Forensics : Prereleases

When new sets of cards are produced, the folk at Wizards of the Coast are smart about the steps they take before it is released to the general public. Typically, they will print up some cards ahead of time so that they can actually play with the cards and see how they work. This play-testing lets them know if some cards are too powerful or if some cards are just plain worthless and need to be spiced up a bit for the final release.

There may be several other ways to tell if you have a pre-release card, but the three sure-fire methods are:

  1. There is a gold date next to the Set Symbol. This is exactly the case for a Urza Saga Pre-release foil of Lightning Dragon. A partial scan of the card has been provided to show how this feather actually looks:

  2. There is a feather next to the Set Symbol. This is exactly the case for a Mercadian Masque Pre-release foil of Lightning Hounds. A partial scan of the card has been provided to show how this feather actually looks:

  3. The card number at the bottom of the card ends in an "a". For example, a normal card would look like this: 201/350 (card #201 of a set of 350). A pre-release card would look like this: 201a/350 (note the "a" is after the card number, not the number of cards that are in the set). A partial scan of the same Lightning Hounds card described above has been provided to show how these numbers actually look:

For a full scan of the card used in the examples above use these links:

Lightning Hounds - Mercadian Masques (37k)
Lightning Dragon - Urza's Saga (53k)

There are a few copies of Lightning Hound card that are available in the Forstle Card Shop as of 06/02/2001.

Credits: Special thanks to TyRaNiD for his help on this topic. We had a nice short chat in a chatroom on 05/31/2001.

If you have any tips on how you decipher which set a card belongs to, please e-mail me and you will be given the appropriate credit on this web site.