out as prizes for Duelist Kingdom tournament rankings, and are still awarded on occasion at major tournaments today, so if you’ve seen one before, you know what they look like. Each sheet has multiple copies of each card at a single rarity.

Now, here comes the tricky part that ties into what we’re discussing. Those sheets? Despite the fact that there are a different number of commons, rares, super rares, and so on in each set, the actual size of the sheet doesn’t change. It’s dictated by the manufacturing protocols. As a result, due to simple math, one or more cards may be placed less frequently on each series of sheets for a given rarity. 

Let’s look at a simple example that doesn’t actually represent the real numbers. Say there are sixteen commons in a set. The printers want to fit as many cards onto a single sheet as possible, or else they’re wasting time and card stock. Their sheets are big enough to fit 60 cards, so they put 60 commons on each sheet. The problem? If they were to print the same number of each card per sheet, they could only fit three complete sets: 48 cards. That would be wasting a lot of paper, so instead they print twelve more. That means four commons are only getting printed three times per sheet, while all the others are getting printed four times. Those four cards have become short prints.

Again, these numbers are really basic, and probably don’t represent the complicated algorithms that go into this sort of thing when a company like Upper Deck Entertainment prints cards. The printing world isn’t so simple, but my example is a basic version of what actually happens, and it accurately portrays the reasons behind short printing.

Sometimes this type of situation happens, and sometimes it doesn't—it depends on the set size, what kind of manufacturing protocols the printer is using, and a number of similar issues. Sometimes short prints are hard to notice, while other times their rarity is easier to spot. It all comes down to how the layouts are arranged before printing begins. The actual rarity of a short print is virtually impossible to ferret out . . . though, as an extreme example, the Japanese version of Tactical Evolution had four short prints, and according to some friends in Japan, one short print was found in one of every 22 packs. That meant that the chance to pull one specific short print was one in 88. At that ratio, the Japanese version of Crystal Seer is actually far more difficult to pull than the TCG ultra rare, which comes in approximately one in 60 boosters.

What Cards Get Selected For Short Printing?

The question of which cards wind up being short printed is a complicated one, and since I’m not an Upper Deck Entertainment employee (let alone privy to their layouts), it’s impossible to say for sure how short prints are selected. Generally though, there are two factors I’m aware of that can make a card a candidate.

First, a card deemed to be less interesting than others is a pretty easy one to offer up for short printing. Think back to your Tactical Evolution pulls and ask yourself how many copies of Broken Bamboo Sword or Gift of Greed you’ve opened. Personally, I’ve pulled fewer of those than I have other commons, and I’m certainly not complaining.

On the other hand, a reprint that conflicts with a previous card's collectability may very rarely become a short print in order to decrease its impact on the previous release. It’s purely my speculation, but that might’ve been why some people had difficulty pulling Cyber Dragon from Duelist Pack – Zane Truesdale. This gives players and collectors another way to get popular cards, without punishing the ones who sought out earlier copies.

There’s still some information that isn’t openly known about short prints, but hopefully I’ve helped you understand the information that is out there. Short prints are just one of those interesting little quirks of the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG, and if you get a chance to look at an uncut sheet yourself, it’s kind of fun to see if you can spot which cards were short printed. The results may prove surprising, especially from older sets. 

—Jason Grabher-Meyer