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Printing Plate

Also written: Plate · Printing plates

The actual metal plate used to print a card, released into packs — unique by physics, one per ink colour.

Physical formThe card itself is made differently

A printing plate is not a card that looks like a plate — it is the actual thin aluminium plate that was mounted on the press and used to print the set, cut to card size and inserted into a pack. The image on it is a single ink channel, reversed, so it looks like a strange monochrome version of the card.

Standard four-colour printing uses four plates per card: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Each one physically exists once, so every plate is a 1/1 — but there are four of them for every card in the set, plus whatever designed one-of-one sits at the top of the ladder.